Awesome Moon Halo

Here is a picture I took a couple weeks ago of the moon way up here in Houghton, MI. It has a huge halo, perfectly circular, around it. My roommates and I stood outside in the cold for a good fifteen minutes just staring at it wondering what it could be. It really was awe-some to see in person.

A friend of mine later told it had to do with ice crystals forming in the atmosphere which reflect the light from the moon and create the halo effect. I think this is one of the cooler phenomena I’ve seen in my life, and yet I wonder why I haven’t seen it before.

An awesome sight right outside my house one night.

Brand Promise

To explore and discover new possibilities for the greater good and to develop those possibilities into opportunities for human advancement.

Winter Carnival

Winter Carnival at Michigan Tech is about as good as it gets. Kicking off the celebrations on Wednesday evening is an all night party on campus with music, food, broomball, ice mini golf, dancing, snow statues, glow sticks, and more food. It is probably the best weekend of the whole year. Following the all-nighter, are four days of walking around town and campus looking at all of the 20 ft tall snow statues that people have spent the past month working on, and going to events around campus like the beard contest. The statues are amazing with incredible detail and seemingly impossible ice creations. It truly is a wonder to see.

This year however, it has been unseasonably warm these past few days leading up to the all-nighter. People aren’t able to work on their statues because all the snow is melting. This is a real problem. Normally, they have plenty of work days before the all-nighter, and they have a big push right at the end to bring out all the secret things they’ve been working on. But this year, there isn’t much going on. I’m worried that it either won’t get cold enough for them to continue work on the very unfinished snow statues, or there simply won’t be enough time to include all of the awesome detail many of the teams were planning on including. 

The forecast says that the Tuesday before Winter Carnival is supposed to be cold and snowy, which is good, but will it be enough? Fortunately, the rest of the week after that will be cold enough to keep the statues in good shape, but it won’t matter if it gets above 40 degrees. At that temperature, the tall statues become dangerous towering snow piles, just waiting to topple. The university has a policy that they must be taken down.

Here’s to hoping that doesn’t happen and we can have our good old cold Winter Carnival.

My Passion: Space

One of my passions is to study the capabilities and limitations of human beings in all capacities in space. I enjoy investigating the current space life of astronauts and how it can be improved. In particular, how to improve the design of astronauts’ interactions with a spacecraft and how they live within it. In pursuing this passion, I hope to create future spacecraft that will work in harmony with the human users in order to advance safely and comfortably into space. 

This passion really came from two different fields which I am currently studying: engineering and psychology. I have been interested in engineering from a very young age; I have followed in my father’s footsteps in the major I choose as well as the school I attend. But I have also been interested in how we think. What goes through our heads? How does that effect how we use things? This is where the psychology comes in. 

It wasn’t until I got to Michigan Tech until I heard about the field of human factors. Human Factors is the study of how the human interacts with a certain system, whether it be physical or digital. This seemed like the perfect field for me, so I added a psychology minor onto my mechanical engineering major. The space aspect of my passion, came later still when I joined the Aerospace Enterprise.

I got involved with the enterprise in the fall of my junior year at Tech, one semester before they were going to the final competition with their satellite. I jumped in with both feet and got really into the project. I even decided to be the next team leader in my first semester of joining. Lo and behold we won the competition, and now our satellite is going into space! Working on this project has gotten me very interested in space. I am going to be a part of it. And I want to know more, do more, and create more that will help us understand it and use it to our benefit.

That is a little background on my passion and how I developed it.

 

Personal Bio

Full Version

Dan Green is a mechanical engineering student at Michigan Technological University, graduating in the spring of 2012. He is originally from St. Paul, MN where he enjoys the nearness of the city. Dan is involved in the Aerospace Enterprise on the Michigan Tech campus in which he is the team leader of the Structures team working on building the Oculus-ASR satellite which will be launched into space in 2013. Dan’s interests are in the field of Human Factors Engineering and relating it to man space missions. He want’s to work on answering the question: How can we make human spaceflight safer, more effective, and more comfortable?

Short Version

Dan Green, a mechanical engineering student at Michigan Tech, is involved in building the Oculus-ASR satellite. Interested in human factors.

LinkedIn

Check out my LinkedIn profile at: http://www.linkedin.com/in/danfgreen