In the meantime I have received more e-mail about today's observations and their detailed planning. I correspond until I agree with the other person on the exact nature of the CDS observations he wants. This is further complicated by the fact that we will be running a new series of observations that haven't been run before and so we must be extra careful about how we handle them. Still no sign of the pointing though-no rush just yet, there's time to go.

It is now 12:30 pm and time for lunch. I have 3 slices of cold pizza from the night before and a bottle of water while sitting at the computer terminal I do the planning from. Cold pizza is perhaps the perfect food. (Ed. note: please remember this is a FIELD JOURNAL about life as it's lived, and not nutritional advice to be followed!)

It is now 1 pm and I decide to chase up some people about pointing. I am assured that it is coming. I do some planning for the weekend that doesn't require any special information.

Since I am at a loose end waiting for pointing information I decide that I can best spend the time debugging some of my own programs. One of my programs looks at CDS data and calculates the temperature of coronal loops-magnetic arches thousands of kilometers long filled with multi million-degree plasma. At least my program will calculate coronal loop temperatures once it works. If we know the temperature of the plasma then we can begin to say something about why the corona is so hot-one of the fundamental questions SOHO was designed to help answer.