Well and Cutting

I'm more or less healthy and hale, and should have a chance to make that mounting plate for my friend this weekend. Pictures as the thing comes off the mill.

On another note, I may have found a neat opportunity to fly my kites for science. (Did that really sound as bad as it felt when I typed it?) The idea is to fly an instrument package on my kite that will take differential temperature measurements across 10cm, 30cm, 100cm, and 1300cm distances using high speed, high-sensitivity microthermal probes, all the while recording meteorological data (temp, humidity, barometric pressure, etc.) as well as GPS location, and log it all to an SD card as quickly as I can make the hardware do its job. The end result will be a dataset that can be used to determine the contribution of the air at each altitude toward atmospheric seeing at the site. ("Seeing" is a term indicating how much stars twinkle, or get shifted around by the air between them and your telescope. Good sites have low seeing, rotten sites have high seeing.)

The advantage to knowing the answer to this is that you take care of seeing at different altitudes using different techniques. If most of the seeing is coming from 6km up, ground level adaptive optics won't do a whole lot to fix the problem. If most of the seeing is coming from the 0-500m regime, it will. (And if most of the seeing is coming from heat plumes inside the telescope dome itself, it's a whole 'nuther set of problems to be solved!)

Luckily this has been done, primarily with weather balloons. But balloons cost (upwards of $1000 for a balloon and a non-recoverable instrument package), and you don't get to fly them everywhere. If you need to sample kilometers of air column, you don't have much choice but to fly a balloon. But if you only need to sample 500m and below, a kite with a 100% recoverable instrument package starts to look attractive.

There's a lot that needs to happen between now and then. I've started my literature search, and I have a vague hand-waving idea of the differential temperature sensor design. But I have a long way to go between that and a deployable instrument package.

In any case, this is a fun one. And it might mean I get to fly my kites at work!

Tom