Kansas

I arrived in Kansas last Tuesday for the first part of our field study.  I flew into Wichita, then drove an hour and a half north to Salina.  I saw mostly farmland on the trip.

The goal of the field study is to look at what happens to ground-level pollution when it's lifted to the upper troposphere by large convective thunderstorms.  We usually fly back and forth at low altitude measuring what is flowing into the storm.  Then we fly to the top of the thunderstorm and measure what's coming out.  We focused on this thunderstorm yesterday:

That picture was taken with my iPhone.  Next time, I'll remember to take my camera!

Finally, I saw my first solar eclipse tonight.  I was out at dinner, so once again, I didn't have my camera.  By the time I got back to my hotel, the sun had almost set.  You can just make out the eclipse on the left side of the sun:

Test Flight

On Friday, I flew on the first test flight of the DC-8. We spent some time in the Central Valley (we did a lot of that back in 2010), where there a lot of dairies:

Here's a picture of the NASA facility at Palmdale (lower right) and Edwards AFB middle left:

We made a missed approach at Edwards AFB, during which I took a picture of this plane landing:

Before the missed approach, the pilots did some pitch and yaw maneuvers. Unfortunately, this made several people on the flight sick (but not me! I was on Dramamine!). Fortunately, the pitch maneuvers led to this video: