By day Penny Smale is a mum to two young boys, living on a rural property in the middle of the farming district of Lauder, in Central Otago. At night the 44-year-old leaves home, walks the short distance to what is essentially a large outbuilding in a paddock, and fires lasers into the sky.
The bright blue and green lights of the lasers travel vertically up to 100km into the atmosphere and are visible for kilometres.
The clear Otago skies, far removed from the light and atmospheric pollution produced by towns and cities, are perfect for her line of work.
Dr Smale works at Niwa's atmospheric research station at Lauder.
People thought scientists working there looked at stars, she said.
"But that's not what we do. While my background is in Antarctic science, I'm a technical assistant and I fire lasers into the sky and use a telescope to measure what comes back. Then I send the information to people who calculate how much ozone there is in the atmosphere.''
Lauder specialises in measuring ozone, UV light levels and greenhouse gases, taking measurements that record changes to the global climate.
Dr Smale operated a Lidar (Light Detection and Ranging) instrument on behalf of a Dutch research group as part of the Network for the Detection of Stratospheric Change.
Lidar emit vertical beams of pulsed laser light. A small fraction of the light is collected by telescope from which concentrations of ozone can be deduced.
‘‘There are two different wavelengths going straight up into the atmosphere. We measure the return signal and, based on those return values, scientists can calculate the ozone.''
Ozone was measured in several different ways at Lauder and the data used in scientific papers around the world, Dr Smale said.
She takes measurements several times a month and works about four hours at night.
‘‘It's technical, it's interesting, it's fun and you get to do some good work. The best things are the scenery and the isolation, and I get to fire lasers.
"It's unusual; you're living here surrounded by farms and people in the district are all farmers, so we're a little bit odd.
‘‘But we're living the country life with great scenery and without the work of running a farm. I love it.''
