I didnt think the days could get better but somehow they do. Unfortunately this post will have limited pictures because I forgot my camera in town when we left but have no fear I will make the trip to the observatory again such that I can get up some pictures of it all.

 Today I took a trip up to the observatory for which all the work I am doing is for. Due to the fact that it is about 500 meters higher up than the town it is still in the dead of winter up there. One side of the building was almost completely burried. We were able to drive up a road for a mile or two to get close although to actually reach the Observatory we had to use what they called a Bandvagn and I took a picture from the KHO website so everyone can see how awesome it is;

It is essentially a Swedish made tank, and it is amazing. It was first used in the military and since then has expanded and become popular with arctic researchers. Once I am back in the US I am going to purchase one. It can climb essentially straight up anything because it has a turbocharged diesel engine.

once we reached the Kjell Henriksen Observatory (KHO) we found half of it to be buried in snow and we had to dig for about half an hour to simply reach the door and be able to open it. Of course I also don't have pictures of this which makes me just as bummed as you but to give you an idea here is a picture of what the observatory looks like;

Although this is very misleading due to the fact that this picture was take much later in the summer. If you look close you can see a door on the back of the building in this picture. That was the door that we had to dig out it was buried up to about half way up the door. 

Next we headed back down into town and did some more work in the lab. This time I got some pictures to try and show you how awesome the integration sphere is. This is the picture of it straight on with a black cap covering the exit/entrance hole.

To understand the size of this it is about 1.1 meters across or about 3.7 ft across. Now in the next picture I take the cap off and I take a picture of the inside looking straight into the sphere.

This looks as if it is simply another flat white plate sitting within the "window" into the sphere even though this is a picture of the inside curvature of the sphere. This is a much easier thing to understand in person but the light is reflected out in such a uniform way that our eye can not detect the inside curvature of the sphere. That does it for today and hopefully I will venture out to the KHO again soon to get some pictures.