KenMankoff

Antarctic Base Trifecta

Visit number three appears to be falling into place. Four and a half weeks crossing the Drake Passage and visiting Palmer Station. I’ve already spent time at McMurdo and South Pole. It will be nice to complete the U.S. Antarctic Base trifecta.

They say:

First time for the adventure.

Second time for the money.

Third time because you don’t fit in anywhere else.

I say:

First time for the adventure.

Second time for the adventure.

Third time to start a new adventure on a whole different plane.

Then:

Fourth and beyond to collect more data.

LMG v. NBP

The R/V Lawrence M. Gould appears significantly smaller than the R/V Nathaniel B. Palmer. The LMG holds 26 rather than 37 scientists and is 18 m (60 ft) shorter. That probably means it is cozier but moves more with the waves. And unfortunately it does not appear to have those wonderful wings on the bridge which provide an amazing place for watching whales, seals, penguins, ice, and skies.

The Lawrence M. Gould and the Nathaniel B. Palmer. Source: USAP Photo Library.

An Antarctic Hat (Part II)

Antarctica Knit Hat Pattern Zoom of East African Horn and Southern Saudi Arabia

I recently finished my Antarctic Hat. This post describes how it was made and publishes the pattern. Since I began by posting the finished hat, I’ll continue to work in reverse order.

The final pattern is seen on the right. Click on it for a full size image. The original pattern is shown below. Annotations on the final are either doodles while I was bored, notes about stitch reduction or type (ocean v. land), or markers to remind me where I was when I took a break from knitting.

For each stitch, I simply looked at the pattern, determined what box I was knitting, and decided if it should be ocean or land, and if it was land if it should be green, brown, or white.

In order to make the pattern I began with with the NASA Blue Marble image, and wrote some image processing code to replace the ocean with white (just to save some ink and have extra space to take notes). I knitted a swatch to determine I wanted X stitches, and then placed X gray boxes evenly across the page. A little bit of extra work was done toward the South Pole in order to have the increases mapped onto the pattern.

My X came out to 108. If you wanted to use this pattern with a slightly different stitch count you can probably just add or remove a few columns from the Pacific and Atlantic basins without much effect on the proportions of the planet.

I chose to begin at the Pole and increase because it allows me to take the hat off the needles and try it on my targeted wearer and then continue knitting if necessary. Beginning at the rim and working up leaves less room for adjustments. The first red line is the equator, and the second was my original estimate of where I would stop. As you can see from the finished product I ended up knitting farther north, and even then adding the white-and-black map border.

Antarctica Knit Hat Pattern

I realize I’ve been calling this the Antarctica Knit Hat but it is really the entire southern hemisphere and almost half of the northern hemisphere. It includes Antarctica, all of Australia, New Zealand, Micronesia, and South America (although I forgot a stitch for the Galapagos), almost all of Central America, Africa, and India, parts of the Arabian Peninsula and Asia, and even a pixel / stitch or two of North America.

An Antarctic Hat (Part I)

Spring is not the best season to finish a very warm double knit triple-layer hat. But it is fall in the Southern Hemisphere, and that seems to be a theme with this hat.

I started it a few years ago during my first trip to Antarctica with ANDRILL, and finished it this evening. More posts will come later on the process and the pattern…

Whales

Some photos of Minke Whales I took in January and February. The first is a pair, one is beginning to dive and you can see the fin, and the second has just breached while blowing. The second image was two pods, one about 10 and one about 20 in size, swimming around and through each other. I held my camera up to the eyepiece of a pair of binoculars to get a better zoom, hence the strange border on the image. The third is a single Minke in front of Pine Island Glacier.

Other whale news I have recently come across: The Australian Antarctic Division has just performed an aerial survey of Whales in the Southern Ocean. Perhaps they saw some of the same ones I saw.

And National Geographic has a very nice Blue Whale infographic website (including how it compares to the Minke Whales in size and weight). Click around there to learn all about their weight, size, anatomy, behavior, and threats to their health and livelyhood.

Geo-Tagging Photos

I have ~2700 photos from my recent trip to Antarctica. All but a few dozen were taken while on the ship, and the GPS track of the ship is known. The few that were taken off ship were within a three mile radius while deploying the ITP. If you don’t have a ship recording your GPS for you, you can get simple GPS systems for less than $100, or even a few $10s of dollars on eBay. The TrackStick is good for this type of project as it does not have a screen or realtime outputs.

I wanted to geotag all my photos by adding the latitude and longitude to the JPEG EXIF data. I was going to code it as the algorithm is quite simple (for each image, get the creation time, find the GPS location nearest that time in the GPS list, and add the (lat,lon) coordinates to the image), but not surprisingly this problem has already been solved. Repeatedly.

Three steps are required.

1. Convert your GPS data into GPX format. If you are comfortable on the command line then use gpsbabel. If not, then go here for a web interface to gpsbabel. If you need help post in the comments. If you were on NBP09-01 a GPX file of our cruise is here.
2. Add the GPS coordinates to the image EXIF tags. There are many tools that will take a GPX or NMEA file and add latitude and longitude coordinates to your photos. I use gpicsync and photoGPSEditor looks nice too.
3. Output KML files. gpicsync does this for you, and has a list of other software that might help here. You can also upload your photos to Picasa and get a KML file that way (instructions).

The end result might look like this.

Photos from Antarctica

If you’ve been following this blog you’ve seen a dozen or so low-quality photos posted during my trip. Now you can see full resolution pictures. In total, I took 2718 photos during the 54 days between when the Nathaniel B. Palmer (NBP) left Punta Arenas, Chile and returned. I’ve selected 350 of the best ones and uploaded them. There are 31 from the sea ice science projects, 54 of the NBP itself, 66 of animals (added to the animal photos from last year), 101 of the Pine Island Glacier, and 98 miscellaneous photos of the Amundsen and Bellingshausen seas, sea ice, sunsets, and sunrises.

You can view all of the photos listed above in the various Antarctica photo albums, or you can view them all geospatially (KMZ) in Google Earth. The ship recorded GPS a few times a second, and I have a one-minute (temporal) resolution data file that I used to geotag the photos.

Notes: If you are viewing the photos on the website, you ought to have the Cooliris plugin installed. Load times might be a bit slow, this computer is hosted at home. If you don’t see any photos in Google Earth you’ll need to drag the time slider to the right. They’ll pop up as you pass the time they were taken.

NBP Photos Geotagged in Google Earth

Returning to NYC

The first 24 hours home were a bit more difficult this time. Perhaps because last year I was on a base with 1,000 people, and this year I was working the night shift on a boat with three people.

The first thing I noticed was the smell. There is not much smell in the cold of Antarctica. New York City has a faint smell of what I think is chlorine. A felt a bit like my dog, who lives in the country with my parents but goes crazy when he visits me because there are so many smells here.

After adjusting to the smell, the next thing I noticed were the sounds. I could hear dozens if not hundreds of conversations at once while standing on a street corner. It was overwhelming and I went back inside.

After about 24 hours all has returned to normal and not even a crowded subway bothers me. At least, not anymore than it did before I left.

Land Ho!

Woke up this morning (lat: -53.591, lon: -72.3015) in the Straits of Magellan. The deck of the ship is green, and has been for the last 50 days, but just like last year, seeing mountains covered with green trees is a shock to the system.
 
Another 10 or so hours and I’ll walk again on solid ground.
 
Signing off for the foreseeable future, -k.

Stormy

The last 48 hours have been interesting. We were in a fairly severe storm. Wind speeds were around 60 knots, which is just under a hurricane, or 11 on the Beaufort scale. Max pitch was 12 degrees and roll was 22, or about 40 degrees side to side. Which is quite a bit of horizontal travel when you are on the bridge 68 feet in the air. Waves were about 30 feet.
 
You can’t really sail in weather like that, so we just pointed into the waves to keep the ship as stable as possible. Unfortunately that meant spending a day pointing to the northwest, away from home.
 
Today: Calm. About 15 hours from land. Tomorrow: Sailing through the Straits of Magellan. Then Terra Firma.