[Quark (Trevor)]

Hi all,
I apologise for not keeping you all up to date with my work for the Cassini RPWS team, wasn't sure that anyone would really be interested, but thing have been pretty chaotic over the last month or so.

The morphology of the storm has changed considerably since I first imaged it in February. I have now imaged it about 80 times to date, activity has varied considerably, at one stage there were three very small storms very close together. Too close together for my RGB imaging ability. Bear in mind I am very new to RGB imaging. I found it much easier to do monochrome images of this group.
Cannot believe the media interest in this, I thought the media were only interested in politicians, celebrities and catastrophic events not in what ordinary folk got up to.

I have done interviews on our local ABC 999 radio, ABC 891 Adelaide, Radio Nationals Science Show with Robyn Williams, the Sydney Morning Herald, Newcastle FM radio 2NUR.
Sarah Clarke ABC TV' National Environment & Science reporter rang me, apparently someone from NASA TV contacted the ABC trying to track me down to do a story.

Sarah organised a TV crew to come to my observatory where she recorded a radio story for AM, a TV story for the news and a story for NASA TV. She interviewed Georg Fischer from the Cassini RPWS team and organised Fred Watson to come down to Sydney and be a part of it from Sydney Observatory. I greatly appreciated Fred's very kind words about my work.

Sarah Maddison from SAO at Swinburne has dobbed me to two undergraduates doing a journalism degree that have to write a feature article for an online Uni magazine about the experiences of a Swinburne Graduate.

Yesterday channel 10 from Adelaide rang, they flew in a TV crew that did a story at my observatory and tagged along with me while a gave an astronomy presentation to MLC School from Sydney, MLC bring there year 9 students to Broken Hill each year for 2 weeks. I give the whole group a general astronomy presentation and the students that select astronomy as an elective (while in Broken Hill) get bused into my observatory for some in depth astronomy, my spectroscope usually goes over well with them.

I have also been contacted by a woman claiming to be from Alice Springs TV , she will be in our area in the next couple of weeks and wants to do a story in my observatory.

The last message from Georg to our group included an invitation to Muenster in Germany for a seminar in September, can you believe that. It amazes me that things like this could possibly happen to such ordinary folk.

It is getting very difficult to image the longitude where the storm activity is occurring before I lose Saturn over my neighbours house. I am adopting different tactics and will try imaging in the twilight through a red filter.
Even if this is successful I will probably only be able to to this for about another three weeks before I lose Saturn below my local horizon.

When Saturn returns to the morning sky I intend continuing my work as Cassini will remain operational for some time yet.

I have often wondered about comments from various people that I have seen on TV about the feeling of "living a dream", I really am living my dream of being able to make a contribution to science as a broken down ex mine worker living in the middle of nowhere.

Regards
Trevor