Tähtitieteellinen yhdistys Ursa

European Halo Project | Contents | Next chapter

Preface

Wintery and warm greetings to all of you! As we now wait a happy new, we may join in remembering the old year, and particularly its April month. The second common-European halo project has now been finished as you can well evidence from the arriving of the ready project summary.

Congratulations to each of you for participating the project. This time we had the record amount of observers, the record amount of pages and probably also the record amount of common enthusiasm spread across the borders of Europe. This time two new countries took part in the project. So welcome Belgium and United Kingdom! Your contribution is heartfully welcomed. Hopefully you will find this leaflet to be of interest as it without much forewarning hits your doormat.

Another new feature was the distribution of work between Finland and Germany. The enormous work of statistics analysis and the resulting statistics pages, observer result lists and the Europe map in the beginning of the summary were performed by the German halo network, more precisely by Claudia Hetze and Wolfgang Hinz, who both else checked and corrected a lot of things in the final summary. Also all the sentences within the text that give weather data were provided by Claudia Hetze from Chemnitz, Germany. In many places these weather descriptions have been incorporated within display description texts, but all weather comments originate from Claudia. Another new feature - the delightful colour print page - was also manufactured and sponsored by the German network.

The texts describing each day were written by Reima Eresmaa, Mika Sillanpää and Marko Pekkola and slightly edited in the end by Pekkola. Also here the work amount has been much more evenly distributed as some may remember that the display description texts of the first summary were done almost completely by Mika Sillanpää, though he did not make a big fuss about it in 1996 leaflet.

Language check and translation help was given for the weather texts by Alastair McBeath (we have possibly ruined here in Helsinki some of that) and the Dutch summary was translated by Frank Nieuwenhuys. Much of the material would not have been in our availability without the quick and efficient observation gathering and posting by Peter-Paul Hattinga Verschure, the Dutch atmospheric optics section leader. Similar thanks go to Wolfgang Hinz, the German halo section leader. The Belgian material and useful information was gathered and sent by Stefan Meulemans. Sirko Molau provided important contact help via his e-mail address when urgently needed. The selection and scanning of drawings into the drawing examples collection was done by Anne Jokinen.

The big personal thanks go to Veikko Mäkelä, who is the genius behind the huge work of both the complete layout, rest of the picture scanning (all pictures in display description pages), satellite picture retrieving, and the father of many hell of a good ideas. Thanks Veikko.

All satellite pictures are the sole property and copyright of Dundee Satellite Receiving Station, United Kingdom.

Marko Pekkola

European Halo Project | Contents | Next chapter<link stat-obs.html>