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Hello everybody... Well the last 24 hours have been quite fun.. Last night I saw my very first Aurora Australis (the atmospheric phenomenon not the ship :-)), and today we sighted the first iceberg! The Aurora was very beautiful, at times it was a huge enormous green shimmering curtain, stretching across the night sky from horizon to horizon. It wavers about in time with the movement of the earths magnetic field. This Aurora was only green in colour, but sometimes reds can just be seen. Over the coming months I will be watching large numbers of Aurora of all different patterns and colours ! The Iceberg turned up before anybody had predicted, and I didn't win the iceberg sweepstakes :-( having never seen a real-life berg before it was quite an awe inspiring thing. It had been eroded to the extent that it looked like a large cone, with a white flat topped tower in the middle. There was a clear vertical face on one side from which I could see layers of very old blue ice - contrasting with the whiteness of the snow. At the moment the air temperature has fallen to 0.6deg C, and the water temperature is 1 degC. There is a 35knot wind (55kph) which makes being outside quite chilly. The sea has calmed down quite a bit now (under 1 metre swell) and we are making good time to our next waypoint where we will be dropping a weather buoy. On a lighter note, I made my first web page - full of photos of the party we had on Saturday night. It didn't turn out as good as I suspected, so I won't be flashing it around much but hopefully my web skills will get quite a bit better by the time I start working on the Mawson 2000 official web site ! Bye for now Kym
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