Subject: Cascades2 report for Mon evening, Feb 23/24.

  No launch yet but we did drop the count to the
two-minute hold point (twice).  We're finally
in for winds, hopefully this will hold.   We had
some nice auroral structures far to the north which
looked as if they were setting things up for a good
substorm, but never quite did.  There was a very fine
substorm (600nT bay) over Ft Churchill early in the evening,
and that seemed to be the major action in the magnetosphere
this evening.  But that was too early/too east (by
5 or 6 hours) for us in Alaska.  
  A good dose of Bz-south for an hour or so (vs Bz-north,
which is effectively random) would have pushed this evening
over the edge into more activity, so this was rather
a freebie from the solar-wind gods...there wasn't supposed
to be much activity at all tonight.  So much for
predictions...we'll hope that the predictions for
tomorrow are even more wrong!
  Also, Kaktovic and Toolik were both mostly heavily
overcast most of the evening;  Kaktovic had some
occasional thinning of the clouds but was not really
optimal.  And still no internet connection at Kaktovic;
many thanks to Hans who patiently stayed on the phone
for ~many~ hours relaying to us the action (or lack
thereof) up there tonight.