Contributions – open-weather

2025-01-24 11:09:00

Automatic Ground Station 15 Florida

Gainesville, Florida , United States

2025-01-23 10:07:23

Augarten, Wien, Austria

I began to think in "un-"s after reading Naomi Klein's proposal for "unselfing" in resistance to a politics of self-preservation and algorithm-fuelled ego. Around the same time, I realised that adding "un-" to German words is a shortcut to expanding my limited vocabulary. This is how I came across the German word for severe weather, "Unwetter". "Unwetter" is the opposite of "Wetter" and literally translates as un-weather. This week, the transatlantic weather of Trump's inauguration and the explosive fire weather of Los Angeles has been so severe, it has felt like both an Unwetter and an un-doing. That is to say, I can see in the people around me how the events of this week have undone certain beliefs about the past or expectations of the future. At the same time, five days into the ceasefire in Gaza, Palestinians are reckoning a new un-peace or Unfrieden.

2025-01-22 17:59:07

Pauline Woolley

The Urban Garden, Nottingham, UK

Storm Éowyn is on it's way but they are unclear how it will unfurl. I can see from the pass that something is heading towards us off the Atlantic. Warnings are changing from yellow to red and I feel for those who will again experience flooding or winds that will cut power for hours or days. We are not a robust country. Our red warning is very different from other places on the planet. The merging of seasons has left us confused and stuck. Sort paralysed by the bigger picture. A low cloud sits above my head as it glows an unsightly orange from the light of the city. Jupiter's pinpoint of light shines through the blanket of cloud. This is another night without the stars. 5 degrees Celcius 90% humidity 995 mb

2025-01-22 16:35:00

Automatic Ground Station 15 Florida

Gainesville, Florida , United States

2025-01-22 11:24:14

Sasha Engelmann

Queens Building Fire Escape, Geography Department, Royal Holloway University of London, United Kingdom

A last minute tutee cancellation gave me a fifteen minute gap in my back to back student meetings, and I snuck out the back of the department to the fire escape overlooking Egham. It was bitingly cold, but fresh. Though the pass was relatively high, the signal struggled to emerge from the static, and I decided the fire escape might not be the best location given interference from heavy machinery, air venting and lab equipment directly adjacent. The news has been filled with the Trump inauguration. For those of us, like my family, who have been directly affected by the LA fires, the slew of executive orders since Monday has felt like another set of fires that were foreshadowed by the burning of Los Angeles over the last two weeks. I am still checking the Calfire map many times daily, and stunned that 'containment' of the Palisades fire is still only 63%. A county infrastructure damage map has recently been released. It looks like a pointilist painting of red, black, green and yellow, but the coloured dots are houses, schools, cafes, libraries, offices and other structures in various states of damage. The map is mostly red, which means 100% structural damage. I found a photo of the house I lived in during high school and couldn't stop looking at it. It is marked as 100% damaged, but unlike other homes that are just piles of rubble, our former house is a hollow cinderblock rectangle with the remainder of the two-story facade pointing to the sky. The single window in the facade looks like a wide eye. Everything inside has burned, but because of the existence of the facade and cinderblock walls, it feels like a hollowing-out rather than a burn-to-the-ground. One can see directly into the corner of the garage where we used to have our family desktop computer- this was where I downloaded music on Limewire for the first time and made CDs for myself and family road trips. It is also the corner of the garage where I sat and chose my first semester's courses at Stanford University. The remainder of the house is a poetics of space- of corners, bubbles, staircases and windows where so much of my life unfolded. The second story - where my bedroom was - is completely gone, and the ring of tall bamboo that used to surround the house is absent. This means the hollow house is open to the sky- in the photograph, this is a pale gray sky that suggests ash still swirling in the air.

2025-01-19 12:02:27

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

A passage of the novel Bosnian Chronicle (Travnička hronika) by Ivo Andrić accurately depicts London's weather today. Reading before bed last night, I marked the page of weather scenography with a large stone, and found it on my desk in the morning - a note to self from the Bosnian town of Travnik in the late 19th century: "It meant rain and mud and snow; snow that turned to rain while still in the air, rain that became mud as soon as it hit the ground. At dawn, from behind the patch of clouds, a pale and listless sun would paint the east a wan rose; at the end of a gray day it would reappear again in teh west as a sickly yellow glow, just before the grayness passed into the pitch-black of night. During the day, as at nighttime, the damp breathing of the sky and the soil mingled together in a smoke-thin drizzle that seeped through the town and pervaded everything; in the silent, inexorable alembic of the damp, solid things lost their shape and color, animals changed their temper, men thought and acted moodily" "The wind, soughing along the narrow valley twice a day, merely shifted the damp around and, by wafting sleet and a smell of wet woods as it went, brought new waves of humidity; so the pools of dampness only nudged and overlapped one another and the raw, bone-chilling mountain mist merely replaced the stale, moldering kind in the town" - Ivo Andrić, Bosnian Chronicle, pp. 109

2025-01-19 12:01:13

Pauline Woolley

The Urban Garden, Nottingham, UK

It's mid January and grey. There is no bird song today. Just one lonely gull flying above land locked and trapped between the desolate winter ground and the concreate pallor of the thick cloud. During the pass I look for signs of spring from plants and fruits that shrivel to nothing to protect themselves. Today's pass isn't clear. An over sight from me for not unravelling the cables properly. Cracked lines and a broken image seem to echo a deeper global anxiety. Or maybe it's just January blues. 2 degrees Celsius 81% humidity 1019 mb

2025-01-19 12:00:00

Alba Iulia, Romania

2025-01-19 10:54:52

Steve Engelmann

Studio City, California, United States

This pass was captured from the Hollywood Hills facing the San Fernando Valley. My friend Henry helped out. There were some large power cables just overhead which I suspect created a little interference initially. The skies were a bit hazy, which is a big change from just the day before. I do not think this is related to the fires as they are mostly contained at this point and not actively burning.

2025-01-19 10:14:00

Alba Iulia, Romania

2025-01-19 08:13:00

Alba Iulia, Romania

Yes, I know the photos look bad, but my rig was a Baofeng UV-5r with the stock whip antenna, recorded with a phone. The NOAA-15 came today at 6:19 UTC almost over head with 89 degrees of elevation. There was a lot of fog out, humidity 84%. Temp was -3 Celsius.

2025-01-18 10:09:00

Automatic Ground Station 12 London

London, United Kingdom

2025-01-16 17:17:00

Automatic Ground Station 13 Cosmos Club India

2025-01-16 11:11:00

Automatic Ground Station 15 Florida

Gainesville, Florida , United States

2025-01-14 11:37:00

Automatic Ground Station 15 Florida

Gainesville, Florida , United States

2025-01-13 04:36:00

Automatic Ground Station 13 Cosmos Club India

2025-01-12 10:44:13

Diepoldpark, Wien, Austria

I stood in a flurry of snowflakes that would not settle. Large, restless and white-grey, they took on the appearance of ashes. From Vienna to LA, with solidarity and love. This is my first satellite image capture of the year.

2025-01-12 07:44:00

Automatic Ground Station 15 Florida

Gainesville, Florida , United States

2025-01-11 10:56:21

Steve Engelmann

Santa Monica Pier, United States

This is day 4 since the Palisades Fire began and it has been quite the rollercoaster. Regardless, NOAA 18 decided to fly over with an elevation of 89°. You don't get much better than that. I decided to visit the Santa Monica Pier as it has great exposure to the sky, and is about as close as I can get to the fire zone. One of the top destinations for tourists, there was much activity. A bodyboarder screams as he catches a wave. The rollercoaster operator ask his riders if they want to go for a second spin. A neon sign above a cafe reads, "Salty air, and not a care". On a small island of homes, my house defied all odds - standing strong. My classroom of 25 years went up in smoke. About 6 1/2 minutes into the satellite pass you can see a thin strip of clouds headed out to the ocean. The winds have died down, but the fire continues. At just 11% containment, it is now threatening Brentwood and Encino. 8 months of no rain and some strong winds. It doesn't take much to change your course.

2025-01-11 10:08:00

Automatic Ground Station 15 Florida

Gainesville, Florida , United States

2025-01-10 10:21:00

Automatic Ground Station 15 Florida

Gainesville, Florida , United States

2025-01-09 18:37:29

Pauline Woolley

The Urban Garden, Nottingham, UK

Another cold frosty night. An 80% Moon illuminates the frost on the grass. Tiny ice crystals shimmer and glimmer in brightness of the reflected moon light. I try and spot the satellite overhead but lots of fainter objects are fighting for recognition in the blinding lunar light. There the pin sharp brilliance of Venus to the west, Jupiter to the south east and Mars rising in the east. On packing away I walk across the grass leaving footprints that remind me of the moon landings or the fossilised prints left millions of years ago by the dinosaurs. As I type this I can hear the news from the next room reporting on the fires in California. What kind of footprints are being left there today and what about the footprints of the generations to come? 0.1 degrees Celsius 90% humidity 1005 mb

2025-01-09 10:33:00

Automatic Ground Station 15 Florida

Gainesville, Florida , United States

2025-01-08 20:25:10

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

For the Los Angeles fires: Blame it on the wind: blame it on the ‘devil’s wind’ that gusts over Los Angeles at 60+ mph, ‘fanning the flame’ of five ongoing, devastating wildfires, as yet ‘uncontained’. Blame it on the wind, an unpredictable, invisible, seemingly chaotic, uncontrollable force: the easiest scapegoat. Whose wind is this? Who remembers its names or its cultures? Who is willing to counter the ‘blame’ with the knowledge that a wind like the ‘Santa Ana’ has a cultural history more than 5,000 years old in the lifeways of the Tongva, Tataviam, Serrano, Kizh, and Chumash Peoples, on whose land Los Angeles was settled and built? The Santa Ana winds may be arid and dry, originating from the desert of the Great Basin. These winds may increase static electricity, topple trees, and produce ‘strange luminosities’ in the sky. Yet being affected by a dry, desert wind is not the same thing as codifying it with sensationalist and ‘demonic’ fears. In demonising the wind, whose demonic actions go unnoticed? Which demons are free to roam? As we blame the wind, how can we have a conversation about the extractive legacies of water stealing, draining and rerouting? Or fire suppression tactics that make the world more flammable? Or centuries of encroachment on more and more arid land? How do we talk about the fact that the logic that pumps money into LAPD and enlists hundreds of incarcerated peoples to fight an uncontainable fire for $4 per day is the very same logic that sends arms to Israel as it burns entire cities and perpetuates another prison? How do we resist sensationalist narratives of neighbourhoods where “millionaires are getting a taste of the apocalyptic movies they have produced and acted in” to be able to see the marginalised, differently abled, and elderly existing side by side, whose narratives of ‘escape’, or simply survival, are far less appealing to a media elite? I pray for the sake of my family home (if it still exists) that the wind relents. But this disaster is not about the wind. (images are screenshots from videos by Steve Engelmann, maps by CalFire, words by me)

2025-01-08 07:48:00

Automatic Ground Station 15 Florida

Gainesville, Florida , United States

2025-01-07 20:36:34

Pauline Woolley

The Urban Garden, Nottingham,

A clear cold night. The winter constellations hang overhead in all their beautiful glory. Orion, Pleiades, Auriga and Taurus drawing out the maps of ancient skies. The lawn is crispy underfoot. The UK is clear on the map except for some small parallel clouds across the counties of Cheshire and the cities of Liverpool and Chester. 1 degree Celsius 90% humidity 1001 mb

2025-01-07 11:25:00

Automatic Ground Station 15 Florida

Gainesville, Florida , United States

2025-01-07 09:39:57

Steve Engelmann

Pacific Palisades, California, United States

Today is a blustery day in Los Angeles. The National Weather Service predicts a "life-threatening and destructive" windstorm, with gusts of wind up to 160 kph. Over the last 8 months, southern California hasn't received a rainfall event with more than a few millimeters of precipitation. The landscape is dry and the humidity is expected to drop (currently 20%). A spark from a power line can ignite the extremely flammable brush and then carry embers great distances. "Fire season" used to refer to late August, September and October. In recent years, some of the worst fires in California history happened in November, December and January. With a changing climate there is a need to update our terminology. While some people might think this is an excuse to hunker down and ride out the storm, I thought this is a reason to break out the antenna. I went up into the hills of the Santa Monica Mountains and captured a pass. While writing this weather note, I started hearing sirens. A neighbor sent me a text. I hopped on my roof and watched flames come over a ridge (see image 3). Ended up evacuating due to air quality.

2025-01-06 20:50:07

Pauline Woolley

The Urban Garden, Nottingham, UK

It's cold. It's been cold all day. I am stood watching Mars and Jupiter fade in out of the clouds along with a quarter Moon. There are layers of cloud tonight. Lower ones are moving fast and in small wispy shapes. The higher clouds glow an orange colour from the light pollution and as I pad around on the lawn during the pass I hear the splashing of water against my boots and I notice that the lawn is water logged in places. There was so much rain last night and another down pouring of sleet and snow today. Airports were shut, roads and rail lines flooded. More to come. 3.1 degrees Celsius 99% humidity 990mb

2025-01-06 11:39:00

Automatic Ground Station 15 Florida

Gainesville, Florida , United States

2025-01-05 11:52:00

Automatic Ground Station 15 Florida

Gainesville, Florida , United States

Another cool, crisp day. Turkey vultures soar on invisible updrafts in the sky. The dry grass is filled with tiny capped nuts, acorn-like but smaller. Surprisingly, dogs search them out and crunch their shells- an unlikely snack. Spanish moss hangs serenely from oak branches, sometimes reaching the ground.

2025-01-04 10:47:21

Steve Engelmann

Bel Air, California, United States

Today I thought I would visit LA's Getty Center. They are coordinating a project called PST:ART which includes over 70 exhibitions throughout southern California with a focus on how art and science collide. The Getty Center also has an amazing outdoor area with spectacular views of Los Angeles. What a great place to also grab a satellite pass - I thought. When security took a look at the disassembled antenna I was bringing along, they had second thoughts. I wasn't able to convince security, or her supervisor, that my intentions were harmless. But I've learned to be flexible. On the spot I hatched a plan B. With 20 minutes to go, I used my speed-walking skills to relocate on an overpass where Sunset Blvd crosses the 405 freeway. On the first image you can see the Getty Center in the background perched on a hillside. The view was a step down from the Getty, but also, not bad. I'm sure there were many suspicious looks from the busy street with a strange man pointing an antenna at the sky. Then again, this is a stone's throw away from Hollywood. At a little over 8 minutes in, a commuter bus blocked by reception for two seconds. A line of static documents the interference. Life throws us many curveballs. The next four years should be no different.

2025-01-04 09:56:00

Automatic Ground Station 15 Florida

Gainesville, Florida , United States

The ‘Cheshire Cat’ moon hung ponderously over the old golf course at West End in Newberry. The sky was a spectrum starting at the palest yellow to blue and violet. In the tract housing that surrounds a good part of the field, I noticed paper taped to windows with the writing facing out, like a label of completeness, while in other windows Christmas tree lights shone out. On this last of many walks in this park, I felt an eerie sense of quiet.

2025-01-03 10:58:05

Steve Engelmann

Pacific Palisades, California, United States

It is hard to pass up an opportunity when a satellite is passing by with an elevation of 87°. Back in Los Angeles I thought I would try out roof-top parking for an unobstructed view. The skies were mostly cloudy with a cool marine layer bringing in a little fog. There was also a light scattering of stratocumulus and high cirrus clouds, but no precipitation. The Air Quality Management District initiated an Air Quality Alert. An inversion layer, which is common in LA, traps air pollutants low to the ground. For this reason there is a ban on wood burning. The fine particulates get deep into lungs and can trigger a range of health issues. Could use some rain, but nothing in the forecast for the next 10 days.

2025-01-03 10:07:00

Automatic Ground Station 15 Florida

Gainesville, Florida , United States

Hurricane Idalia has haunted several conversations with locals on the west coast of Florida. In Crystal River, a sleepy seaside town known for its warm springs and manatees, the severity of Idalia was attributed to “a trifecta: king tide, full moon, west wind”. This phrase stayed with me as the New Year passed and the holidays drew to a close. Before spending time in Florida, I had little knowledge of the diversity of hurricanes and which local conditions affected their impact. Hurricane Helene apparently was a “muddy one” as it dragged up tons of mud into houses, streets and dry surfaces, and so repair was even more laborious. I heard the same person from Crystal River say that “because hurricanes tend to hit at night, you never know what’s around you”. They were pointing to Christmas Island, a small patch of land in the middle of the mouth of the river that had been the site of a single house before Idalia- after the storm hit, locals could only make out the Christmas lights strung up around the darkened house, hence its name. It was bought and rebuilt in 2024, right before Helene hit, and now stands crumbling and empty. We also passed a line up of sail boats in the rivermouth, two of which had sunk during Helene, their sailing masts pointing out of the water crookedly. “They didn’t tie up properly for the hurricane” we learned. Yet dozens of other boats were peacefully anchored adjacent and around the sunken ones. Their owners had stayed on their boats during the storm.

2025-01-02 21:39:00

Automatic Ground Station 15 Florida

Gainesville, Florida , United States

2025-01-02 10:20:00

Automatic Ground Station 15 Florida

Gainesville, Florida , United States

Migrating sandhill cranes, common apple snails and wild Spanish horses emerged from the tall grass and reeds of Paynes Prairie on a hike yesterday afternoon. The air was much cooler and crisper than previous days, and the humidity dropped from 90% to 50%. We came across an impression in the mud, the outline and texture of which looked strikingly like the sideways body of a pig. There were even tiny lines that looked like fur, and hoof prints where it got up after rolling around. The Paynes Prairie visitor centre had boasted a large poster of a wild boar with very black fur and gleaming eyes, and the title on top of the image said, in bold letters, 'Alien invaders'. Another section of the educational exhibit had information on the history of the prairie, and featured a wall sized display about Seminole and Potano Indigenous communities. Amidst information on Seminole pottery, hunting tools and agriculture, one sentence acknowledged that: "Seminole populations declined in the 18th and 19th centuries due to war, disease and land dispossession". But which wars? Which diseases? Land dispossession by who? These questions and answers were absent.

2025-01-02 10:19:52

Steve Engelmann

Newberry, Florida, United States

Went out to capture a satellite pass with a super high elevation (87°). Found an abandoned golf course in the process of being repurposed with a relatively clear skyline. The skies were mostly clear with some cirrus clouds toning down the sunlight. It was a crisp 10°C at 10AM, which seems a bit unexpected for someone not from Florida. Just at the satellite was at it's highest point, an airplane left a contrail, as if to mark the spot.

2025-01-02 10:06:55

Pauline Woolley

The Urban Garden, Nottingham, UK

A bright and crisp morning. Blue skies and frost underfoot. There is a stillness to the day and though it's already the 2nd January the new year feels like it's still slowly unfurling. Blue Tits and Robins interject with pips and chirps that are bumped off the musical score by the prehistoric caws and croaks of the corvids. The British Isles are clear. A rare sight indeed. 2 degrees celsius 82% humidity air pressure 1011 hPa/mb

2025-01-01 10:33:00

Sasha Engelmann Steve Engelmann

Gainesville, Florida , United States

Today marks the official permanent installation of the Gainesville Automatic Satellite Ground Station on the roof! We did one more test of two AGS's (15 and 12) running in parallel and receiving the same satellite shortly after 10:30am from the roof. Both received stunningly clear images, even though the pass was only around 65 degrees at max elevation. One V-dipole was mounted on the permanent installation site, and Steve held the second. The former received an image with less interference, which made sense, given it had nothing around it to possibly affect the antenna's radiation pattern. After drilling a pilot hole through the PVC that holds the antenna to the (now waterproof) wooden mast, we used a wood screw to solidly connect the two. We stretched out the RG8X coaxial cable throughout the backyard to make sure there were no kinks, and screwed one end into the base of the antenna on the roof, using zip ties to hold the cable against the mast. Following one edge of the roof, we bolted the cable down with small cable brackets, and looped it under the garage door overhang, following the edge of the moulding around the door to the floor, where we hooked it under a piece of wood. Steve drilled away some of the wood on the inside part of the garage door corner, where we passed the cable through to the inside, testing the garage door could open and close without causing any friction. We then bracketed the cable to the moulding along the bottom of the garage wall to the corner where there is a work desk and a power plug. We had a good metre and a half of cable left, and gently looped this around twice. After the cable was stretched out and secured, we returned to the roof, where we oriented the V-dipole to 'true north' using a professional compass, which meant we had to apply a 6 degree West declination (based on the difference between magnetic North and true North from our position in Florida). One of us oriented the antenna with the compass while the other screwed the wooden mast tightly into the steel mount with two screws. We also wrapped the UHF connector at the end of the coaxial cable with some vinyl electrical tape to protect it from UV radiation and water damage. Back inside, we cleaned up the wood shavings, glue, and spare screws. As we didn't have any extra 3D print casings for the Florida AGS, we DIY-ed a small cardboard box, and hooked up AGS 15 in its corner. It lit up, and let us know that it was going to collect a NOAA-15 pass shortly before 7pm this evening!

2025-01-01 05:54:00

Automatic Ground Station 13 Cosmos Club India

2024-12-31 14:02:00

Automatic Ground Station 13 Cosmos Club India

2024-12-31 11:14:24

Steve Engelmann

Newberry, Florida, United States

Got up on a roof in central Florida with my nephew to do a little training and compare two different antennas on a satellite pass. The sun came in and out of the clouds often. Combining the warm December temperatures, humidity and the dark roof surface I came down a little sweaty. On the last day of 2024 it is always interesting to assess the year that just passed and contemplate what lies ahead. 2023 was the warmest year on record regarding global temperatures. The consensus is that 2024 will end up being warmer still. At this moment there is a polar vortex sending frigid temperatures to the midwest and northeast. Ironically, climate change makes these events more likely. Searching for opportunities to dial down carbon emissions would be a great new year's resolution.

2024-12-31 11:00:29

Pauline Woolley

the urban garden, Nottingham, UK

A low winter sun brushed over the bare trees and though it tried to break through it was beaten by the cloud. While the pass happened I moved the outside furniture and bins around in preparation for the windy weather that was forecast for the afternoon. 10 degrees Celsius

2024-12-31 09:15:30

GREECE, Northern Greece

Northern Greece

NOAA 19 from Greece at 09:15AM local time ( 07:15 utc time)

2024-12-30 11:28:00

Sasha Engelmann Steve Engelmann

Gainesville, Florida , United States

We were late in plugging-in the semi-permanently mounted V-dipole antenna to the 'recording' AGS, but happy to see it standing on the peak of the garage roof, glinting orange-pink in the sunlight, without anyone attempting to hold it in place, as it received an image from NOAA-18. After several antenna radiation pattern calculations, we decided to try a test antenna height of 0.8 metres off the pinnacle of the roof. While some radio forums suggest putting the antenna as high as possible, others suggest this is not necessary, especially if one is already mounting on a semi-conductive wooden roof (as opposed to concrete or steel). Depending on what surface the v-dipole antenna takes as 'ground', the antenna height can create different patterns of reception, and can even lead to 'null' points where no signal data can be received. However, as Gainesville can get very strong, hurricane force winds, and we couldn't see many examples of tall antennas or rooftop weathervanes in the neighbourhood, we opted to keep the antenna height under one metre, and 0.8 seemed to work great today, despite our lateness. To secure the antenna mast to the roof, we used a steel 'weathervane' mount with special wood screws with deep ribbons that we had gotten at the local ACE hardware store, and a good coating of a transparent sealant gel called, somewhat counter-intuitively, 'Through the Roof!' We managed to hit a stud with one side of the steel mount, which was a good sign for the sturdiness of the antenna, but also meant that the drill pushed further into the roof on the stud side of the mount, and slightly unbalanced the mount. We unscrewed, knocked some wooden 'shims' under the metal pad at the stud side, and checked its straightness by hanging a roll of tape on a golden ribbon next to the mast. Tomorrow, hopefully, we will be able to tie the RF cable onto the mast, and bracket / secure the cable to the roof, wrapping it around the edge of the garage door and entering the garage where the AGS will stay plugged in.

2024-12-29 20:52:41

Pauline Woolley

the urban garden, UK

A night time pass. It's 8 degrees Celsius. Cloud whispers across the sky. Jupiter is a small smoky dot that battles for attention. There is a slight breeze and it feels much colder than the temperature states. 90% humidity 1018 air pressure

2024-12-29 17:45:00

Automatic Ground Station 13 Cosmos Club India

2024-12-29 11:41:00

Sasha Engelmann Steve Engelmann

Gainesville, Florida , United States

A huge amount of progress was made today with AGS reception! It is hard to contain the excitement while writing this weather note. After several months exploring ‘herringbone’ distortion patterns and deep diving into NOAA APT + Raspberry Pi tutorials, the team found an ‘instructable’ tutorial via which several people seemed to be receiving relatively long and clear NOAA images. In this tutorial, Grayson noticed a filter option for rtl_fm called -F 9 that we hadn’t tried to implement in the AGS code yet, and he added it in an update yesterday. Last night, the roof mounted turnstile in Florida had to be taken down due to a lightning storm and ‘extreme’ tornado warning. Yet even though it was up against a garage wall and under an overhang, the last evening pass of the day yesterday showed telemetry data at the top and bottom of the image, where previous captures only recorded static. This morning, despite an ongoing storm and tornado warning, the Turnstile was positioned out on the front lawn for a 70 degree max elevation pass shortly after 11:40. In stark contrast to previous ‘letterbox’ type images in which satellite data only appeared in the central strip of the recording, today the image is significantly longer and clearer, with telemetry data clearly showing through static at the beginning and end of the pass. Also, the typical ‘herringbone’ type distortion seen in all previous images appears to be gone! More testing will verify this but at present this is something to celebrate.

2024-12-28 11:53:14

Sasha Engelmann Steve Engelmann

Gainesville, Florida , United States

To continue our antenna comparison, we sat on the roof shortly before noon with a weatherised V-Dipole and the tripod- mounted Turnstile, looking north. The V-dipole was hooked up to AGS 15, while the Turnstile received via an android phone running SDR++. The image attached to this post is from the latter. After the pass, Steve did a soil texturing test which revealed the local soil to be ‘loamy sand’.

2024-12-28 04:35:00

Automatic Ground Station 13 Cosmos Club India

2024-12-27 14:06:00

Automatic Ground Station 13 Cosmos Club India

2024-12-27 09:56:00

Sasha Engelmann Steve Engelmann

Gainesville, Florida , United States

We joked that Orlando kept getting farther away as we drove south on 75, east through Ocala National Forest, over the waters of Lake Monroe, and alongside cattle pastures and skeleton scarecrows. Rain splattered intermittently on the windshield. Billboards declared that ‘at 18 days since conception, a baby’s heart is already beating’, or ‘man up: your child needs you.’ An entire single story house rolled down the highway taking up two lanes, flanked by pickup trucks. A corner ‘yard art’ shop burst with bronze eagles, brown bears, American flags and an original Bob’s Big Boy sculpture, complete with a checkered red and white outfit and a sculptural hamburger on a plate.

2024-12-26 16:13:00

Automatic Ground Station 13 Cosmos Club India

2024-12-26 10:09:05

Gainesville, FL, United States of America

United States of America

This was my first time picking up a satellite signal! Very intriguing process. It was chilly (compared to typical Florida weather) and very cloudy, but not windy. There's a bit of South America in the lower part of the image, such as the Panama Canal, as well as most of the East Coast. We can see some tougher, perhaps stormy clouds moving in from the bottom.

2024-12-26 10:08:00

Sasha Engelmann Steve Engelmann

Gainesville, Florida , United States

Florida balances over one big aquifer: a hidden cavernous water system fed by rainfall that stretches beneath the everglades, wetlands and an ecological system known as 'moist sandy pine / hardwood woodlands'. Walking through the Sweetwater Wetlands south of Gainesville yesterday, we met some of the water on its way into the depths. Today, at Rainbow Springs, an hour further south, we saw some of it come out, bubbling up through pale white-gray sand, so abundantly that it creates the Rainbow River, a wide, flat river sustaining alligators, turtles, catfish, frogs, coral snakes and other wildlife. Rainbow Springs exists because of the thinner karst rock separating the aquifer from the surface, while elsewhere in the state, the rock-shield is much thicker. The upwelling makes the water below feel very close, even reachable, but we learned that the water in the Floridan Aquifer is between 17,000 and 26,000 years old. The springs seemed otherworldly in their crystal clear shallows, ferns and mossy trees, and two impressive waterfalls cascaded over towering rocks. One of the waterfalls was named 'Seminole Falls', after local Indigenous peoples who never ceded their land. We speculated that the two tall waterfalls might have been built up as the upwelling spring water deposited minerals over thousands of years. Later a park ranger informed us that the waterfalls were entirely man-made in the 1930s, created with sediment dredged from the bottom of the springs, and that water has been power-pumped to the top of the rocks for decades, just so visitors can watch it fall.

2024-12-25 16:26:00

Automatic Ground Station 13 Cosmos Club India

2024-12-25 10:22:00

Sasha Engelmann Steve Engelmann

Gainesville, Florida , United States

"What is this obsession with 'manned' or 'unmanned'?!" jokes Bowen Yang, playing 'A Drone' on Saturday Night Live. "For the record" Bowen continues "I can get a man whenever I want!". The skit plays on political divisions haunting thousands if not millions of American Christmas Eve dinners this year. I had not heard about the reported drone sightings prior to arriving in Florida, but they have been raised by local family members at every opportunity. "What is the government really doing?" "Remember the media explosion about that one Chinese balloon?! Now there are hundreds of drones and no one is talking about it!" Or, "I just worry about what could happen in New York on New Years Eve". Earlier in the week, when Steve and I set up the turnstile antenna on the roof of my Mom's house, a family member walked over and asked if we could listen to the drones. I decided to preserve a bit of mystery: "this is for satellites, but both satellites and drones communicate via radio waves".

2024-12-24 10:34:00

Automatic Ground Station 12 Florida

Gainesville, Florida , United States

We ran two AGS at the same time to test the difference between a weatherised V-dipole and a static mounted Turnstile on the top of the roof. The pass was around 68 degrees in maximum elevation- so not ideal, but good enough for a comparison. Steve reclined on the roof and used a spare curtain rod to hold the V-dipole in a static position for eleven minutes. We ran a spare radio cable from the V-dipole through the garage door to AGS 12, while AGS 3 stayed connected to the turnstile. Comparing the images is interesting: AGS 12 / V-dipole picked up the satellite signal a little earlier, but more bands of interference run through the start of the image. In contrast, AGS 3 / Turnstile pick up the signal later, but the middle part of the image is generally clearer. The antennas lose the signal at about the same time to the South.

2024-12-24 10:34:00

Sasha Engelmann Steve Engelmann

Gainesville, Florida , United States

After a few hours at Florida's coast, one begins to see beyond the obvious signs of damage from Hurricane Helene to houses and infrastructure, and other more subtle signals become visible. At the edge of the marshes in Suwannee, a town at the mouth of the Suwanneee river, the land had subsided significantly. We spotted a red life jacket caught in top of a stand of high reeds near the waterline. Near the Cedar Keys museum, a bleached log had been lifted into the upper branches of a Cedar or Juniper. "Have a good time on the island- or what's left of it" said a Cedar Keys resident named Tom as we left the community garden he had set up and repaired from storm damage. We noticed how local mud clams grow in clumps, clustering on each other, rather than on rocks, like the clams and mussels of California and the UK. In the mud, the footsteps of boots traced a path to a dense outcrop of clams, presumably for a local clam harvest. Raccoon feet looked like tiny hands sunk deep in the mud. "When I was young we all used to go clam stomping" said a woman we spoke to in Cedar Keys. "You would stand in the mud and stomp your feet down over the clam. They were huge" she made a sign with her hands, fingers arranged in a large diamond shape, "nothing like what we eat today", she added.

2024-12-24 05:55:00

Automatic Ground Station 13 Cosmos Club India

2024-12-23 22:32:51

Tiny amounts of rain at receiving spot. Image shows some rain clouds over France and Bay of Biscay and just off the coast of Ireland in the Atlantic Ocean.

2024-12-23 17:22:00

Automatic Ground Station 13 Cosmos Club India

2024-12-23 11:17:00

Sasha Engelmann Steve Engelmann

Gainesville, Florida , United States

"How high did the water get?" asked Steve. Our waitress silently walked to the door of 'Steamers' cafe and pointed to a green line drawn on the wall above chest height. "The previous high water level was all the way down here" she added, bending all the way down to a wave pattern drawn with Sharpie about a foot off the ground. "Then Idalia was here" she said, referencing the 2023 Hurricane, and pointing to a black mark around two feet off the ground, not far from the lower mark. "We prepared for it to be somewhere in between" she said. In the midst of the bustling cafe at lunchtime, we all took a moment to look at the marks on the wall in silence. The distance between the water level that the town of Cedar Keys had prepared for, and how high the water rose during Hurricane Helene, was almost unbelievable. Later, driving through Suwaneee, another Gulf-side town north of Cedar Keys, we saw tree branches hoisted into upper tree branches, boats that appeared to have been lifted and dropped in driveways, broken windows, boarded-up holes, and debris still clinging to the upper branches of palms, cedars and other bushes. The newer houses were built on stilts 16 feet high or more - the new 'code' for building, we had learned from the waitress.

2024-12-23 10:47:00

Sasha Engelmann Steve Engelmann

Gainesville, Florida , United States

2024-12-22 11:29:00

Sasha Engelmann Steve Engelmann

Patio Homes, Newberry , United States

Day 1 of the Florida Automatic Ground Station testing phase. A turnstile antenna is taped to a tripod sitting on the angle of the roof. An RF cable runs through a crack in the garage window to the AGS on a worktable inside.

2024-12-21 11:40:57

Sasha Engelmann Steve Engelmann

Old golf course next to W Newberry Road, Gainesville, United States

A clear, cool, breezy day here in Florida. We stand on separate hills in the former golf course, one of us with a turnstile antenna, another with a v-dipole. Later, comparing images, we notice how there is a clear line at the midpoint of the turnstile's image that doesn't appear in the image made with the dipole. This line is appearing at almost the same spot in previous images collected with the same laptop and antenna - a signature of the laptop? or a glitch in antenna reception, at the peak of the satellite pass? Later in the day, we test the same antenna from the roof, shaded by southern live oaks. As there is no wind or rain predicted, we tape it to an old camera tripod found in the garage, simply stand it up on the roof's apex, and run a cable through a crack in a window.

2024-12-21 11:29:00

Automatic Ground Station 11 Arbroath

Arbroath, Scotland

Yellow weather warning just starting here. Bright but very very windy from 2 floors up, leaves swirling everywhere, bins falling about

2024-12-20 11:54:51

Sasha Engelmann

Southern live oak tree, former golf course, Newberry, United States

After a few warm, humid days, the air today felt lighter, cooler and clearer. I took a long walk around the neighbourhood, and it wasn't long before I came across the edge. A grid had been carved into the land near a local forest, sandy flats exposed, and the sounds of hammers and staple-guns echoed back and forth. I walked to the very limit of the housing development and found a gap in the trees, but as soon as I entered the forest I could see someone was living there, or at least squatting for a while, in a shelter made of tree branches. Being alone around sunset, I turned away and found the empty pavement again. As I returned home, the orange sunset light was glowing through the palms, matching in intensity the light-up candy canes on a nearby lawn.

2024-12-18 10:07:46

Sasha Engelmann

Patio Homes, Newberry , United States

Cumulus clouds tower to the east of "Patio Homes" in Newberry, so sharp and iridescent, they look like they have crystalline facets. It is muggy today, but I stubbornly wear my Mom's flannel-lined denim jacket on my walk to the local golf-course-turned-park - I am needing protection. The political 'climate' of Florida has been on my mind today. An organisation called Safehome ranks Florida the second most unsafe state in the USA for LGBTQIA+ people based on current legislation and records of hate crimes. Governor Ron De Santis' GOP-led 'Don't Say Gay' law, passed in 2022, barred instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in kindergarten through the third grade on its inception, and was later expanded to all grades. It had a chilling effect across the state, caused queer teachers to hide photos of partners and take down rainbow flags, queer festivals to be cancelled, and books featuring queer characters to be removed from curriculums. It also inspired a series of other similar laws in states like Arkansas, Alabama, Indiana and North Carolina. A 2024 'settlement' clarified that LGBTQIA+ discussion can happen in classrooms "as long as it is not part of official instruction", and that the law doesn't apply to books with incidental references to LGBTQ+ characters or same-sex couples, "as they are not instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity any more than a math problem asking students to add bushels of apples is instruction on apple farming". Though it is a relief to know that some books are being allowed back 'in', it is frightening to think they were removed from teaching in the first place, and the comparison between queer characters and 'bushels of apples' feels particularly wrong. Ron De Santis called the 'settlement' a 'huge win'. In August 2024, all of the webpages on the Florida state tourism website related to LGBTQIA+ resources and travel advice were quietly removed. On my walk back to 7th street, I notice two American flags raised high on a dedicated pole in the front yard of an olive green house.

2024-12-17 10:20:29

Sasha Engelmann

Old golf course next to W Newberry Road, Gainesville, USA

The unusual humidity and warmth woke me up from a dream in a shadowy landscape, and it took me more than a few seconds to realise I was in Florida. Peaking out the window I saw a suburban street framed by massive palm trees, southern live oak, bald cyprus and lots of ferns. Spanish moss trailed down from the southern live oaks, sometimes so thick it seemed to cover the entire tree. On a morning walk I discovered what seems to be an old golf course turned into a neighbourhood park, and I climbed the only hill (a very small mound) to see further across. As the landscape is so flat, I could see further than expected. On the other side of the cul-de-sac where I slept, there appeared to be a quarry full of excavation machinery and a bright turquoise pond, a bit too turquoise to be non-toxic. As I listened to NOAA-19, a group of men in high viz outfits drove up and down the golf course in small open door vehicles that appeared to be cutting the dry, light brown grass. I watched them run over and over the same spots, and wondered what the purpose of this was- a seemingly futile looking attempt at edge-maintenance, kicking up small clouds of dust.

2024-12-15 11:03:50

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

Today is my last satellite pass in London during the year-long attempt at capturing satellite images and weather observations that began on the solstice in December 2023 and will come to an end in a few days. Hackney Downs was the best version of itself for the occasion, a low-lying sun shining across the grass, and reflections from apartment block windows adding a kind of sparkle or glimmer. Tomorrow I travel to Florida to visit my Mom who moved there a few months ago. As I traced the typical arc of the satellite orbit, I realised I would need to invent a somatic ritual for this year's solstice- both as a way to recognise the culmination of this near-daily practice of satellite image capture and weather sensing, but also as a means to start a new cycle, a new set of practices that I can't quite foresee yet. On a call with two very good friends later in the afternoon, this sentiment was confirmed. Speaking a set of rituals they have carried out during a time of transition, a time that is joyous but not without difficulty, one of them said "everything is meaningful, everything is magical - it has to be".

2024-12-15 09:26:13

Steve Engelmann

Pacific Palisades, California, United States

The view from the bluffs was a sunny and calm Pacific Ocean with only a distant layer of low clouds hugging the horizon. A fifteen minute drive north along the coast would take you to Malibu where roads are closed due to the Franklin fire. A week earlier a fire erupted late at night. 8 homes were burned as Santa Ana winds gusted to 100 kph and humidity levels dropped to 5%. Pepperdine University was completely surrounded. The fire stands at 43% containment, but dry winds are expected to return in a few days. In November of 2018, the Woolsey fire burned 97,000 acres in just a few days. The term "fire season" has little meaning at this point. Insurance companies have been refusing to write new policies due to the increased risk of loss due to the changing climate. This last week California agreed to allow insurance companies to increase their premiums in response to the new climate reality.

2024-12-13 17:53:00

Automatic Ground Station Los Angeles

Los Angeles, United States

2024-12-12 11:42:49

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

London is all glare and reflection today as a very low cloud-mist settles over the city. The sheen of street signs, asphalt, vans, and buses makes everything more obviously aggressive and frantic. As I cycle to south London after dark, a white Prius pulls out in front of my bike, so close I have to skid to a halt. When the driver looks over his shoulder, and sees me braking and motioning my fright, he hardly blinks as he merges into the centre of the road. The tops of tall buildings are drowned in cloud so it feels like we are living in a reduced space, the ceiling coming down. I am reminded of the fictional city Ravicka in Renee Gladman's novel Event Factory. Ravicka is a city of smoggy, ‘yellow air’ that, “vibrates around the foreigner in the street” (Gladman, 2010: 41). Edges and borders shape-shift as the city appears to rearrange itself, or, as the main character observes, “the singing structure eludes me” (Gladman, 2010: 93). Today, in Gaza, a house was flattened in the packed Nuseirat refugee camp, while two separate strikes targeted local workers securing aid convoys. US officials claim they have a 'jurisdictional dispute' with the ICJ and reject its call for arrest of Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant; another 'structure' that continues to elude.

2024-12-11 11:55:04

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

Whether by icy air or circulation of blood, the act of going out for a satellite pass at lunchtime managed to break a mild migraine - my first ever, I think - that had been ongoing for the last twenty four hours despite many painkillers, salves, and hours lying down. By the time my brain and vision had relaxed from the pain enough for my senses to be alert to detail in the world, the sun had fallen. I haunted the park at night, peering into blue-lit windows and noticing the ways streetlights highlighted the elegant curves of plane tree branches from below. A faint oval-shaped pink cloud hovered over one hill of the park like an omen. Two dogs tossed and tumbled in the dark, their paws vying for dominance and their teeth glowing. They were eerily quiet except for their panting breaths. A person pushing a baby stroller walked briskly along a lit path with a tied up Christmas tree slung across their back.

2024-12-10 11:35:24

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

to / desire / the world / as it is / not as / it was / falling / feather / attaches / to new life The third poem in CA Conrad's book 'Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return' makes me forget to breathe while I read it over coffee. for a moment / when the hammer / approached we thought / is that thing coming this way I think of the many 'hammers' still falling on Gaza, on Syria and Lebanon, and of the metaphor of a meteor strike as world ending event, when we already have so many- we are the fractal / drop to hear / our own / harmonics / in the muffled / underground / hum of seeds

2024-12-09 10:07:04

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

The sky was a thin, eggshell blue when T and I woke up this morning. Two cats, a ginger and a spotted black one, were playing hide and seek in the overgrown grass of the back garden. For a few hours, perhaps three or four, the sun shone in London, but the night came so quickly that every flat on the street had lamps turned on by three. I spent most of the day writing and thinking about projects sent to me by a network of friends and collaborators from whom I had solicited 'new and exciting work in the geohumanities beyond the US / UK'. My friend Cecilie sent me a link to a project called The Conference of the Birds, a transdisciplinary, socially engaged arts collaboration named after the 12th century epic poem by Persian poet Farid ud-Din Attar. Focused on the loss of birds in the High North, the project involves community based exhibitions and events in Norway, Finland, Denmark, Sweden, Iceland and North-Russia. Reading the conference programme, I learned that one of the participants is a twenty five year old person who left home at 17 to learn birdsong and learn to survive alone in the forest. Apparently they can now sing the songs of 130 different species of birds, and they continue to live outside of human dwellings. In their profile photo, they are pictured shoulder up, with bright blond hair in dredlocks, and a small black bird on their shoulder, to which their face is turned in affection. News came over the weekend that the Assad regime has fallen in Syria. We see scenes of thousands of people celebrating in the streets, crying and cheering. On Democracy Now, an interviewee refuses to 'analyse' the political moment, saying that analysis needs to be suspended while the feeling of this moment resonates.

2024-12-08 21:12:27

A hotel, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

The Netherlands

I lean out of the hotel window to catch a noisy signal. The signal and noise come in waves: signal rising, noise rising, signal rising, rising, rising, rising. "Assad’s gone." "I told you," my closest Syrian friend writes from Hong Kong. "How are you celebrating?" I ask. He sends a photo of him looking sharp, wearing a Mercedes cap, with a keffiyeh draped over his shoulders, holding a slice of red velvet cake. "U have no idea how ecstatic I am," he writes. No one I know believed that this day would come. And, at what cost? "I'd written off a future without Assad," WhatApps a former human rights colleague who, in 2016 interviewed survivors of Saydnaya Prison. I recall her saying that the investigation had almost folded as they could not find enough interviewees because so few people left the prison alive. I watch on Al Jazeera as a stream of men and women walk up a dirt path between mine fields, into the open gates of Saydnaya.

2024-12-08 10:19:14

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

"You look like the old man from Back to the Future" T says to me as I head out to capture a satellite image in still-raging Storm Darragh. "You mean Christopher Lloyd?!" I ask and she smiles a yes. I wonder about the resemblance as I walk to the middle of the park and set up a makeshift shelter for my laptop with one of the umbrellas borrowed from the communal umbrella area near the entrance of our building. No matter which umbrella I chance to grasp, I always end up with a wire poking through torn Rayon, like a featherless wing. To keep the umbrella firmly over my laptop, and thus to protect it from random sprays of rain seeming to come from all directions and nowhere, I stood on the handle with one foot while shakily steering the antenna. When sharp unexpected gusts threatened to carry the umbrella away from my exposed keyboard I had to lean my entire weight on top. There were a surprising number of people in the park with their dogs, so these antics were in full view. A chocolate Labrador came bouncing over. Normally I am happy to play with dogs while holding my antenna, but this one threatened to collapse my entire delicate balance in the wind. "You nosey dog!"" I heard a woman's voice say before the wind drowned her out. When I finally got to the end of the pass and started packing up, my fingers were so icy cold they fumbled, and somehow I managed to get a slab of mud on my trackpad. Later at Cafe Oto I saw the great poet, ritualist, mystic and queer icon CA Conrad read their poems. For almost fifty years, CA has travelled by car across the US, writing poems and inventing somatic rituals. One of their rituals involved leaving tear off paper notes on notice boards across Philadelphia inviting people to call a number and leave a message for Elvis. Several people would call each day, some multiple times. Another ritual involved them bathing their body in the sounds of extinct species. Later they started working with the sounds of coyotes, crows and foxes: "We've got to learn to love the world we have, not the one we lost" they said. I was moved by all of their poems, but one in a new pamphlet (created in collaboration with Jacken Elswyth, a queer banjo player) resonated especially well today. It ends: "I've got the wind I say / with both hands".

2024-12-07 20:23:00

Automatic Ground Station 10 London

I woke at around 6am to winds buffeting the flat and a car alarm going off on the street. Can winds cause car alarms? I wondered as I drifted back to a light sleep. This morning, the needle of the barometer teetered far below 1000 hPa and pointed at the diagram of a storm. Indeed Storm Darragh was already swirling across the U.K., a storm so violent that the Met Office issued a red wind warning, alerting people of the threat to life – only the 19th since 2011.

2024-12-07 05:01:00

Automatic Ground Station Los Angeles

Los Angeles, United States

2024-12-06 11:19:00

Automatic Ground Station 10 London

The needle on the barometer crept up from its place around 1,009 hPa yesterday afternoon to 1019 today around noon. True to the barometer, the sky opened up into a clear, crisp blue. I was reminded of Gaston Bachelard's writing on the aerial imagination, and his writing of air as 'thin matter' that is especially sensible to poets.

2024-12-06 11:18:06

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

As I look ahead to the final sprint of a writing project, for which I will be submerged in books and my laptop the whole weekend, I am inspired by the collections of geographical thinking and arts practice that I pull out of the towering pile of books on my desk's side-table. I read of 'volcanic polyphonies', 'magmatic languages', 'fluvial hydropoetics', 'sand saltations', 'geo-mimicry' and 'reclaiming energy flows'. I think about the ways in which, across scholarship and creative practice, artists and writers are amplifying the animacies and memories of the elements, from Sotaventine rivers in Mexico, to tidal islands in Scotland, to the humid 'warm fronts' of Southeast Asia. In the satellite image that I capture today from Hackney Downs, I wonder about the repeated patterns and rehearsals of clouds in the North Atlantic, and consider these patterns as another form of air's 'working memory... a memory of energy' (Szerszynski, 2019).

2024-12-05 17:52:00

Automatic Ground Station Los Angeles

Los Angeles, United States

2024-12-05 11:32:21

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

The satellite image starts in darkness. Absent of any rays of light from our nearest star, the top left hand corner of the image is almost pure black. I think of NOAA-18 and its near-infrared sensors trying to capture any stray photons as the satellite crosses the Arctic circle and the Nordic countries. The darkness feels vast, like what I imagine the deep space around Earth must feel like. While planting a willow tree named Hildegard at the Stave Hill ecological park in South London on my lunch break yesterday, I dug into deep, black layers of topsoil. Rebeka, keeper of Stave Hill, had inherited a mountain of rubble deposited from war-ruined buildings, as well as imported trash, on which the eco park was established in the 1980s. She asked all of the schoolchildren from nearby schools to bring worms to the hill, and over the decades, the worms got to work. The deep, dark mulch that I dug into yesterday is the intergenerational inheritance and gift of these worms, and the soil that my almost seven year old willow tree will grow into. Hildegard joins around ten other willows of ‘diverse varieties’ planted in a new willow coppice near Russia Dock Woodland and the Globe Pond. As Rebeka explained to me, over the decades, these small twig-like willow trees will sprout from their bases, and their bendy branches will be sustainably harvested to build fences and other infrastructure around Stave Hill, another gift for the future.

2024-12-04 07:50:00

Automatic Ground Station 10 London

2024-12-04 06:13:00

Automatic Ground Station Los Angeles

Los Angeles, United States

2024-12-03 21:48:00

Automatic Ground Station 10 London

London's air is a crisp, cold air today, but the movement of the city keeps me warm. The pressure on my barometer reads over 120 hPa, and the arrow of change points to 'clear' weather. I spend the day in rooms full of students in colleagues, on multiple tube and overground trains, and on busy high streets. Walking from my university campus in Bloomsbury to Tottenham Court Road at sunset, I can almost feel the warm glow of each body as it passes by me in the crowd.

2024-12-03 18:51:00

Automatic Ground Station Los Angeles

Los Angeles, United States

2024-12-02 15:32:00

Automatic Ground Station Los Angeles

Los Angeles, United States

2024-12-02 10:31:29

Weitao Wang and Sasha Engelmann

Fire escape at the back of Queens Building, Department of Geography, Royal Holloway University of London, United Kingdom

This weather note was written by Weitao Wang, PhD student in the Geography department at Royal Holloway University, currently doing a fantastic project on the 'The geopower of air and fire: a cultural geography of fiery rituals in China'. “It’s a typical day in the UK, partly cloudy day, a bit windy, and not too cold. As it’s the first time for me to participate, I feel a sort of transit in terms of the ‘body-(satellite)-weather’ relation. At the beginning, I found myself disconnect with the weather (and satellite) because I had no idea of where it would come from and where it would go. However, as time moved on, I felt my body gradually coordinate with the satellite movement in the sky as I listened to the noises in the signal. At the end, the signal slowly faded with noise, which made me wonder whether my direction was still correct and thus feel out of sync again with the satellite". "The weather images produced on the screen reminded me of the previous remote sensing course I had took before, where the date collection process was more detached, abstract and rational because we were just sitting in front of the computer, clicking, and typing. However, today’s outdoor data acquiring seems to invite me to be closer to the real-time weather dynamics.”

2024-12-01 10:07:00

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

In a recent article on 'Clouding knowledge in the Anthropocene', Kate Lewis Hood proposes a "cumulative reading - where cumulative shares an etymological root with cumulus, a type of cloud (OED, 'cumulate') - that shifts from clear skies to fog, between atmospheric transparency and opacity" (2018: 83). Exploring poetry including The Weather by Lisa Robertson and Drift by Caroline Bergvall, Lewis Hood suggests that "such experimental practices enable a shift from asking whether to read or interpret in a certain way to engaging with the weather system of a text: its unpredictable changes and complex patterns" (2018: 185). If today's weather system in London was a text, it might read like this passage from Robertson's The Weather: Our skies are inventions, durations, discoveries, quotas, forgeries, fine and grand. Fine and grand. Fresh and bright. Heavenly and bright. The day pours out space, a light red roominess, bright and fresh. Bright and oft. Bright and fresh. Sparkling and wet. Clamour and tint. (Robertson, 2001: 10)

2024-11-30 20:10:00

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

I've been testing open-weather Automatic Ground Stations all week, and as we are still seeing some unusual patterns and distortions in the images, I brave Hackney Downs long after sunset tonight with AGS 12 and my Yagi-Uda antenna. It is wet and cool but not freezing. Today the pressure on my home weather station (given to me by Soph on my birthday last weekend) reads 1024 hPa, and points toward the symbol at one pole of the barometer that says 'clear bright sky'. This feels at odds with the low-hanging cloud that I feel all around Hackney, but it is true that the weather is stable, and it doesn't feel like a storm is brewing, yet.

2024-11-30 18:38:57

Waxeneck, Austria

2024-11-29 11:08:30

Sasha Engelmann

Near Ledbury Building, Friary Estate, Southwark, United Kingdom

I found myself at the Southwark Reuse and Recycling Centre shortly before 11am this morning. I have been fascinated by this place for a while- it is a series of gigantic warehouses where one can bring any kind of object, from clothes to appliances to batteries to cleaning equipment to stones and plates to furniture, in any condition, and after putting each item in the right place, the team at the Centre takes care of sorting, testing and repurposing. Clothes and linens are sent to local charities, appliances are tested and re-used if possible, batteries and old phones are recycled and household items of all kinds are either repurposed or ground down into their raw materials to make new things. As I pulled up in a cab with a bunch of stuff from my old flat in the trunk, an older man with long gray hair was manning the entrance, and assessed me and my things before allowing me entry, like a guardian or gnome giving way to a magical place. I took my time sorting my things into different corners of the warehouse, and was amazed at everything else that was there, from phones that looked like they were last used in the 90s, to very nice bags of clothing. In various corners and levels of the cavernous space, I could see staff moving around. As there was a satellite pass shortly after I left the centre, I found a corner of a nearby housing estate- one with at least three tower blocks of dozens of stories each- and propped my laptop on a mossy wall. Later I noticed how odd the concrete infrastructure of the estate was. There were multiple sharply angled concrete features built into the walkway in between the tower blocks. Their shape and star-like structure, and simultaneous brutalist aesthetic, reminded me of some of the socialist monuments I had seen in Croatia and Bosnia while on fieldwork earlier this month. The crisp blue sky opened above the estate, and magnified the concrete edges.

2024-11-28 09:37:09

Steve Engelmann

Venice, California, United States

Went out to the Venice Pier to capture a satellite pass on Thanksgiving. From the image it looks like blue skies for the entire California coast. The pier was busy with sport fishermen. One approached me and asked me if I was looking for aliens. The aliens he was referring to, however, were not extraterrestrials. He was suggesting that immigrants were coming ashore via boats at night. We I explained that the NOAA-19 satellite was harmlessly taking our photo, he suggested we all give it the finger. Sarah Josepha Hale had been campaigning for decades that the US celebrate Thanksgiving. In 1863 she finally convinced Abraham Lincoln to make the last Thursday in November a national holiday. In the midst of the Civil War, it was intended to find common ground and unify the country. Many Americans express anxiety at sitting down with relatives and navigating the inevitable awkward conversations. Sometimes I wonder if I am the "crazy uncle" at the table.

2024-11-28 08:44:24

Southern Ocean, somewhere in the vicinity of 170°W, 57°S, Antartica

This is an image taken from the porthole next to my desk on the RVIB Nathaniel B. Palmer on the day I imaged the weather. Typically the weather decks on the ship are closed during storms like this, but I was allowed outside to take my satellite reading. It was so windy I had to hold onto the antenna and my computer the entire time.

2024-11-26 10:37:48

Steve Engelmann

Topanga, California, United States

Captured this satellite pass from a helicopter landing site on a ridge of the Santa. Monica mountains with the San Fernando Valley to the north and the Pacific to the south. From the overlook you could see small patches of light precipitation. I was visited by a curious crow and a grizzled hiker. The hiker had more questions.

2024-11-26 07:58:00

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

After another round of Automatic Ground Station testing late last night, I saw that there would be a NOAA-15 pass around 7:50am today. Carrying the AGS in a tote bag, and my turnstile antenna in another, I found a spot on the largest field in the park, as the sun searched above the horizon toward an array of small cottonball clouds. A man was in the middle of the field before me, pacing up and down with a flip phone in his hand. The grass was damp and water-logged. A few schoolchildren hurrying along the park's main path looked over and pointed in my direction.

2024-11-26 06:15:00

Prototype Automatic Ground Station Los Angeles

Los Angeles, United States

2024-11-25 18:09:02

@astro.anderson

South West England, United Kingdom

As storm Bert leaves I take the opportunity to test my mobile rig consisting of electrical wire in a joiner, a short coax, RTL-SDR and a Samsung Galaxy S6. With no rain and a light breeze I was quite happy wandering around and aiming it roughly. I did not expect it to work so well after reading up on the 137MHz antenna variants and the precice calculations, pass filters and leaky coax.

2024-11-25 18:08:48

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

The air bit my fingers as I held onto the metal handle of my turnstile antenna in the pool of darkness that is Hackney Downs at night. A police siren rang out in the distance and a high-speed chase progressed, two police cars tailing another car around two sides of the park. Suddenly a faint neon light appeared to bounce and leap toward me, revealing itself to be a small bulldog wearing a glow-in-the-dark collar. NOAA-15 circled overhead, scanning the outlines of North Africa, Italy and Croatia until I lost the transmission in the blurriness of the Arctic.

2024-11-25 11:57:44

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

Overnight, mountains of plane tree leaves have amassed on sidewalks, against walls and fences. Leaves paper walls, cars and bike sheds. While Storm Bert has resulted in mass-rearrangements of leaves in London, elsewhere in the UK roads have been flooded, and thousands of people were without power. Although relatively minor compared to these other events, the leaf-mountains feel oddly dramatic in today's calm, blue sky weather. Photographs don't do them justice- they are space-invaders, yellow-brown fillers of unused corners and parking spaces, where the westerly wind carried and dropped them.

2024-11-25 11:19:06

Diepoldpark, Vienna, Austria

I feel a dangerously numb to news of extreme weather. Yesterday, as I read a long and moving article about drought hit farming communities in South Africa, Storm Bert inundated costal towns in the UK. Is numbness what happens when, to quote deputy first minister of Wales Huw Irranca-Davies, the feeling is “here we go again. These traumatic weather incidents are a pattern of our weather”?

2024-11-24 11:08:24

Steve Engelmann

Malibu, California, United States

I went to the Lois Ewen Overlook in the Santa Monica Mountains hoping to maximize my capture length, but missed the first few minutes of the satellite pass. At the beginning we were in complete fog-out with a visibility of maybe 20 meters. By the time I took photos there was better visibility. The day before was the first precipitation of the year, though not even 1 cm. Slightly more rain in a few days. Los Angeles is rare in that it has a mountain range that bisects the city. The COP 29 negotiations ended today. Experts assess that $1 trillion/year is needed to assist developing countries as they address climate impacts and build a low-carbon infrastructure. The countries agreeed to $300 million. The Trump presidency vows to withdraw from the Paris agreement - again.

2024-11-24 09:58:41

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

Storm Bert - the 'named storm' that was brewing on the Atlantic when I last contributed to the Archive on Thursday - is sweeping the UK this weekend. "More than 200 flood alerts put in place and three men die on roads as wild weather crosses country" reports the Guardian this morning. The flood alerts are due to the rapid melting of ice and snow across the north of England and Scotland, as the storm brought milder temperatures. Indeed today in London, it is shockingly warm, around 17 degrees- a huge jump from previous days. The Met Office has issued yellow warnings for rain and wind across large swathes of the country into Sunday, and this is felt in London, with gusts battering houses, trees and infrastructure. As I braved the park with my turnstile antenna, I noticed how a mountain of plane tree leaves had been pushed against the fence near the train tracks, drowning two bikes and the fence itself. In the middle of Hackney Downs, the force of the wind meant that people walked with their heads down, hoods pulled over their faces. My laptop flung wildly left and right as I tried to track the satellite pass. The turbulence reminded me of a day back in 2021 when Soph and I went out to Burgess Park to capture an image of Storm Eunice- against the advice of the Met Office- and I had to kneel on my laptop to keep it from flying away. The blustery conditions affected the satellite image I captured today, as I struggled to keep hold of the antenna. Oddly, although the Guardian headlines its reports with various numbers of injuries and deaths across England and Wales, reading further into the reporting, a phrase consistently repeats: 'It was not clear whether the incident was linked to the storm'.

2024-11-22 08:21:11

Southern Ocean,

Another day, another storm in the Southern Ocean. I thought about removing the tip of my finger from my photo of my station, tucked in with the Zodiac boats and surrounded by coring equipment, but it shows a signal of how difficult it can be to operate anything that isn't tied down. The rolling of the ship and the strength of the mind make any one-handed task just on the edge of impossible. I don't expect to experience weather like this again in my lifetime, but I also don't hold a lot of expectations that anything will remain as expected.

2024-11-21 11:09:00

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

Today's test of an Automatic Ground Station involves me carrying the AGS in a tote bag to keep it dry and away from dogs, and tracking the satellite with my Yagi-Uda antenna. The results show a diagonal current of squigly lines in channel b - lines we think might have something to do with a recent update to the code in the AGS system that attempted to produce clearer images, but might have introduced other noise signatures. The air is still freezing, and I regret not bringing gloves and a woolly hat.

2024-11-21 07:17:23

Steve Engelmann

Pacific Palisades, California, United States

Took another satellite capture from the bluffs over-looking the Pacific Ocean. Over the last couple of days a "bomb cyclone" formed and is making landfall in the Pacific Northwest. The name comes from how fast the storm developed. Heavy rains and strong winds have hit Washington state already. A few lives were lost to falling trees. From the image you can see a tail of the cyclone that might bring some precipitation to Southern California in the next few days. While recording the pass a construction worker came over for a chat. He asked if I was recording aliens. I later pulled up a hotspot, decoded the wav file and showed him the image. He then asked me if the world is really round or flat. I guess sometimes it is however you want to see it.

2024-11-20 20:39:00

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

A freezing night in the park, with a clear, faintly star-lit sky. As I return to Hackney Downs long after sunset to test the open-weather Automatic Ground Stations, I am getting better at recognising night-time park activity. Though many people warned me of entering the park at night, I am growing to feel more safe. Perhaps its something about holding a tall pole with a metal object attached at the end. I've also realised that, while daytime park activity happens on the fields, with dogs galloping and racing around each other, night-time park life stays close to pathways and the deeper shadows of trees. I have rarely seen another person walk directly across the largest field, where I stood this evening. As I watch the BBC weather report later in the evening, I learn that the beginnings of a 'possibly named storm' are brewing in the North Atlantic. I wonder and try to anticipate what the name of this storm will be.

2024-11-19 20:49:00

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

It has rained, it has snowed, and the crevices and corners of London are thoroughly drenched in semi-freezing moisture. This is testing the infrastructures of the city, a city that one might expect could have weathered many cold winters in its time. Yet, one of my best friends, K, who was over for a spontaneous Monday dinner last night, told me and T of her crumbling, disintegrating roof in Dalston. The roof has been leaking for months, and mould has been growing along the walls and in corners. She had stopped paying rent after her umpteenth attempt to ask the landlord for repairs, failed. Within weeks of her stopping payment, the landlord had workers visit the flat, and they claimed to have 'fixed' the issue. But yesterday, when she got home after dinner, she texted me photos and videos of the rain coming straight down onto her floor. A long curving crack in the ceiling gave me shivers- as if the whole roof was going to collapse. Luckily, K left to stay at her girlfriend's place. I couldn't help but think how many people in London are feeling similar exposures to the rain, the cold. How many walls are being eaten from the inside out, by the creep of humidity and the mould that thrives in it? I tested the AGS in the park late at night today. I didn't want to 'expose' the AGS in the park, less because of weather, wind or rain, and more because a number of people have had phones stolen in the park recently. As the AGS is so conspicuous with its glowing light, I hid it in a tote bag. For the antenna, I wrapped the legs of an rtl-sdr v-diple around the top of a PVC pipe. Standing in the middle of the dark field, holding the pole to the sky, I felt a little like a fictional character enacting some magical ritual. The moon rose against the silhouetted plane trees and the outlines of bodies crossed under lamp posts. Most avoided the dark, open grass.

2024-11-18 11:05:52

Kleingarten Schmelz and Waxeneck, Austria

It's cloudy and cold, but no longer freezing. It's also Monday yet, I mistakenly checked the satellite pass times for Sunday. My displaced weekend feeling is because N and I have taken off work. We decided to only last week. The idea is to spend a day outside the heavy weather that has characterised this year. So far, we have gone swimming and eaten omelettes with pickles. Later, we plan to cook a roast and watch an episode of Self-portrait in a Coffee-Pot. In other words, cultivate our own fragile high pressure system. If its strong enough, maybe it'll even persist into the week, this indoor sunshine.

2024-11-18 08:07:00

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

It was 8am, but the sun hadn't properly risen over Hackney. As stream of uniformed children ran across it diagonally, somehow in an evenly spaced line, sleepily on their way to the primary school on the opposite corner. In five minutes I was smothered by a black terrier, trounced on by a visla, and I had to separate an Australian shepherd from the previous two, while their owners called vainly in the distance. Perhaps my status as a single dog-less human in the middle of the largest field meant I was a good one to mess with! As I was testing an Automatic Ground Station outside for the first time, using a battery pack and my phone as a hotspot, I was anxious that one of the dogs would sit or step on the delicate cables or pee on the station itself, open as it is to the air because of the need for heat vents. Luckily only one dog leg brushed the AGS, and in a few minutes more, they had raced off. The satellite image collected by the station was oddly grainy, and I resolved to try again later tonight, after 9pm.

2024-11-17 11:58:56

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

In a short essay titled 'The sound of temperature rising' in the edited book 'Bodies of Sound: Becoming a Feminist Ear' (Irene Revell and Sarah Shin), Christine Sun Kim writes of an artwork she made while pregnant with her first child, and while watching the devastation of Trump's first term as president. She elaborates, "Persistent droughts, floods and storms were marking the effects of climate change and a warming world. I felt these different kinds of rising temperatures intertwining, and used an open-ended musical notation to capture the feeling. When I draw musical staff lines, I use four lines instead of the standard five, which references how staff bars would be signed in American Sign Language (ASL) as four fingers pulled across the front of the body. Like my other mural and billboard works, I want the scale to actively impose Deaf people's existence and culture into the everyday lives of hearing people". Kim's drawing is evocative - four lines curve from the bottom of the page to the top right, and musical notes dance on either end. The line 'the sound of temperature rising' hovers above. Today, as I think about the multiplicity of weather during a satellite pass in Hackney Downs, and reflect on how much of the 'sound of temperature rising' is felt in our bodies, our lungs and other organs, Kim's artwork and words resonate powerfully. Around halfway through the satellite pass, as the image creeps down my screen and the deep darkness of the Arctic circle gives way to a few pieces of lighter cloud and land, the satellite almost over London, a football player comes trotting over. He finds my tape measure Yagi antenna interesting, commenting, 'I never would have thought a tape measure could be so useful!'. When I point to my screen, he drops his chest and body to the field so fast it startles me, and for a moment he has his face a couple inches way from the slow-loading image. I become self-conscious of the layer of dust on my laptop which, combined with the glaring sunlight of the afternoon, makes the satellite image challenging to make out. Yet he hops up as quickly as he went down, and satisfied with his understanding, jogs away.

2024-11-17 10:52:00

Steve Engelmann

Venice Beach, United States

Went to capture a satellite pass from the Venice Pier. Beautiful blue skies. The pier is covered with tourists, fishermen and many spectators watching the 40 plus surfers on both sides of the pier. A number of people approached me curious about what trouble I was into. There was a family with three small children from Italy, a pair of senior citizens and a guy named Sidney. All were dazzled with the antenna and the concept. To complete the magic trick I used my phone as a hotspot and decoded the wav file live. The audience was impressed. Two weeks after the election the news is full of the latest on the cabinet picks for the next administration - an anti-vaxer in charge of health, a former oil executive to regulate fracking, and an alleged sex-trafficker to run the justice department. I wish I believed in magic.

2024-11-15 11:46:37

Magazin, Rembrandtstraße 14, 1020 Vienna, Austria

I finish writing the talk at the same time as my phone alarm rings, reminding me to leave the relative warmth of our studio to receive NOAA-18's transmission. The satellite will pass 77º overhead. It always feels like a waste to not catch such a 'good' pass, so I pack my ground station bag make the short cycle to the edge of the Augarten park. I have learned to stay outside the its impressive brick perimeter wall, so as to avoid confrontation with Austrian rules-based culture. In the past year, multiple gardeners have told me that I need permission to have an antenna in the park and my German is not good enough to argue. The satellite is above the horizon when I hit record. I use the 10 minutes of bleep-bleeps to think about what I will say tonight. The talk is written, but I want to begin with a pause to think of Gaza, our former classmates, friends and colleagues in the Middle East, and to hold in our minds those whose names we will never know but whose existence is resistance to Israel's genocidal drive. The architectural exhibition that the talk is a response to is a installation of Breathe Earth Collective's archive. Material samples, organic matter, salt, copper pipes and more fill the gallery space, each exhibit labelled with a small paper number as part of archeological dig or forensic scene. This anarchic yet indexed presentation and the earthy smell of decay in the gallery reminded me of the book 'M Archive: After the end of the world' by American writer and poet Alexis Pauline Gumbs, in particular her description of an 'Archive of Dirt'. The book is dedicated "to the purveyors of our bright black future". Tonight I will read for Gaza the following poem: they came with sugar not of sugarcane sweetness not of cotton but of air they came with cakes not funneled down to grease with layers like clouds they came every day like it was their birthday or yours one or both that was when they first came and then they came with salt with water and blood to wash you they came with spit and sand to shine you they came with cleansing first in mind and woke your soul with it next time they come i hope they bring soil and green soothe for the roots i hope they bring dirt and depth and plant us in it we could sure use the grounding for remembering earth' Alexis Pauline Gumbs, 2018

2024-11-15 10:43:20

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

As the sun gets lower in the winter sky, the plants in our flat receive more light, and today they seem to be basking in it. The flat almost feels like a greenhouse with fronds and stems poking out of all corners. One of our bushy plants is even growing a new orange flower from between two leaves. A finger of dust reaches from Tunis to the Balearic Sea, another from Misrata into the Mediterranean. During the satellite pass, a group of dog walkers notices me and my antenna, and while they stay on the far side of the field, I overhear the older woman in the group tell the others - 'yes yes... she does the weather'. Later, as I await the phone call of a doctor, the passing of the light feels slow and sluggish. I bury myself in email hoping to move it along.

2024-11-15 08:05:33

Southern Ocean, Antarctica

This is the farthest south towards Antarctica my body would go, although I didn't really put that together at the time I was receiving this image.

2024-11-14 10:19:00

Automatic Ground Station 13 London

London , United Kingdom

2024-11-14 08:20:04

Southern Ocean, Antarctica

This day was sunny and clear, which was very rare to see during my trip through the Southern Ocean. The second mate has told be this is the grayest, stormiest research cruise he's ever been on. But this particular morning broke clear and bright and while it got a bit dark midday the afternoon was sunny again which offered a shadow of the ship onto the pancake ice. Later, at what would be considered night but is in fact still light, the people of the ship would all pour out onto the decks to see the last glorious iceberg patch we would end up having passed through. The remainder of the time at sea would be in open ocean.

2024-11-12 11:24:00

Automatic Ground Station 13 London

London , United Kingdom

I duck-taped my turnstile antenna to the kitchen window while I went outside to capture the same satellite pass with my tape measure Yagi-Uda. Collecting two images - one from an AGS and one from a mobile station - will help us identify if there are any unusual patterns in the images collected by the AGS.

2024-11-12 11:23:50

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

It is a brilliantly sunny day in London and the sky is a deep, clear blue. A lonely cloud skirts the horizon to the east. As I set up for the satellite pass in the park, I think of a poem I have just tried to translate from Croatian/Serbian/Bosnian. It is called 'Pjesma žena' or 'woman's song' and it was written by Ana Matanja who is described as 'seljanka iz Ledenica' or 'villager from Ledenica'. The first lines go like this: Crna noćca svud pritisla Nigde bjela dana, U kuhinju stoji žena Ćvrste prikevana To je bilo prošlog ljeta A sad toga nije The poem- from the archive of the Antifašistička Fronta Žena in Sarajevo - describes a scene in which the 'The black night fell / no daylight anywhere / A woman is standing in the kitchen / Tightly chained / That was last summer / And now it is no longer' (loosely translated by me). It goes on to make a call to arms and to the voices of women who form that AFŽ to protect their rights, including those of voting. The author - Matanja - is a villager, but 'Ledenica' literally translates as 'icicle' or 'icebox'. This, combined with the scene of the first lines, gives this poem of activism and mobilisation a sense of the dark, the cold, and the surreal. As I attempt to catch the last fragments of signal from NOAA-18 over the southern horizon by standing on my tiptoes, two dog walkers approach and ask what I am doing. I explain, and we chat about my tape measure Yagi antenna briefly. As they are leaving, the man of the couple turns around and says: 'It's not who you know, it's what you know!'

2024-11-12 10:04:55

At the cross roads, but the tram lines, Austria

Grey skies, newly biting cold. My attempt at recording a satellite pass for several weeks. I forgot the radio frequency extension able and used a wobbly USB converter… which caused SDR++ to freeze multiple times. Next time I will pack different kit.

2024-11-11 11:33:59

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

A radio antenna arrives in the mail, from Florida. It comes in a rectangular box covered almost halfway down one end with rainbow 'first class' stamps, each individually advocating for breast cancer awareness. For the first two hours of the morning, Soph, Lizzie, Dan and I discuss ways to 'animate' material in the Public Archive spatially, textually and visually. Later I test three 'automatic ground stations' in various corners of my flat, and watch them boot-up to a new version (v1.1.4) of the programme they are running. Around 11:30 I catch a NOAA-18 pass from Hackney Downs, happy once again to be back in the park with my tape measure Yagi-Uda antenna. Though I do lots of university work as well, catching up on the various crises and urgent demands in my inbox, today is a day mostly 'weathered' by open-weather.

2024-11-11 09:49:13

Steve Engelmann

Pacific Palisades, United States

Looking out over the Pacific Ocean on another beautiful day. City crews are busy behind me trying to stabilize the bluffs from their relentless slide towards the ocean. Multimillion-dollar homeowners are in denial of the inevitable, attempting to resist the forces of nature. It has been nearly a week since the election. Trying to find my tribe. Spent most of my Saturday with Climate Strike LA. This morning it was a zoom meeting with Human Rights Watch. Concerned, but feeling the energy. We too shall resist.

2024-11-10 12:19:21

Albany, Oregon, USA

I’m really struggling to get images. I have SLIGHTLY better luck with a dipole. I tried a random wire to see if that helped but not really. I’m working on building a QFH but it’s complicated. I’ll keep at it.

2024-11-10 09:17:26

Sasha Engelmann

Via Giovanni da Udine, Latisana, Italy

A NOAA-15 satellite pass at only 21 degrees to the west was not the strongest option for an image of the Adriatic, but I wanted to capture one last satellite image while nearby to this sea. Standing at the corner of a balcony reachable from T's childhood room, I fished for signals in the quiet Sunday morning. I could hear the squeak of laundry lines being pulled in, and the occasional shutter being lifted, but otherwise it was calm, near-silent. The sky lifted into a clear blue and I felt a little cold in the wool jumper that T's mom had given me when she last visited in London.

2024-11-09 11:22:19

Sasha Engelmann

Tagliamento Riverbank, Latisana , Italy

I emerged from an overgrown path, full of fallen birch branches and reeds, onto a small sandy bluff above the bank of the Tagliamento. The river ran a cool green-blue that changed shades as clouds periodically covered the winter sun. It was chilly but not cold. The sound of farm equipment echoed over the opposite riverbank and a single engine plane passed by overhead. This weekend, the village of Latisana is celebrating the festival of San Martino. As T's mom tells us, traditionally this festival marked the time when farmers (il contadini) had sold their autumn harvests and had some spending money. They would celebrate as lavishly as they could. Most women were married around this time, when their families could afford to purchase cloth, lace and housewares for dowries. I sat on a mushroom-speckled birch log and watched the slow moving water. A strikingly blue bird - perhaps an Eurasian Blue Tit - landed on a branch near the beach and darted away. A small flock of pigeons skidded to the water’s edge, dipped their beaks in the river for a split second, and took off again. They returned at least five times in the same configuration. Yesterday, as T and I returned to Italy from Rijeka, last week seemed like a blur- a blur that felt very similar to the smog-fog of Sarajevo and its surrounding villages. At some distance to the Balkans, I can now visualise the histories, weathers, archives and monuments that I visited in the last week with a little more sharpness and clarity, like the circuitous and sandy curves of the Tagliamento.

2024-11-09 07:33:11

Steve Engelmann

Pacific Palisades, California, United States

In the wake of last week's national election I've been trying to find silver linings among the chaos and wild projections over what the next four years will bring. My email feed has been flooded with requests from environmental/social justice NGOs. Apparently membership and donations increased during the last time this happened. In blue California there are pockets of red. Beverly Hills High School needed to institute new regulations to tone down celebrations by teens. Monday is the beginning of the next climate conference - COP 29. The tone of the conference will pivot widely on the election results. Curious to see what, if any, strategies arise. Hopped up on my roof this morning to capture NOAA 15. Seems as if some power lines interfered with the end of the pass.

2024-11-06 09:40:11

Sasha Engelmann

Miljacka River, Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina

Bosnia and Herzegovina

Thankfully it is morning now, and the sun is shining on the Maljicka River in Sarajevo. I woke around 1am last night in tears, thinking of all of the places I have seen so far on this trip in the Balkans, and the way my family history is so inscribed in this landscape, a landscape that has felt so much pain. I thought about the memories the landscape holds, that monuments to anti-fascist resistance or tombs of fallen fighters, or memorials to the more recent Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s, only manage to represent partially. Upon properly waking, the news of the US election was shocking, but somehow dulled by the intensity of the last few days. I almost found it darkly humorous, that in the week I am spending engaging with my family’s history, and the very concrete, serious struggle of anti-fascism, a movement for which my great grandfather risked everything, a fascist has been elected to power in my birth country. As the news sunk in later in the day, the dark humour faded and despair set in. I kept the despair at bay by throwing myself head first into the story of Sarajevo womens’ resistance to authoritarian power, and their role in the communist movement. T and I drove to see a monument to Sarajevo victims of the national liberation war at Vraća Park, on the west of the city. The park itself is not well maintained, with trash and graffiti everywhere, and much of the original stone architecture crumbling. However, at the far end of the park, stands a monument to ‘Women Fighters’ by Sarajevo sculptor Alija Kučukalić. The sculpture is a 2-3 metre tall figure of a woman, from the torso up, wearing a sharp jacket, and gazing to the sky, arms open in a cactus shape and fists clenched. She has a long braid that flows down her back, and her face turns upward. An early sketch for the sculpture that I found online shows a female figure with an agonising face - indeed the original title of the work was “Stratišta” (Executions). While the sculpture is meant to be representative of all fallen women victims and fighters, many believe the sculpture depicts Radojka Lakić, a female leader of the Sarajevo underground communist resistance who was executed at Vraća in September 1941. The sculpture is in poor condition, emblematised by the fact that the right arm has been sawed off. Yet, even with only one arm raised, the figure is striking - a reminder of the immense strength of resistance, and the cost of truly fighting fascism.

2024-11-05 17:48:43

Sasha Engelmann

Zemaljski muzej Bosne i Hercegovine, Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina

Bosnia and Herzegovina

It’s dark, and I am standing in the botanical garden of the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina in Sarajevo. It has been a sunny, cold day. Across the street from where I am standing is the US Embassy, a place whose politics will change in the next 24, or maybe 48 hours, depending on how close the election is. The embassy is measuring the air quality as part of the IQ Air network. The level of pollution is currently 122 on the AQI scale, meaning ‘unhealthy for sensitive groups’. The main pollutant contributing to this unhealthy air is PM2.5, the most deadly of the microscopic particles. In comparison, London’s air today is around 70-80. It feels somewhat prescient that, on the day my home country is voting to elect (or not) a fascist leader, I have been conducting historical research on the Antifašistička Fronta Žena (AFŽ) at the nonprofit organisation and art space called Crvena. I learned about women’s efforts to organise between 1942-1953, largely around issues related to women’s working lives, their capacity to aid in the fight against fascism by taking up all manner of jobs, their need for labour recognition, their literacy, and childcare practices. As Andreja Dugandžić, co-director of Crvena explained to me, the term ‘feminism’ was not so popular at the time as it was seen as a bourgeois idea, but a ‘women’s antifascist front’ was a concrete and inspiring movement for many women in former Yugoslavia. I read magazines like ‘Nova Žena’, poems by women writers, and looked at prints and engravings. Some of it felt very contemporary - expressions of power and voice - while other parts would turn to the domestic, for example ‘how to treat diarrhoea in your baby’ or even an article on 'butchering chickens'. One article was called ‘čudno kuhinje’ (strange cooking) and I look forward to translating it to understand what kind of cooking the AFŽ thought to be strange! I wasn’t able to understand or read everything given my basic Croatian/Serbian /Bosnian, but I absorbed so many themes and images, it will take months to entirely unpack. I am left with the feeling of the Yugoslav women’s antifascist movement as a prideful one. I also felt something resonant between the thematics of the AFŽ and what I have come to understand as ‘cuerpo-territorio’ (body-land) in South American feminisms. Like cuerpo-territorio, the movement of AFŽ was about relations to land, as much as it was about anti-fascist struggle. Sharing some of the poems of 'Nova Žena' with my Mom, she immediately replied with the exclamation that she felt so much pride, like those women did, and that she also wrote poems as a teenager in Belgrade about the pride and struggle ('borba') of Yugoslavia. As I ride the tram back to the hotel, I think of my Mom, who now lives in the 'red state' of Florida, and I reflect, not without a lot of worry, about the political systems she has weathered in her life.

2024-11-05 07:32:33

Steve Engelmann

Pacific Palisades, California, United States

As the sun rises over the western US, the national election is in full swing. Regardless of the outcome, about half of the US adult population agrees with a candidate who thinks the climate crisis is a hoax played by the Chinese government. As president he pulled the US out of the Paris Accord and promises to resurrect the coal industry. Two days before the election he stated that the cool weather in Pennsylvania was "evidence". Looking out upon the calm Pacific Ocean hasn't done much to calm my nerves - yet.

2024-11-04 10:44:11

Sasha Engelmann

Roadside near Raðici, Bosnia and Herzegovina

Bosnia and Herzegovina

Turning off a narrow street, we climb a dirt road into hills of farmland. The smell of manure permeates the car as we pass farm equipment and local men that wave kindly at us. I think I hear one of them call out but he doesn’t follow us. The road winds steeply onward and turns against the edge of recently turned fields. Next to two stacks of hay, sandwiched between two different fields, both steaming with manure and dust, we can see curved shapes of stone. At the base of the hill, a plaque in an odd mix of Latin and Cyrillic letters, lines running at odd angles, seems like a warning, but we climb the hill anyway. We are completely alone except for two men driving tractors. There, on the hilltop, is a kind of assembly, a collection of surreal stone figures around two metres tall, arranged at odd angles to each other, resting on stone plinths. Like serpents with eyes or faces in contorted shapes the figures peer wildly and hauntingly into the distance. I notice there are rotting cobs of corn scattered on the grass in places, and I wonder if there are any offerings to these creatures. The site is Nekropola žrtvama fašizma (Necropolis for the Victims of Fascism) or Spomenik na Smrika (Monument on Smrike) designed by Bogdan Bogdanović and it is both monument and underground crypt. This is the site of a great massacre of around 700 Serbian civilians and communists by Ustaše forces during WWII. Of the monument, Bogdanović apparently said: “It is a story of mythical creatures: the ambisbaena is a two-headed serpent that goes by day in one direction and by night in another. It symbolizes the end of time." To me, though, the figures are less serpent-like and more like currents or energies. Leaving Smrike by car, it is not long before we enter a valley shrouded in haze, and it only increases in density as we approach Sarajevo. We notice white smoke plumes pouring out of peoples’ chimneys and large currents of either steam or particulate flooding from thermo electric plants. I remember reading how a combination of local fuel burning in winter and heavy industry is creating an air pollution crisis in this part of Bosnia. The five o’ clock prayer echoes from minarets as the air thickens, spectral timing as voices mingle and seem to repeat across the landscape, and materialise the feeling that the air is a carrier of many things in these valleys, of faith and ghosts and microscopic toxicity. I think about the double headed serpent invoked by Bogdanović and I wonder about the ‘end of time’. T and I both peer hard at the sky, wondering if we are seeing the sickle moon or a strange small arc in the sky. When the air is so thick and unbreathable, do we see and feel time passing more slowly, finding our circadian rhythms numbed, or do we see and feel what lies underground?

2024-11-03 18:39:01

Sasha Engelmann

Petra Kočića Street, Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina

Bosnia and Herzegovina

“Gdje je mala sreća, bljesak stakla, lastavičje gnjezdo, iz vrtića dah; gdje je kucaj zipke, što se makla, i na traku sunca zlatni kućni prah?” wrote Ivan Goran Kovačić in the poem Jama or ‘the pit’. It describes village life near the town of Jasenovac in modern day Croatia. In these lines, happiness flows through a ‘window’s glint’ and ‘windborne garden sweet’. It manifests ‘by the threshold, sunshine at my feet’. These lines evoke a bucolic, gentle, rural life. And yet the poem - immediately recognisable from these four lines by anyone borne in the Balkans - is far from a picture of happiness. It narrates what occurred at the town of Jasenovac after Axis forces invaded the Kingdom of Yugoslavia during WWII, and installed an Independent State of Croatia (NDH) ruled by the nationalist Ustaše militia. Jasenovac became the site of one of the deadliest forced labour and extermination camps of the war. What happened at the camp is disputed, but most evidence suggests that the majority of people imprisoned and executed at Jasenovac were ethnic-Serbs, largely civilians brought there for their collaboration with Partisan rebels. My grandfather, Deda Milan, was one of those anti-fascist Serbs brought to Jasenovac, but luckily he was released after my great grandmother, of Croatian / Hungarian heritage, managed to use her influence to save him. Roma, Jews, and political communists were also targeted. Kovačić’s poem goes on to narrate the horrors of Jasenovac in gruesome detail, and its power in communicating these scenes made it one of the most celebrated anti-war poems of its time. Most children educated in former Yugoslavia (and even, I learn at dinner in Banja Luka, in present day Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina) learn this poem in school. This context might help explain why the lines quoted at the beginning of this note - about happiness, gardens and sunny thresholds - are engraved in a plaque inside a large scale monument designed by Bogdan Bogdanović in the 1960s that now stands at the former centre of the Jasenovac camp. Its shape resembles a giant flower with six petals from some angles, but from others, it looks like a pair of wings. The edges of the petals are sharp, and diamond shaped holes allow the sky to shine through, against the heaviness of concrete. As I walked around it at sunset, its form seemed to transform, always asymmetrical. In the landscape around the monument, Bogdanović created mounds to denote the places where buildings of the camp used to stand. The monument was Bogdanović’s attempt to memorialise the history of civilian suffering without reproducing it, toward “termination of the inheritance of hatred that passes from generation to generation". To place lines of poetry depicting ‘sunny thresholds’ or ‘windblowne gardens’ at the heart of this monument is perhaps to use peaceful images - peaceful weathers - to break the ‘inheritance of hatred’ while recognising the importance of careful, watchful memory.

2024-11-03 10:29:57

Steve Engelmann

Red Rock Conservation Area, Nevada, United State, Nevada

United State, Nevada

The Red Rock Conservation Area, just outside of Las Vegas, has been a work in progress for over 500 million years. It has seen oceans, sand dunes, the formation and dissolution of supercontinents, mass extinctions, indigenous peoples and more. Midway through the satellite capture sudden strong winds blew away my notes (later retrieved) and nearly capsized my laptop from a precarious railing (I should make better choices in the future). I was stabilizing my computer against the wind with one hand, tracking a satellite with the other and trying to convince some humanities academics from Chico State that the extraterrestrial I was following was benign - all in preparation for my audition at the 3-ring Circus. On the time log of Red Rock Canyon us humans will be nothing more than a minor footnote. What mark shall we leave on the geologic record?

2024-11-02 11:41:15

Steve Engelmann

Near Nelson ghost town, Nevada, US, Nevada

On my way to my nephew's wedding I pulled over near the Colorado River for a satellite capture. There has been controversy regarding who gets to use the Colorado River water. California has gotten the lion's share mostly, but the quantity has been declining for several decades and sometimes it doesn't reach Mexico. The best of plans get ruined when there isn't enough water. All the best wishes to Chris and Heather.

2024-11-02 08:10:31

Steve Engelmann

Las Vegas, Nevada, United States

8am on a Saturday morning outside the Strat casino in Las Vegas is pretty quiet. Few cars, but a disheveled man with many tattoos asked me if I was communicating with aliens. When I told him I was receiving an image from a passing NOAA satellite, he seemed interested - but not enough for a conversation.

2024-11-01 12:01:36

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

The reports of flash flooding in Valencia fill the front pages of newspapers in London. At lunchtime, the BBC shares the feed of a Spanish news network where a journalist breaks into tears while describing the losses of life, and damage to neighbourhoods. "The worst part..." he says in between attempts to catch his breath "is that our government knew that this was going to happen. They knew this was coming, and they did nothing". Hundreds of people are known to be dead, and some are still missing after days of search and rescue. "There is mud everywhere" an English reporter comments "on everything, on me". In London, the city is covered in low gray cloud, light barely penetrates through. On my way to mail one of the new open-weather automatic ground stations to northern Scotland, I pick up a copy of the Guardian and try to take a picture of its cover near a market on Mare Street in a way that also captures the lack of light, the gray mist, the way even important stories and images of loss seem slightly shadowed, out of focus.

2024-10-31 09:50:53

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

The humidity is 100% today. When T and I wake up, we see condensation on the living room and kitchen windows- as if the flat is sweating. Yet it is not warm, it is strangely cold. Later in the morning, I find myself getting anxious at the amount of assessments I have to review for an external examiner appointment at another university, and for which I need to synthesise feedback to the whole department by the end of tomorrow. To calm down, I spend twelve minutes on the couch after lunch meditating with the help of an app. This meditation is called 'Sense' and at several points, the guiding voices says 'There's no need to go out looking for sounds. Just like a satellite dish, we can simply receive what's coming'. I find myself puzzling at this metaphor while the meditation continues, so much so that I realise I am not following the instructions anymore. Does a satellite dish 'simply receive what's coming'? And is the body anything like a satellite dish? I remember the meditation Soph invented for their students in Eindhoven, called 'Your body is an antenna'. I have always loved this meditation, and find that it makes sense- an antenna can just exist, and it can pick up a wide ranging but also environmentally limited amount of information around. A satellite dish, on the other hand, feels intent on capture, on picking up a television signal. Later in the day, after I have made some headway through the external examining, my body antenna feels less tense, more open. Outside I can hear the beginnings of Halloween, as mobs of small children spill out of houses and make small shrieks of excitement on their way down the street.

2024-10-30 10:05:00

Automatic Ground Station 11 London

London, United Kingdom

Today is humid, over 80%, and this creates blurry lines and fuzzy borders. The sky hangs low over London. In the evening, news of the flash flooding in Spain comes online, and T and I watch with horror as Channel 4 news shows images of people being airlifted from flooded homes, holding tightly to their pets, and cars having been pushed across streets and cities - piled up, water logged.

2024-10-29 10:17:00

Automatic Ground Station 11 London

London, United Kingdom

As I leave for a workshop with a PhD student in Bloomsbury, early this morning, I set up my turnstile on the kitchen windowsill. Making sure its 'reflector' spokes are inside the window, and the cable is taped to the window ledge, I leave the flat. Upon returning many hours later - after cycling over 1.5 hours in total across London, through streets heavy with mist, smog and traffic - the antenna is still there, poised to receive. I wondered, as no one was in the flat when it recorded, whether the plants sensed what was happening. I wondered if the simultaneous recording of Automatic Ground Station 11 on the kitchen table, connected via a thick coiled cable to the turnstile antenna on the window, together with two other Automatic Ground Stations in T's studio (not connected to antennas) changed the conditions of the flat in some way. I enjoyed thinking of the three stations lighting up on cue, all attempting to track and receive radio waves from NOAA-19.

2024-10-28 11:11:12

Sasha Engelmann

Between Biology and Physics departments, Royal Holloway University of London , United Kingdom

The Ginko trees make pools of yellow everywhere on campus, from the parking lots behind student dorms, to the small copses between departments. As the day is grey lit and damp, and Heathrow borne planes roar past overhead, invisible through the cloud, the pools of colour are welcome. Later in the afternoon, Soph and I compare 'lighting gell' colours on a role of about 200 samples, ranging from fluorescent magenta to eggshell yellow. The colours come with short descriptions of their intensities and transparencies. Soph asks me to hold up the small rectangular transparent samples against a black and white photograph in a book on my desk, the better to compare how the colour enhances or mutes the detail in the image. It is difficult to make a choice of colour when only one of us can actually see the physical 'gell'. We end up choosing a green called 'half plus green', which is a more transparent version of a green called 'plus green'. Hovering between a bright green and a lemony mint, and around 80% transparent, the green film adds a beautiful intensity to grayscale text and imagery. As I leave campus at 5:30 it is almost pitch black. Students in hooded sweaters walk past in small groups, dorm kitchens are brightly illuminated, and rows of liquor bottles balance precariously on window ledges. As I pass the parking lot into the deep dark of the woods at the bottom of campus, a Ginko leaf catches my attention- it is fanned out against the asphalt, an opaque yellow through which dark textures permeate.

2024-10-27 11:25:00

Automatic Ground Station 11 London

London, United Kingdom

2024-10-27 11:23:20

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

I awoke to a creeping feeling that the plants in my and T's flat were feeling very happy today. Leaves of monstera deliciosa, begonia maculata and weeping willow seemed unusually vibrant and springy from their stems. The lower angle of the sun at this point in the autumn means that the flat is flooded with rays. Throughout the morning, the sun climbed slowly over the three-story houses and the 'Open Doors' Baptist Church directly opposite our second floor windows. Later in the park, a local young family and a couple of mid-20s french women asked about my antenna, and I got to explain the 'magic' of radio twice. It was so bright I had to squint to see their faces. Above, an intersecting set of contrails looked like another, much larger Yagi-Uda, pointing south.

2024-10-27 10:35:55

Steve Engelmann

Pacific Palisades, California, United States

In a late morning pass overlooking the Pacific from some neighborhood bluffs. A thin layer of stratocumulus clouds add a calming effect to the Fall and a little more than a week before the US election. Hardly a mention of the climate crisis amid fictitious tales about Haitian immigrants and praise of Nazi generals. Crossing my fingers for a favorable forecast.

2024-10-26 12:36:11

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

The fallen brown and golden leaves from plane trees are the brightest thing in the park today, as a grey and muted bank of cloud wraps London. I keep thinking of an interview I read with Stefan Rahmstorf, an oceanographer and climatologist who is well known for studying 'Amoc' or what is now known as 'Amoc breakdown'. The article in the Guardian explains: "Amoc, or the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, is a system of ocean currents that brings heat into the northern Atlantic. Warm surface water from the tropics flows north and releases its heat in the subpolar Atlantic, south of Greenland and west of Britan and Ireland. Then it cools and sinks to a depth between 2,000m to 3,000 m before returning south as a cold current. Amoc is one of our planet's largest heat transport systems, moving the equivalent of 50 times the human energy use, and it has a particularly strong impact on the climate in Europe". This description of great waters rising and sinking, and carrying heat across the planet, is captivating. Yet scientists like Rahmstorf suspect Amoc could be slowing down and even about to stop. Apparently "the most ominous sign is the cold blob over the northern Atlantic. The region is the only place in the world that has cooled in the past 20 years or so, while everywhere else on the planet has warmed - a sign of reduced heat transport into the region". There is also "excessive heating along the east coast of North America" which could be another sign of a slowing Amoc current that drifts closer to shore, and the "reduction of salt content of seawater" especially in the "blob region". A less salty 'blob' is harder to sink, and therefore harder to mix into the Amoc cycle. According to Rahmstorf, there is a 50/50 chance that Amoc stops in our current century. The collapse of Amoc will have global effects: the sea level of the Atlantic will rise by half a metre, the tropical rainfall belt will shift south, leading to floods in places not adapted to so much rain, and droughts elsewhere, and less CO2 would be taken up by the oceans, further driving global warming. Rahmstorf explains that all of these changes are poorly modelled by scientists and reported on by the IPCC because they are considered extreme, but at the same time they are probable, and on a timescale that humans alive today may witness. As the satellite image I am capturing loads line by line, I peer into the darkness of the North Atlantic. I think about the word 'Amoc' and how it can also have connotations of 'going astray' or 'running wild'. I wonder whether I can see the 'cold blob' west of Ireland, and what one might see in that part of the ocean in decades to come.

2024-10-26 10:33:00

Soph Dyer The Seaweed Institute

Helston, Cornwall, UK

A crisp and clear. Blue skies after yesterday's rain showers. The Automatic Ground Station hosted by The Seaweed Institute at the visual arts organisation CAST in Helston is online! The station's weatherised v-dipole antenna will remain inside, and so reception limited, while we search for an accessible rooftop location. The Seaweed Institute is run by Kerry Holbrook and Ruth Klückers on the south coast of Cornwall. The project connects people, seaweed and the intertidal space. Kerry and Ruth have spent the last five years working as seaweed harvesters on the Lizard Peninsula for the Cornish Seaweed Company. Ray Dyer, Soph's sister and and co-director of Goonown Growers, was also present. The day began with a visit to the community food growing project, Loveland, in nearby Penryn. Thank you, Finn and Ray, for the tour of the new polytunnel and winter crops. More updates in the coming weeks!

2024-10-24 11:24:20

Sasha Engelmann

Millfields Park, London , United Kingdom

A black cloaked, elderly woman steps slowly across the dense, wet grass of Millfields Park in East London. I worry about her feet getting wet, as mine have soaked through already. Though it is nearing 12 noon, the sun casts long shadows against the plane trees, shapes forming and rearranging on the ground.

2024-10-23 10:50:16

Sasha Engelmann

Eastfield Grass Pitch, Royal Holloway University of London , United Kingdom

The department is hosting an 'authors meets critics' session with Henry Wai-Chun Yeung, an eminent economic and human geographer from Singapore, and I am on a panel of respondents. Henry's book is called Theory and Explanation in Geography, and it synthesises vast literatures in the discipline informed by theories such as non-representational theory, actor network theory, assemblage and feminist and postcolonial theories. As I need to formulate something to say, I spend the morning and most of the afternoon buried in this book, thinking about Henry's proposals for theorising. In one chapter, Henry proposes that 'relational' theories in geography need more concreteness, focus on causation, and specificity, so that they can better explain the world. He advocates for what he calls relational ‘geometries’ or ‘relational specificity’ or ‘relational complementarity’. An example of relational geometries is regional union networks and their ways of complementing each other, to gain power and resources. The response I decide to give reflects on what a specific focus on the geometry of relation might do - how does it operate? What does it explain? I have recently been puzzling over the geometry of relations in a paper on the ‘aerial turn’ in geography - I have been observing how, for quite a while now, geographers participating in the ‘aerial turn’ are writing about air in three key modes: i) as something that flows or can be traced, most often on a line ii) as a collection of particles iii) and as a volume. Although these three ‘orientations’ to air are persuasive, and in many ways helpfully explanatory for all kinds of aerial processes, from atmospheric warfare to the relations between breathing bodies and spaces, they produce versions of air and atmosphere that are linear, particular, and volumetric, and they distance other ‘versions’ of air that are more difficult to draw into geometric forms or shapes. I have been wondering how the ‘aerial turn’ is thus reproducing spatial geometries that say more about disciplinary formalism and perhaps modernist aesthetics than anything about air itself. Geographies of air are indeed a very small part of the discipline, but in my hesitation around the ‘relational geometries’ in Henry's book, I wonder if there is something else going on here. I wondered if the proposal to adopt ‘geometries’ felt at odds with the ‘relational irresolutions’ ‘topologies’ and disorientations being developed and theorised for studies of infrastructure by people like Jerry Zee and Aya Nassar. I think also about the outpouring of work on quantum field theory and quantum mechanics in black studies and geographies, for example in new work by Pat Noxolo, and I think it is important to take seriously what a turn to the quantum does in this work, that geometry simply can’t. As important as it is to be specific and practical about spatial relations and how our theories of relation can explain causal effects, I feel that these and other movements in the discipline suggest plural, capacious, perhaps less immediately geometric forms of relation, and yet they are doing so without the vagueness or flattening that might have characterised relational theories of ten-twenty years ago. For the seminar, the room is packed- geographers from across the department are present, as well as people from other departments. Henry gives a presentation on the book and I am impressed with the way he manages to make theory sound exciting and approachable. After me and three of my colleagues have offered responses, we discuss what it means for goegraphers to 'do theory', what kind of theory that might be, and whether the issue is rather than geography is both a social science and a humanities discipline- theory works differently and does not necessarily need to 'explain' in the humanities, as it might do in the social sciences. After the event, the atmosphere of the department is animated. A PhD student comes to my office and speaks for thirty minutes about how excited she was by the seminar. From time to time, I catch a glimpse of the ginko trees outside the window of my office. The golden leaves are glowing in the afternoon sunlight, so that they seem to be projecting light in all directions.

2024-10-22 11:14:35

Sasha Engelmann

London Bridge, London , United Kingdom

2024-10-21 11:15:17

Sasha Engelmann

Canada Copse, Royal Holloway University of London, United Kingdom

"Late nights in black silk in East London / Church bells in the distance / Free bleeding in the autumn rain / Fall in love again and again" sings Caroline Polachek in a somewhat cheesy but also beautiful remix of the Charli XCX song 'Everything is romantic'. The song has been circling around in my head for several days, and I hear it when I leave my flat in the dark at 6:30am this morning, spotting the waning moon in a fuzzy glow above. A tank truck rolls slowly along the edge of the park. A man in a high viz jumpsuit is walking ahead of it, using a pressurised hose to blast aside the golden leaves that paper the asphalt in wet layers. In the early morning moonlight, they look like a chimera - half machine, half person. Though Storm Ashley has not affected the southeast of England, the world feels soaked with water- a ubiquitous saturation.

2024-10-19 12:29:47

Sasha Engelmann

Downs Road, London, United Kingdom

The sunlight stretches through the shutters as I prepare a roast vegetable and fish lunch for T and her mom who are on their way back from the airport. I mix purple carrots, magenta-striped beets and lightly gold potatoes with extra virgin olive oil and a mix of spices and herbs - a medley of oregano, peppers, sage and other 'bilke' from my grandmother's village on the island Hvar in Croatia. When the vegetables have roasted, I place three marinated 'John Dory' fish on top of everthing and keep the oven hot for another twenty minutes. As I cut, season and roast, my turnstile antenna leans out the kitchen window. My hands are too oily to hold or point it, so the resulting image is just what the antenna receives from its resting position. At one point, though, I graze the handle with the dishwasher door, and the whole antenna slips out the window and dangles on its cable over the edge- luckily there is a small ledge immediately underneath, otherwise it might have fallen to the steps below!

2024-10-18 12:36:47

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

The day started with low, misty clouds and rose to a golden, clear-skied afternoon. The last few days have been much warmer, even balmy. I noticed the transparency of fallen leaves, shining like small lanterns in the grass.

2024-10-15 13:15:53

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

"You might find me with some tims on, rockin fascinators and clutches / marchin' through these streets my face on double decker buses / London's been all love, from the dancehall to the pub / when we play the O2, or back when subterranea was the club / real Fugees lovers / big up you know them, all my sisters and my brothers!!" spoke Lauryn Hill, reading a poem she had written in the twenty four hours before her performance at the O2 Arena last night. T and I were in seats so far away, on the opposite side of the stadium, that the sound seemed to bounce and refract in odd echoes. But that didn't matter- squeezed into tiny steep seats, all 20,000 people were dancing the whole night. I looked over my shoulder to see several grey-haired ladies singing all the words, while below our row, a group of teenagers managed to dance and livestream at the same time. This morning the energy stayed with me as I got ready for the day, another grey and cold one in London. The park was full of dogs, including an incredibly fast whippet named Ziggy. In several places, the gilled cap of a small mushroom pushed through the blades of damp, freshly mowed grass.

2024-10-14 11:49:15

Sasha Engelmann

Picnic table near Bourne Building, Royal Holloway University of London, United Kingdom

Arctic air, icey wind and a cold drizzle- a combination that makes any Monday morning feel especially gloomy. I take shelter under a small tree on a field between the biology and physics departments on the university campus. Part of me questions my decision to even try to catch a satelltie image, as the pass is only 50 degrees at maximum elevation to the west, and it's so freezing outside. I hum Lauryn Hill lyrics to myself as the satellite image loads, the pixels looking fractal like ice. "Possibly speak tongues / Beat drum, Abyssinian, street Baptist / Rap this in fine linen / From the beginning / My practice extending across the atlas / I begat this". The 'atlas' on my screen builds southward, tendrils of cloud extending in blurry motions, like something moving too fast before it can be captured, stilled. Every so often the tree is pushed by the wind and fat droplets shower down. The song ends: "Everything is everything / What is meant to be, will be / After winter, must come spring / Change, it comes eventually".

2024-10-13 17:06:00

Prototype Test Device Los Angeles

Los Angeles, United States

2024-10-13 11:14:35

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

As I ride the 35 south from Liverpool Street the sun begins to pierce through the matted, slightly hazy sky. A current of ‘Arctic Air’ has flowed across the U.K. this weekend and lowered temperatures at least six degrees. At a performance yesterday afternoon in a roofless Anglican Church in Nunhead Cemetary, the cold entered deep into my lungs and bones. After an evening at the pub, T and I ran to the overground station and realised we had fifteen minutes to wait for the train - it felt like an interminable time in that level of cold. As we entered Tesco to warm up before the train, an older man sitting on the pavement near the streetcorner lost his paper cup in the wind and it spun into the traffic. After I retrieved it for him, he asked if I could buy him a chocolate milkshake. He drank the cold drink in big gulps as me and T ran back to the station for our train.

2024-10-12 11:14:00

Automatic Ground Station London

Today on BBC, Keir Starmer says he is remaining focused on the achievements of his new government, refusing to be distracted by 'side winds'. The phrase gives me pause, as it suggests that recent scandals around campaign donations or staff adjustments are akin to a tangential or minor wind. I think about the associations between wind and chaos, and the way the prime minister must be intent on distinguishing the focus of his government from any hint of entropy or agitation. Yet, if there are 'side winds', what is in the centre or the middle? Is it a storm, like a hurricane? Is it another wind, but one that is constant and measured? At the salon this morning, I was telling my hairdresser about my Mom's experience of Hurricane Milton, and the number of people who texted me about my Mom's safety, having seen Milton's imagery on the news, as well as the rumours and lies that have emerged in its wake, about the government creating and directing the hurricane, or refusing emergency relief. A woman who has just been styled for an upcoming hairdressers convention overhears me, and tells me she is from Idaho. "it's so fascinating what you were saying about everyone focusing on Milton" she says, "because where I'm from, in Idaho, we had the largest and most severe fire in US history earlier this year, and it did not make any headlines. No one was talking about it". I confessed I had not heard about the Idaho fires either, despite being an American, perhaps more attuned to US media than most people in the UK. She had to leave for her taxi before we could finish this conversation - which left me thinking again about 'side winds'.

2024-10-11 12:24:58

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London,

Of a day like today, Derek Jarman might write, "Crystalline sunlight, all the dark humours blown away by the wind" (1991, 235). As my partner opens the curtains in the morning, the blue of the sky pierces through the growing gaps in tree branches, blue against yellow and light brown. Before lunch I set the automatic ground station up in my flat, leaving the turnstile antenna resting against the open windowsill in the kitchen, and I head out to the park wtih my tape measure Yagi-Uda antenna. Later I enjoy comparing the images: not surprisingly, the automatic station has captured a swathe of the satellite pass to the south (as our kitchen window is south-facing) and lines of interference from the building pulse through it. Out in the park, I receive a good signal for most of the 86 degree pass, enjoying the 'crystalline' sun and the momentary break from the 'dark humours' of recent grey and rainy days.

2024-10-11 11:27:00

Automatic Ground Station London

Tropical Storm Leslie is brewing in the mid-Atlantic. By Monday, it may begin to reach the west coast of Spain, much like where the beautiful curving cyclone visible in today's image is swirling. For now, central Europe is dotted with a few clouds but is otherwise relatively clear. This image from an automatic ground station in my flat was captured by a turnstile antenna leaning on the windowsill, its metal dipoles shining in the noon sunlight.

2024-10-11 08:57:00

Prototype Automatic Ground Station Wien

Vienna, Austria

Remoteness is a position. The prototype Automatic Ground Station has freed-up my time to write more contemplative, spelling error free Weather Notes, but this has come at a cost. I no longer need to go outside in all weathers at inconvenient times of the day (when I should be in a meeting, eating dinner or just doing something unrelated to satellites and weather). For several weeks, I have not had to checked satellite orbits, hold an antenna or manually decode sound and process files. As a result, I look at today's satellite image with a sense of detachment. I treat the image more like a 'data product' than an hard-won 'weather observation'. This abstraction makes the tropical storm systems just beyond the image's frame feel remote and the weather outside my window feel comfortingly local. What's more, I have allowed a 'safe' distance to open up between me and other geopolitical heavy weather. When I manually captured longer satellite images, I often looked for Black Sea or coastlines of North Africa, the Gaza Strip, Israel and Lebanon to orientate myself. Put differently, I have put the 'remote' back into remote sensing and it has become easier for me to deny shared atmospheres and storm systems, interdependencies and breath.

2024-10-10 12:37:28

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

Representative Michele Rayner, Democratic Florida State representative calls in to Democracy Now. As the sun rises on a night that saw the landfall of Hurricane Milton, she describes the situation in St Petersburg, Florida, where there is no power, where there has been large amounts of flooding, 120 mhp winds and failures to infrastucture, including cranes collapsing into buildings. "I don't even know what my own home looks like right now" she says, "I can't get there". She describes gridlock on the highways and price gouging of hotels, flights and Airbnb accommodation in safer areas of the state. Her voice breaks up and the 'call dropping' sound happens several times. Amy asks her about the misinformation being propagated about the government withholding FEMA funding, or government officials taking peoples homes, and even that the US government is 'controlling the weather'. These are lies with life and death consequences, Amy comments. It is possible to hear Rayner say "people have lost so much... people need help" before the call drops again. Meanwhile videos of trees propelled sideways, people walking through knee deep water, and couches floating down sidewalks rolls on the screen.

2024-10-10 06:37:00

Prototype Automatic Ground Station Wien

Vienna, Austria

The weather today sounds like names: Milton, Kirk, and Leslie. The weather sounds too like rain, even though here it is not raining. This is because the tree outside my studio window makes a rustling, swishing, and swooshing sound in the wind. Laden with dried beanpods it has become a musical instrument. I see passersby turn to find the origin of its percussive song. While working, I tune out of the news feeds of Hurricane Milton crossing Florida and tune into the tree.

2024-10-09 18:30:00

Automatic Ground Station London

After having watched Hurricane Milton on various media throughout the day, and thinking about my family in Northern Florida, going to sleep tonight feels like a very difficult thing to do. As I try to distract myself with a book, I can still see the slowly spinning 'arms' of the hurricane, like an after-image.

2024-10-09 12:50:19

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

"Even though it looks beautiful, this is very bad, this will cause a lot of damage" says a forecaster of Hurricane Milton in one of many livestreamed weather reports I consult throughout the day. He repeats this phrase several times, as if he has to convince himself that it is true. Yet he still calls Milton 'healthy' as he describes its current trajectory and form. I learn that Milton has an 'eye' or 'core' that is among the smallest ever recorded - only about 4 miles across - and this is one of the reasons its effects could be so devastating. Another forecaster uses the metaphor of an ice skater doing a spin and hugging their arms closer to their body, therefore spinning faster. A very different set of affects was offered by John Morales, a Puerto-Rico raised, Florida-based meteorologist and weather forecaster for 30+ years, who became emotional on live television yesterday while describing the fact that the pressure in Hurricane Milton had dropped 50 millibars in ten hours. Morales takes a deep, shaky breath and continues 'this is just horrific'. The video circulates widely on social media. As the hurricane moves north, its proximity to the jet stream will cause wind shear, and some of its 'arms' will 'tear to shreds' according to another newscaster. The storm will likely downgrade to a level 3 hurricane by the time it meets land. But this does not mean it will be weaker or cause less damage, as the weaker storm-system will become wider, potentially affecting much more of Florida. The jet stream will not remove enough 'arms' to reduce the storm's strength. The site of landfall remains uncertain, with some forecasts suggesting the beach of Tampa, where the consequences in terms of storm surge and infrastructure would be catastrophic, while others suggesting it may land further south. It is both fascinating and terrifying that less than twelve hours away from 'landing', the landing-site is still unknown. To follow Milton in all of these ways is thus to process an extreme set of affects, prognoses, visualisations and predictions - everything from figure skater metaphors to public displays of despair. I make a special trip to the park for a satellite pass that is quite far to the west of London, over the Atlantic. I try to stabilise my experience of Milton by 'seeing' some of the weather in its proximity, the cloud systems and extra-tropical cyclones that are somehow linked to Milton's energetic core.

2024-10-08 21:56:00

Automatic Ground Station London

I wake up to news of Hurricane Milton, one of the most rapidly intensifying storms ever measured in the Gulf of New Mexico. The category 5 storm is on a path to make landfall in Western Florida by Wednesday evening in EST. My Mom just moved to Florida two months ago - on time for hurricane season. She lives in Gainesville, just north of the projected path of Milton. On various late night phone calls over the last two weeks, she has showed me mountains of debris on her street, still there from Hurricane Helene, which also passed close, but not directly over Gainesville. Later in the day, I am in a team supervision with one of my PhD students, and my co-supervisor, a geomorphologist and quaternary scientist, shares that he was planning on searching NOAA's National Centre's for Environmental Information the other day (researching data for a third year undergraduate course practical) but the NCEI headquarters are in Asheville (Buncombe County) in North Carolina, one of the cities hardest hit by Hurricane Helene in the last few days of September, and they have had a continuous power outage since. My colleague reports that most of the region's electricity substations were flood damaged, as are all the bridges. Initial damage estimates are coming out in the order of $30-45 bn. Out of >100,000 houses in Buncombe County only around 900 have flood insurance. A former NOAA scientist has estimated 40 trillion gallons of water fell. And now Milton has arrived. Normally, the NCEI would offer 'real time' products for tracking weather like Milton, and it is a crucial hub in packaging various forms of satellite, sensor and other data for a wide group of people including farmers, businessmen, insurance companies and weather services around the US. But as of today, none of NCEI's real-time tracking and forecasting features are available - this is a big hole in networks of weather data sharing and communicating. As I hold my turnstile antenna out the window for a satellite pass close to 11pm this evening, I read the prognosis of a Florida based meteorologist, speaking of Milton: "This is nothing short of astronomical... This hurricane is nearing the mathematical limit of what Earth's atmosphere over this ocean water can produce."

2024-10-08 19:24:00

Prototype Automatic Ground Station Wien

Vienna, Austria

"When the sand settles," said my sister on the phone earlier. I think that she meant to say "when the dust settles" but misspoke and created a one line poem.

2024-10-07 19:36:00

Prototype Automatic Ground Station Wien

Vienna, Austria

On my way to work, I see a posy of flowers and candles arranged around a group of 'stumbling stones' (Stolpersteine) for Jewish Holocaust victims. The care and thought contained in the small act of memorialising such unfathomable violence moves me. Yet, I also feel disquiet at the possible mnemonic "fusing" of the October 7 attacks with the Holocaust. In a Guardian article, 'How Israel has made trauma a weapon of war', Naomi Klein asks what are the dangers (and motivations) of making such parallels? Klein's arguments have resonances beyond Gaza to other contexts where work is being done to remember the violence and victims of war. Sasha, I am thinking of your 'pilot' research into your family's Balkan ancestry, knowledge of wind and other more-than-meteorological weathers. I am thinking too about how half a decade ago I tried and mostly failed to write about the flawed efforts of Western NGOs to record and so mark the deaths and injuries of civilians in the wake of US-led aerial bombing campaign against the so-called 'Islamic State' in Iraq and Syria. The questions that recur, for me, are about how the memorialisation of "traumatic histories can be done in ways that encourage collective healing and a sense of solidarity across divides" (Klein 2024). And, how when this is not the case, throughout history the transmission of trauma has been used to stir revenge and justify punitive campaigns of violence. Conversely, too, how when public or collective acts of remembrance are forbidden, mourning becomes an act of resistance. Remembering or "zochrot" in Hebrew, writes Klein, "in its truest sense is about putting the shattered and severed pieces of the self together (re-member-ing) in the hopes of becoming whole" (Klein 2024).

2024-10-07 07:57:00

Automatic Ground Station London

In Enemy of the Sun, Samih al-Qasim writes: I may – if you wish – lose my livelihood / I may sell my shirt and bed. / I may work as a stone cutter, / A street sweeper, a porter. / I may clean your stores / Or rummage your garbage for food. / I may lie down hungry, / O enemy of the sun, / But / I shall not compromise / And to the last pulse in my veins / I shall resist. | You may take the last strip of my land, / Feed my youth to prison cells. / You may plunder my heritage. / You may burn my books , my poems / Or feed my flesh to the dogs. / You may spread a web of terror / On the roofs of my village, / O enemy of the sun, / But / I shall not compromise / And to the last pulse in my veins / I shall resist. Samih Al-Qasim, “Enemy of the sun,” in Enemy of the Sun: Poetry of Palestinian Resistance , Edited by Naseer Aruri and Edmund Ghareeb (Washington, DC and Dar es Salaam: Drum and Spear Press, 1970).

2024-10-06 11:02:38

Sasha Engelmann

London Bridge, London, United Kingdom

On London Bridge, loosely knit groups of people wander by. I notice two families in which the Dad is pointing across the Thames to skyscrapers and offering some words of information or wisdom to his children. They don’t look interested. It’s the kids instead who are interested in me, asking ‘but what is she doing ??’ in voices that implore an answer. A tall man passes very close to my left shoulder and says in passing ‘watch out with that thing’ even though I am standing well to the edge of the bridge and there is tons of empty space to walk. The pass is a bit staticy at times but I have come to expect this from most of London’s bridges - too much happening by land, river and air.

2024-10-06 06:40:00

Prototype Automatic Ground Station Wien

Vienna, Austria

“How cold do you think it is outside?” I ask N as I hesitate between a light woollen or puffer jacket. “Now maybe it'll get cold. Until recently, with the sun it was okay,” he replies. I choose the black puffer jacket and we make a walk around the neighbourhood, appreciating the changing colours of dusk. We wander into a large Gemeindebau and weave through its ascending courtyards until, unexpectedly, exiting onto a familiar street. After three days of rain the sky is clear and air crisp. TD and GD left for Berlin this morning. Their spirits were not dampened by the wet weather. GD left an tunnel made of pillows, chairs and towels in our living room. Except for the walk, N and I spent the day in our pyjamas enjoying the afterglow of a weekend spent with friends.

2024-10-05 20:49:00

Prototype Automatic Ground Station Wien

Vienna, Austria

Giant Riesenbovist mushrooms, colourful Kurbis (pumpkins), and sweet Sturm made from fermenting grape must are the seasonal highlights this weekend's market. Sturm (also spelled Storm) is made from grapes picked in Austria and is named after its swirling, cloudy appearance. As well as the autumn storms that typically signal its arrival. This year Storm Boris flooded the Danube valley before the grape harvest was complete. Sturm is so volatile that bottles of it are sold without lids, so as to allow the gases to escape, and its alcohol content can vary from one to around ten percent. A fellow shopper asks the stall holder in earnest if there will be more Sturm next weekend. He responds it is likely, but stops short of offering a guarantee. By next weekend will the Sturm already be wine?

2024-10-05 18:34:00

Automatic Ground Station 10

Today's night-time capture from Automatic Ground Station 10, currently in testing phase in London, looks like the 'ectoplasm' of 19th century clairvoyants, a current of veiled matter flowing over the continent.

2024-10-05 12:01:49

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

Today is October 5th, and a national protest for Palestine solidarity in London is underway, slowly moving from Russell Square to Downing Street. Many posters and banners point to the fact that the genocide in Palestine has been going on for one year. There are photographs of victims, messages to Netanyahu and Kier Starmer, and demands for reckoning. Chilling, however, are attempts in the wider media to memorialise this moment in ways that justify Israel's ongoing agression Gaza and Lebanon. Naomi Klein writes in the Guardian today: "What is the line between... memorialization and weaponization? What does it mean to perform collective grief when the collective is not universal, but rather tightly bound by ethnicity? And what does it mean to do so while Israel actively produces more grief on an unfathomable scale, detonating entire apartment blocks in Beirut, inventing new methods of remote-controlled maiming, and sending more than a million Lebanese people fleeing for their lives, even as its pummeling of Gaza continues unabated?" In light of this, the protest feels like more than a public demonstration- it is also a collective remembering, a coherence of what we remember.

2024-10-04 20:18:00

Automatic Ground Station 10

The satellite image collected by Automatic Ground Station 10 is framed with the noise and obstructions of a London street at night, a full story of building behind and four story buildings across the street. Yet in the window of signal there is a glimmer of movement, a curve and swirl of cloud that, in the infrared channel, speaks of something moving far away. I am still in awe of the fact that this is possible with an antenna held out of a window.

2024-10-04 08:44:00

Prototype Automatic Ground Station Wien

Vienna, Austria

The temperature is hovering around 11 centigrade. Not quite the "baltic" but still bone chilling. It's wet and soggy. Yesterday, I learned the German word for "drizzle" is "Nieselregen". Today, Nieselregen has turned into "it's chucking it down" or depending on your mindset, "lovely weather for ducks!" My favourite word for especially grey wet weather is the Scottish, "dreich". To my ears, it sounds perfectly bleak.

2024-10-03 20:28:00

Prototype Automatic Ground Station London

2024-10-03 17:41:00

Prototype Automatic Ground Station Wien

Vienna, Austria

New automatic ground station test location. Today is cold! Or perhaps I am just feeling the cold as I type this because I have to keep a small window open to run the ground station cable indoors. Brrr.

2024-10-03 12:30:08

Sasha Engelmann

Finsbury Square, London, United Kingdom

It is a relatively warm and mild day in London, and people pour out into the streets at lunchtime as I set up for the satellite pass. Yet I am thinking about the wind and it's relationship, provocation (?) or resonance with memory. Writing from the depths of February in Dungeness, Derek Jarman is listening to the wind, observing: "Fragments of memory eddy past and are lost in the dark". The wind is blowing "high in the tower blocks and steeples, down along the river, invading houses and mansions..." He continues: "But the wind does not stop for my thoughts. It whips across the flooded gravel pits drumming up waves on their waters that glint hard and metallic in the night, over the shingle, rustling the dead gorse and skeletal bugloss, running in rivulets through the parched grass - while I sit here in the dark holding a candle that throws my divided shadow across the room and gathers my thoughts to the flame like moths. I have not moved for many hours. Years, a lifetime, eddy past: one, two, three: into the early hours, the clock chimes. The wind is singing now".

2024-10-02 06:44:00

Prototype Automatic Ground Station Wien

Vienna, Austria

2024-10-01 10:09:00

Prototype Automatic Ground Station Wien

Vienna, Austria

2024-09-30 17:19:00

Prototype Automatic Ground Station Wien

Vienna, Austria

"Helene Has Killed More Than 90 People. Here Are Some Of Their Stories" read the New York Times headline. I tried to recall if I had heard of the serial killer. Woman serial killers make headlines as the embodiment of evil – women who choose to take life, rather than reproduce it. I realised that I knew Helene. She had been seen a week ago in the Gulf of Mexico, before making landfall over the Big Bend of Florida's Gulf Coast, churning out death and destruction in her wake. Helene was a hurricane. Her first name was Potential Tropical Cyclone Nine, given to her by United States meteorological service on 23 September 2024. A day later, as she grew in strength and her personhood took shape, they renamed her Helene. In writing about plants, Potawatomi botanist and author Robin Wall Kimmerer observes that “names are the way we humans build relationships, not only with each other but with the living world” (Kimmerer 2013). My home country, the UK, began naming storms in 2014, following the US which had started giving tropical storms female-only names in the 50s. It took decades of feminist fighting for the US meteorological service to assign storms names coded male too (Skilton 2018). Lately, I have been thinking about the power of naming and names to affect real-world relations. I read a British study that compared named and unnamed storms of similar strength, and found that there were fewer cars on the roads during the named storm. The study's authors reason that this is because of the media event that formed around the named storm, possibly saving lives (Charlton‐Perez 2019). In North American and European nomenclature, storms are named at their geographic origins. If a storm named by the US meteorological service crosses the Atlantic and reaches the UK, it will retain its American name. What if, I wonder, we were to reference a different origin? For example, social, historical or political? In ‘Call Them by Their True Names: American Crises (and Essays)’, Rebecca Solnit argues that to name is to “diagnose” and so to transform our ability to speak about a subject, even articulate our relations to it (Solnit 2018). What if, rather than naming storms after each other, we traced their social origins? One outcome could be that unusually large storms, such as Helene, are named after the extractive industries that make their existence statistically so much more likely. If Hurricane Helene had been introduced to us as Hurricane ExxonMobile or Storm Shell how might our relations to such 'extreme weather' events be changed? To name storms after Big Oil feels as offensive as it is flattening. Yet current naming practices fall short too. It would be apt if, in media coverage, mega storms sounded less 'woman serial killer' and more 'corporate killer' or 'colonial menace'. Could such an expressive exercise help us grasp our role as "weathermakers" (Neimanis 2014), to diagnose the social-political origins of today's weather, and so articulate our relations, our knotty response-abilities to it?

2024-09-29 19:35:00

Prototype Automatic Ground Station Wien

Vienna, Austria

2024-09-29 10:46:38

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

Today we put on the heating in our flat for the first time this autumn. The air temperature has dropped significantly over the last week, and there is an 'edge' or 'bite' to the weather outside. At dinner on Friday night with a very good friend, we all agreed to change our duvets to the heavier 'winter' version. This collective decision made me think of squirrels and other forest creatures adding leaves and twigs to their nests for warmth. I tested a new antenna in the frosty park this morning - a copper, weatherised V-dipole made by a radio amateur supplier in Florida. I used a PVC pipe given to me by Martin Collett (for another tape measure Yagi) to elevate the antenna above ground level, as if on a small mast. A woman walking two chihuahuas smiled at me. A small cyclone of clouds emerged, swirling over the UK, but hopefully leaving some space for bursts of sun over the rest of the day.

2024-09-27 10:22:22

Alabama, United States

2024-09-26 12:13:45

Sasha Engelmann

Downs Road, London, United Kingdom

A rolling family of storms passed over Hackney today - one body after the next. Alternating floods of sunlight and dark shadows passed through the flat, a changing scenography to breakfast, PhD student supervisions and emails. As it was pouring when I planned to head to the park with my Yagi, I instead tried fitting the antenna out of the bedroom window - more difficult than the compact V-dipole or tunstile antennas I've used inside before. It worked somewhat- both detecting the 'flood' of Meteor MN 2-3 before picking up NOAA-18 - though I think it also proved sensitive to lots of interference coming from flats and the building itself. By the end of the pass the sun was shining and an orb-like cloud receded into the distance.

2024-09-21 19:34:00

Prototype Automatic Ground Station Wien

Vienna, Austria

I stretch the blue plastic gloves over my hands. Harvesting grapes reminds me of Marina Abramovic's performance "Counting the Rice" in which participants count and separate grains of rice for a minimum of six hours. At first, it's a novelty to be outside cutting, sorting, and plopping the grapes into the bucket at my feet. Then the repetition becomes annoying. I even feel a little anger. But I have committed to be here so cannot stop and by the morning break of coffee, Käsebrot and gherkins, I have found peace. My experience is more solitary than that of the other volunteers whose German language chatter I struggle to follow, espcially when it slips into Viennese dialect. The grapes are small weather globes (Wetterkugeln). We remove the brown, mushy ones smelling of vinegar that did not survive Storm Boris's record rains, dumped on the Wachau region only a week ago. We leave the purple-brown ones that smell sweet and have a fuzz of 'good mould' (Edelschimmel). Their sugars index a summer of sun and heat-stress – Europe's warmest summer since records began (Copernicus 2024). Lastly, we pick out the grapes with small black bruises left by hail early in the growing season. These are mostly on the South-facing vines that I am picking. They will not be sweet, the winemaker tells us.

2024-09-21 19:16:12

Imperial California , Imperial county

Imperial county

2024-09-20 11:07:14

Toronto (High Park), Canada

2024-09-19 12:10:06

Toronto (High Park), Canada

2024-09-19 11:19:56

Toronto (High Park), Canada

2024-09-17 10:58:00

On a train and in my bed, Between Czechia and Austria

Between Czechia and Austria

I wake groggy from the late arrival of my flood delayed train. Out of habit, I open my phone and load the news. Brown water fills the screen, punctured by branches, submerged buildings, and the fluorescent jackets of emergency workers. A climate scientist in Switzerland, Sonia Seneviratne, is quoted as saying that "most of the water vapour came from the Black Sea and Mediterranean Sea, both of which have grown hotter as a result of human-induced climate breakdown". I share the article in our Signal group. Our intern, LJ, replies that this is a "vivid image". I agree, picturing the Mediterranean falling onto Vienna, in a Hollywood-like special effects inversion of sky and sea. A literal image of our world turning upside down.

2024-09-17 08:54:00

Prototype Automatic Ground Station Wien

Vienna, Austria

2024-09-16 09:06:00

Prototype Automatic Ground Station Wien

Berlin, Germany

2024-09-14 12:23:54

Leipzig, Germany

Here: Warm sun, grey skies. Just south of here: Extreme weather events all over Central Europe.

2024-09-14 12:22:00

Constanze Müller

Leipzig, Deutschland

2024-09-14 12:22:00

Florian & Hanna

Leipzig (West), Germany

A cloudy and windy day with some sun coming through the clouds. One of the first colder days after summer.

2024-09-14 12:22:00

Leipzig, Germany

It felt magical when a bright-green signal began to cascade down the waterfall display. I turned to Heide, my partner in our Leipzig open-weather workshop, who was next to me. We both made excited, eyebrow-raised faces. Were we imagining things? Was everything set up right? Our laptops responded with reassuring rhythmic tick-tocking and high pitched sounds that danced around our ears. I was surprised how the satellite continued talking with me, even as I played with different heights of the v-dipole antenna and the wild wind whirled around us. Ten minutes passed quickly. Soon I was angling southwards, feeling the radiant sun on my face and seeing other workshop people communing with NOAA-18 across the park while it faded into static.

2024-09-11 11:08:41

Sasha Engelmann

Burgess Park, London, United Kingdom

Grazie! Grazie! T and I pronounced our happiness at the blue sky when we woke up this morning. The blue is a deep cerulean and small cottonball clouds dotted the horizon. As we ate breakfast we watched the debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump that had aired last night in the US, and within minutes my heart raced and my stomach spiralled. Phrases like ‘illegal transgender aliens’ and ‘killing babies at the seventh, eighth and ninth month’ and ‘immigrants eating dogs’ were spat out of Trump’s mouth. I was reminded of a scene in Leslie Marmon Silko’s book Ceremony that depicts a group of evil ‘witches’ from different Native American tribes at a witch ‘conference’ in a cave. Most witches in the room show their power by donning animal skins and making terrifying performances, but one witch claims their power lies in telling a story, and that as they tell it, the story will already begin happening. They begin telling a tale about dark forces releasing energies into the world and this energy arriving in North America in the form of white people who bring weapons, diseases and greed. In other words, white Europeans are figured as the shapes or shadows of the darker evil at work, but in the story they do wreak havoc. The other witches complement the storytelling witch on their power but say they would prefer this story to not unfold - they ask to call the story back. But the witch says it can’t be done, it is already unravelling. As I listened to some of Trump’s language - the crude and demonic shapes he was conjuring - I couldn’t help think of the power of stories, even if they are neither true or realistic. Something is released when these figures or shapes are vocalised. I do not want to give Trump the credit afforded to the storytelling witch in Silko's novel. I do want to think more about the power of plot, story, and fiction in creating the 'capitalist sorcery' (to use a Stengerian phrase) that we are experiencing in great intensity before the current election.

2024-09-10 12:24:00

Toronto (High Park), Canada

2024-09-10 12:14:14

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

This morning a PhD student wrote in an email to me that the "Autumn very much feels like it's arrived!". I agree wholeheartedly- and wonder how many days have gone by without the golden sunlight I have come to expect from London in early September. Instead we are soaked in thin, grey and matte light emitted from low-hanging cloud. As I read onward about 'global darkening' and the 'State of the Climate' as assessed by close to 600 scientists in a report published last month, I read that this 'darkening' (or increased absorption of light by earth's surface) is, "linked to increased plant growth (which causes the absorption of radiation) in other parts of the world" and that "Plants directly responded to the warmth" (State of the Climate, 2023). To describe how plants responded to the warmth, the report continues: "early in the year [2023], the full bloom for the cherry trees in the Arashiyama district of Kyoto, Japan, occurred on the earliest date in the over-1200-year-long record" (State of the Climate, 2023). I find this so fascinating and devastating at the same time: that a 1200 year old cherry tree grove in Japan - the symbol and site of so many romantic films and stories - is a sentinel for plants' reactions to global warming and planetary 'darkening'. Seeing a line like this in a report written by hundreds of scientists also gives me pause. Who chose this example of the Japanese cherry tree grove (as opposed to, say, the effects of warming on forests in the Amazon, or the great forests of the boreal regions)? Was it purely based on record keeping (the cherry tree grove has been maintained for centuries) or is there another set of concerns around cultural landscapes, histories, symbols and aesthetics at play? Back at home, I peer through a sample of lime or 'linden' tree wood in the microscope, in awe of its graphic and formal beauty.

2024-09-10 11:33:04

Toronto (High Park), Canada

2024-09-09 12:36:26

Toronto (High Park), Canada

2024-09-09 11:33:25

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

A low-hanging layer of clouds obscures the sky today, and very little light illuminates the streets and gardens of our neighbourhood. I think about a passage in the recently published 'State of the Climate' report by the American Meteorological Society. It explains that, in 2023, there was more water vapour in the atmosphere than many years past, but also, "Despite this increased moisture aloft, 2023 had the lowest cloud area fraction since records began in 1980 with skies clearer globally. Consequently, the clouds reflected away to space a record small amount of shortwave radiation, but also blocked a record small amount of longwave radiation from leaving Earth. The overall effect was the weakest cooling effect of clouds on record". The report goes on to explain a global 'darkening' due to reduced sea ice and other ice-covered areas - here 'darkening' refers to the increased proportion of earth's surfaces that absorb light, rather than reflect it. At the same time, in the UK and across northern Europe, the changing and 'wobbling' route of the jet stream is bringing cloudier, stormier, wetter weather. As I peer up at the thick grey cloud, the term 'darkening' seems to register with many meteorological and more-than-meteorological affects. I manage to coax enough light from a table lamp into the microscope to see the veins of a fallen, yellow Plane tree leaf.

2024-09-09 06:40:00

Prototype Automatic Ground Station Wien

Vienna, Austria

Heavy rain and cold. In the Vienna woods, mist hangs dense and low between the trees. Back in the flat, on the phone to my mum, I noticed a red balloon suspended above the rooftops. It appears to be tethered by a long string, implausibly stretching the length of the block before disappearing behind a roof. The string is long and weighs down the balloon, which despite its size must have had significant buoyancy. It looks not much larger than a child’s party balloon, but perhaps this was an illusion of perspective. I wondered if it is a weather balloon come back to Earth, however there is no visible payload. Perhaps it is a child's ambitious experiment?

2024-09-08 12:39:48

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London,

To the southeast, a gap in a towering panorama of clouds looks like a giant lens or a portal, magnifying rays of light. Two men walk by my ground station asking 'is there signal??' and then exclaiming 'you see the storm is picking up!'. Yet the wind does not rise further than a few sharp gusts and the clouds dance past. In my daily micro-weather observations, I look at 'Lumbricus' (an earthworm with its movement muscles), 'Anopheles male E' (a male mosquito) and a fragment of Selaginella sporophylls (also known as the spikemosses or clubmosses). I read that Selaginella are known as the 'fern allies' - I thought this was a nice phrase, if read non-scientifically. Some species of Selaginella are known as the 'resurrection plant' because they can survive complete dehydration, much like the lichens I wrote about yesterday. These moss-like plants roll up into brown balls, but rehydrate and expand when moistened. On this theme of 'resurrection' or 'time-traveling' or bending of temporal/ spatial ideas of life, I am reminded of a passage in the book Ceremony (1977) by Leslie Marmon Silko. It is a scene from the perspective of Tayo, a man of Laguna Indian and Mexican heritage who returns from the war in Vietnam. At dawn, Tayo is watching the life emerging around a small pool filled by a spring in the otherwise bone-dry mountains on the reservation. He observes: "When the shadows were gone, and the cliff rock began to get warm, the frogs came out from their sleeping places in small cracks and niches in the cliff above the pool. They were the colour of the moss near the spring, and their backs were spotted the colour of wet sand. They moved slowly into the sun, blinking their big eyes. He watched them dive into the pool, one by one, with a graceful quiet sound. They swam across the pool to the sunny edge and sat there looking at him, snapping at the tiny insects that swarmed in the shade and grass around the pool. He smiled. They were the rain's children. He had seen it happen many times after a rainstorm. In dried up ponds and in the dry arroyo sands, even as the rain was still falling, they came popping up through the ground, with wet sand still on their backs. Josiah said they could stay buried in the dry sand for many years, waiting for the rain to come again" (Silko, 1977: 87-88).

2024-09-08 09:58:00

Prototype Automatic Ground Station Wien

Vienna, Austria

Tomorrow is Schulstartwoche (the week Austria's public schools reopen after the summer break). On Saturday, the man who I buy apples from at the market, tells me that he remembers the Schulstartwoche being cold and rainy. Today, it was so warm outside we closed the windows to keep the flat cool, only to give into the humidity and reopen them. Weather forecasts suggests that, inline with memories of Schulstartwoche, Monday will being heavy rains, causing the temperature to drop to a chilly 19C.

2024-09-07 12:51:46

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

Hello lichen, who and when are you? This morning over breakfast I read a post by my friend Adriana Knouf about project Obxeno which is an automomous, solar-powered apparatus and camera watching lichens in a park around the clock. Though lichens are famously slow growers (some only grow around 1mm / year) one of Obxeno's timelapse videos seems to show a rapid grown of a lichen leaf or thallus, sort of blossoming out of the larger body. A curved piece of bark glowed bright yellow and green on the pavement on my way back from the farmers market. Later in Hackney Downs, I saw many smaller fragments of lichen in the grass, and I couldn't help borrowing two small pieces to put under the microscope at home. As I wandered through the labyrinths, caves, colours and depths of the lichens I brought home, I learned they were, like many lichens, collaborations between a green algae and a fungus. For the (at least) two lichens I was looking at, the lichen-forming fungi were Physciaceae and Teloschistaceae, both apparently relatively common and 'cosmopolitan' according to what I could find online. I read these samples in my living room were 'micro-lichen' and their shapes were foliose (leafy) and leprose (like a powder dusting). Lichens are believed to be some of the oldest organisms on earth (though how to define the limits of their identity as 'singular' organism challenges many of Science's principles). They can grow on almost any surface and they can even live inside solid rock, growing between the grains! The collaboration between the algae and the fungi is beneficial because the algae produce carbohydrates via photosynthesis that are used by the fungi, and the fungi provides a protective environment while also gathering moisture and nutrients. When fungi form partnerships with cyanobacteria in certain species of lichen, the cyanobacteria can even fix Nitrogen from the air. I learned that lichens were sent to the vaccum of space by the European Space Agency and exposed for fifteen days to the vacuum, with its widely fluctuating temperatures and cosmic radiation. After 15 days, the lichens were brought back to earth and were found to be unchanged in their ability to photosynthesize. If a lichen can live without water, and even without air; if it is never only 'one' but 'more than one'; if a lichen may be ancient or renewed each day, then perhaps, from the perspective of a lichen, energy, space and time are things that can be bent, molded, malleable. People like Adriana have said this to me before, but I am finally understanding lichens as both space and time-travellers...

2024-09-07 10:11:00

Prototype Automatic Ground Station Wien

Vienna, Austria

V and I, adamant that it was the last day of summer, caught the train in the opposite direction from home to Hallstattsee. The lake was blissful. Its steep sides and deep waters have kept it cool, even after the hottest of summers. This we learned this from an older couple and their two dogs, who joined us on the narrow pebble beach. I took my first dip since the operation. The cold water held me, drawing me down. Despite my caution and an unfamiliar tugging in my abdomen, I dipped under again and again. The feeling was one of release. I extended my body, unfolding and stretching it in ways that I have not since the beginning of August. The lake’s water was cloudy and its stoney bottom, quickly dropped away. With my film camera, I photographed V floating in a starfish position, her peach colour swim suit beautifully offset by the dark greens of the lake and mountain side. In that moment, I think that we both felt a supreme confidence and peace in our bodies.

2024-09-06 19:19:00

Prototype Automatic Ground Station Wien

Vienna, Austria

It is one month since the operation and being engulfed by the 'closest weather' of my body. Last night I dreamt that I was standing in a brackish pool near the coast, bare foot with a fine mud between my toes. N and S are nearby. The coastline could be West Scotland. N asks if I’ve stood in the pool before. I know that I have, but for reasons I cannot explain, I lie and say that I haven't. Stripy leaches appear from the mud and attach their mouths to my feet. In horror, I freeze, unable to move for fear of stirring up more leaches. N reaches over and helps me jump out of the pool. I wake distressed and go to the next room where N is sleeping. I fall asleep again, only to dream that I am at a surreal hospital check-up.

2024-09-06 10:29:48

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

For the second day, the weather is damp, grey and dark, with intermittent rain. The park was wet and puddled, but plenty of people were out walking, having coffee and running with dogs. I breifly cuddled with Moonpie as Dave arrived at the park: 'you're one of the only people he runs up to like that, and also lets pet him' Dave said. By the time that sentence was finished, Moonpie was off again, racing to the other corner of the park. I collected some specimens - a leaf of clover, common yarrow and a tiny bump of moss found on the damp brick of the wall outside the house - to explore with the microscope. The 'weather worlds' of these small plants came alive under the lens - the moss danced with long whitish filaments that I learned could be sporophytes, and its stems and leaves bristled below. The yarrow was difficult to bring into focus because of its three dimensionality, but slowly the tips of leaves came into view, and I saw that it was covered in micro droplets. The stem of the clover almost shimmered, and I wondered if this was water coursing within the tissue, or just a quality of the surface.

2024-09-05 19:31:00

Prototype Automatic Ground Station Wien

Vienna, Austria

Despite the daytime heat, the nights are cooler. Only the mosquitoes continue to be a pest. There must have been a mass hatching event as there are so many, espcially in the studio. I think that I am now able to tell part the larger black and white striped ‘common’ mosquito from the smaller brown ‘tiger’ mosquito. With some encouragement, the last of my five scabs 'fell' came off. I pulled at the plastic surgical threads still protruding my my belly button but they wouldn’t budge and later my tummy ached. Once all the wounds are seal, I can swim again. These days, I can mostly move without pain but I am still cautious about twisting or turning too suddenly. I wonder if the doctor will find adhesions when I have my check-up in two weeks. The thin red scars look small on the surface but feel bulbous beneath the skin. In the evening, S from the hospital, WhatsApp'ed me to say that her endometriosis had already returned. The news is disturbing. She already has a new cyst! So, soon? “No one could have known,” she writes.

2024-09-05 19:09:26

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

'Cabbage clubroot'; 'bee leg with pollen sack'; 'cucurbita ts stem' (cucumber stem); 'dryopteris filix-mas' (male fern); T and I pored over dozens of microscope slides rescued from an old science building due to close or be refurbished at Goldsmiths University. T had even rescued a microscope - the older kind with no light for illumination, and only a mirror - that otherwise would have been tossed. Too engrossed to cook dinner, we ordered pizza and kept speculating about the worlds made visible through tiny pieces of glass and magnifying lenses. Based on my undergraduate training in plant biology I thought I could identify the cambium in a slide containing a sliver of wood, but I wasn't sure. In the midst of this I went outside for an early evening NOAA-15 pass and wondered again about scale, patterns, fractals.

2024-09-04 23:28:08

Toronto, Canada

2024-09-04 19:40:52

Toronto (High Park),

lots of mosquitoes out this evening

2024-09-04 12:03:01

Toronto (High Park), Canada

2024-09-04 11:07:28

Toronto (High Park), Canada