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It’s all about the right equipment: That’s why I now own a UV lamp! I see a lot of fluorescent tracer spotting in my future!

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Before I start gushing about my awesome new UV lamp (thanks for encouraging that purchase, Uta! :-)), some other updates on the state of green in the park across the road from my house (don’t know what I am talking about? Check out previous posts on the fluorescent dye tracer).

The lake is still bright green and very well mixed, similar to what it looked like in this post. But what is a lot easier to see now is the green water coming out into the Kiel fjord. It was very hard to see on the pictures I took the other day on our fluorescent night walk, and I didn’t see any by eye the first couple of days, but for the last days it has been clearly visible:

It’s still a lot clearer by eye than on the pictures, but even in these pictures you see the plume going out of the storm drain, don’t you?

In other news: my UV lamp arrived today and I am so excited!

So here is a water sample I took out of the green stream, photographed in normal daylight and then lit by my UV lamp. Pretty cool, ey? :-)

Who wants to come fluorescent water-spotting with me? :-)

Fluorescent night walk — following the stream through the lake into Kiel fjord!

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Luckily some of my friends are crazy enough to bring the UV lamps and go on a night walk with me, following the green fluorescent stream! (Don’t know what I am talking about? Check out the previous posts (post 1, post 2) on why there is fluorescent dye in a lake across my street and why that is exciting)

Following the water

It looks very spooky when all of a sudden in the middle of a park you come across something looking like the picture below. Well, you would probably not come across it if you didn’t know where to look, but you get my point. And once you found it, you can follow it downhill.

But don’t let yourself get distracted by signs on the trees, someone is trying to lead you in the wrong direction ;-)

Because what we were looking for was, of course, the same lake I have been posting about today and yesterday, except now it looks like the picture below. If you thought it was creepy by day you know nothing of creepy!

Creepy, but also fascinating! Of course I have to inspect it more closely.

Below my hand holding the UV torch while I was looking at all kinds of critters in the water (poor things!)

Science is, of course, team work. Especially when you want pictures, too ;-) Thanks Maria and Tom for such a spontaneous and exciting adventure!

Below, Tom is shining the UV lights down the little water fall so we can take pictures.

And here you see the view from the upper lake down the water fall into the lower reservoir. Next time I will definitely not do such a fluorescent night walk without a tripod and a better camera than my phone!

It might have been a bit of a hassle to find if you didn’t know where to look, but since I know exactly where that lake drains into Kiel fjord, we could follow the fluorescent water out the storm drain into the fjord!

Here we are at the top of the sea wall, looking down, and you see eddies of fluorescent water coming out of the storm drain and into the fjord. Super cool to see that the flow was coming out on the edges of the drain, and that it was eddying. And that, even though there was not a large flow coming out, it could be seen quite far into the fjord, at least as far as our torches could still light the surface. Very very cool tracer oceanography! That was one exciting evening!! :-)