Moonset and Sunrise     Print   PDF

Enlarge image A beautiful sunrise this morning.

Enlarge image The same sunrise, this time with a dark Pacific below.

Enlarge image This is Rob. He is the deck manager for most of my shift. He leads us in the well orchestrated steps we follow to put the rosette in the water and to take it out.

Enlarge image The moon was either full or very close to it this morning  (Dec. 2nd) as we moved on station this morning. The water at the bottom of the picture is blurred because the ship was moving.

Alison Macdonald

Every morning, Mimi, Carolina and I begin our shift 02:00 (2 am ship-time). Ship-time is the time the clocks on the ship tell us it is. Most importantly, it is the time by which meals are served, and when you get up at two and you didn’t get dinner the night before, you want to know when 7:30 is, because that is breakfast.

All our work we do in UTC, a.k.a Zulu or for us, GMT (the time at the Greenwich or zero meridian, i.e. longitude = 0 degrees.)  We must use GMT when we write down the time things happen, otherwise we would have to know, when we looked at those times later on, what time zone the ship was using. We change time on the ship at the Captain’s discretion.

Ship-time is presently at GMT+11. So today I when I began my shift at 02:00 ship-time on Dec 3^rd, it was 15:00 (3 pm) Dec 2^nd GMT. This means I get up on one day and go to bed on the next, and when I wake up it is the same day….very confusing.

Usually when I come down to the main lab in the morning, I check to see if we are in transit (i.e. the ship is moving and we have an ETA to the next station) or if we are ‘on station’. Being on station means that the rosette is being made ready and about to go in the water, or is in the water, or has come out of the water and we are sampling. This morning, we were just coming on station. The moon was out and beginning to set as we put the rosette into the water so I took some pictures. Yesterday, we saw the sunrise as we put the rosette in.