JWO, Moon Halos, and Aloft!

MFT: Going Aloft
LFP: Coming down!

Hallo, it’s Thursday and we disembark on Sunday — the cruise is nearing its end. The best part of today was after dawn watch and laundry I decided to finally go aloft again! Apparently lots of other people had the same idea so it ended up that 5 of us went up the foremast and Taylor went up the mainmast. I spent over an hour aloft, mostly just sitting or standing in various spots. I went about as high up as you can go on the foremast, which is 115 ft tall! It was so incredibly amazing to be up there on a sunny day looking out over the entire boat and ocean. 

I took some awesome photos of us all up there. Lauren and I talked for about 30 minutes standing on the top brace. We are both rather short but once we got all the way out to the edge of the yard arm we were able to brace back the foot rope (called the flemish horse) and hang a bit more comfortably. 

We had evening watch after wards and I got thrown a curve ball! Apparently at the last minute I was signed up as the JWO for the watch. This meant I was the mate in charge (kinda). It was actually awesome! It helped that I had a very chill watch with no science deployments or other things. I had lots of fun being Junior Watch Officer. At the end, I managed to remember all the myriad minutiae that had to be said to the oncoming watch (course steered, day tank fuel level, sails up, traffic, ect.). During our watch, we had pretty good weather except for one small squall at the very end that necessitated us striking the JT. But in the end, there was barely any rain! All the other scary squalls tracked around us, which is my kind of day. The moon was pretty impressive. There was a very large and distinct halo in the sky surrounding the moon. Apparently that means 24 hours of precipitation following it (hopefully will not prove to be true).


All in all it was a very fun filled day!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Hopper Last

Image
So we made Hopper hop....well sorta! We built a bottom for hopper's body by adding 6 puzzle pieces! Lots of fun making puzzle pieces that fit together in a tight fit. Then we have a small tail piece of foam that helps with the balance and the hop of hopper. We got in the long axel and put it in for the double axle of the engine. Unfortunately we picked up the extra long one which messed up our balance and looked REALLY strange. So instead we decided to use the shorter 100 mm axle (not the 150). But at this point our engine started acting up! So after an hour and a half of fiddling with the engine, we got it to stop making weird noises when it ran. We also decided to do some soddering. We soddered the batteries with the engine and added an on/off switch. Lot's of fun soddering again. After all of this our hopper is mostly working. I've shown you tons of pictures so here are the two new ones from friday: This is hopper with the 150 mm axle -- doesn't it look weird! yo...
Read more

Thermal Work - Matlab -- Write up

So I worked with Jeff on the matlab thermal work, since I had missed a fair amount during thesis time. WE managed to finish up everything. Umm ok here goes: So I worked up the part 1 of the thermal challenge in class with Robbie. The cooling and heating of coffee was really easy. But hey, I've done tons and TONS of matlab coding this semester (aka > 200 pages of matlab codes). Any who, what happens with bang bang is lots of oscillation for the control, aka the temperature of the coffee oscillates around the desired temperature. When you code in proportional control, you have trouble reaching the desired temperature. Instead the coffee tends to be right below the desired temperature and never quite reaches the desired temp. I guess Starbucks can't use proportional control then! It is quite fun to add in a time delay for the proportional control and bang-bang control. With bang-bang you see a fair amount of overshoot. You see some overshoot with proportional control too. a...
Read more

Hopper Finale

Image
He works! It's crazy soooo crazy :). Here are some pictures from hopper finale. We did all of the sodering and used the smaller 100 cm axle. We also got the alignment correct between the two legs. And he hops!!!! There is a movie I have, so please email me if you want to see it :). I don't know how to post it here so yea. We decided not to redo any parts as he works pretty solidly! There was one idea to make the big rabbit legs a tad bit smaller so that they rotate completely freely without touching the floor surface when he is hopping, but the weighting of the legs with screws really means that this isn't an issue! I think hopper is adorable and my partner is brilliant. I am good with solidworks and printing but she is good with lots of everything else!
Read more