Subject: Cascades2 report for Thurs evening, Feb 19/20.

No launch tonight, but hope for tomorrow and into the weekend.
Beginning late tomorrow (Friday) night we should move into
a period of increasing activity.  We can already see the
start of this by looking at the STEREO satellite, which 
has monitors of the solar wind activity similar to ACE, but
is out in front and gets a 1-3 day preview of what is headed
towards ACE.  You can see this comparison at
  http://ccmc.gsfc.nasa.gov/ccmc-swan/timelines/ACE_STB.gif
(this is the "ACE and STEREO data" link on our 
spaceweather page 
  http://www.dartmouth.edu/~aurora/spaceweather.html
What you see here is in red from STEREO and in black
from ACE.  The top panel is solar wind density and the
second is (upside down) solar wind speed.  The two
traces are delayed with respect to each other so that
the red one tells us what should be coming down the
line in another day or two;  you can see that
the period of decaying solar wind speed and minimal
magnetic field strength we have been in since the 16th 
should break by about 2300UT on the 21st.  That would
be about 11am local on the 22nd.  So it may not get
here in time for our window Friday evening, but if it's
just a few hours early, it might....it'll be a race
between the local meteorological weather (which could
break by late Friday evening) and the space weather.
We usually see a burst of auroral activity at the beginning
of these periods of increased solar wind speed (this is what
we saw last weekend), so we are on alert for early
this weekend.
  Another nice thing about this weekend is that there
are several possible conjunctions with the US THEMIS satellites
and the European Cluster spacecraft....
  So hopefully our cruddy weather and inactive space weather
are both about to break.  I'll ask Meghan to post some
pictures of our patient camera crews in the field sites...
they are really at the end of nowhere and are patiently
awaiting the return of some good aurora to see.  Today
the weather at Kaktovic was so bad that the crew did not
even attempt to reach the observatory;  yesterday at Toolik
they had to board up the windows.  So we are very grateful
for their willingness to be out there for us.
-K
  PS: the New Hampshire contender in the Yukon Quest
(Mike Ellis from Rumney) has moved up to 9th 
place (out of 25 remaining...)