"Light up the sky"

Between dusk and dawn, a green light to the dark sky becomes visible on the R/V Mirai and gives a sword to Orion.
The light is a part of the Mirai LIDAR. In the sky, particles (sea salt, dust, cloud droplet, rain drop, etc.) glint with the light. The lidar collects these glints to shed light on the sky condition during day and night.
On a clear night, the lidar collects extra gleams from water vapor and nitrogen molecules.
So, I enjoy very much the green illumination of the stargazing night.
(K.T., photo by S.S.)

"How to enjoy on Christmas Eve"

Merry Christmas! How are you tonight on Christmas Eve? I imagine there are so many twinkling illuminations everywhere over cities and we are doing our observation as usual at the corner of this world.
We ate a piece of a roll, discussed on data analyses at the seminar room, were carefully trouble shooting, and we all contributed to own roles for keeping the data high quality.
Christmas presents for us are not given by someone. Those will be created for someone.
The two staffs in the photo are Takeda-san and Fukuda-san who are doing water sampling by the bucket. By pulling the rope up for sampling 10 liter sea water, we can keep a lot of sampling bottles for many analysis items every 6 hours. You can see the large CTD winch behind them. They can quickly do the bucket water sampling for the time when CTD is going down between 200 m and 300 m because they have another jobs after the CTD coming back.
Each 300 m CTD profiling takes about 1 hour (90 minutes for 500 m once per day) and the 3 hourly CTD operation is continued without any data lost.
Motesaku gets so excited at each profile and says "Wow! Salinity is getting lower! Oooops! Temperature is getting 0.1 degree higher! Hey, hey, hey, ... current direction has been changed!"
How do you think it? Why not join us on future Christmas days?
Qoosaku MOTEKI