Maybe getting brighter?

So we are officially in twilight now. The picture above was taken be Robert Schwarz a couple of weeks ago, with a circle around a little bit of brightening on the horizon. It isn’t very obvious. The last couple of days though, it has been noticeably brighter along the horizon. Less than two months until sunrise!

There is light on the horizon!

Probably my most exciting thing down here in the last couple of weeks, is that I did my last liquid nitrogen delivery to Aurora Cam last night. I am also switching over to a swing shift schedule in the next couple of days, so that Steffen and I can do LHe deliveries to BICEP before dinner.

While we haven’t been able to watch the London Olympics (which a number of us are pretty bummed about), we have been doing something with McMurdo to celebrate. The folks at McMurdo are “running the torch” out to us, and we are running is back to them. Basically, people are keeping track of their running mileage and pooling it together, with the goal of reaching 830 miles before sunrise. After a little more than a week, the South Pole runners are at 80 miles, and I’ve added 46 of them. There have only been four people adding mileage so far, so hopefully a couple more people will start posting their miles, so we can get the torch back to McMurdo faster.

Star trails. Since the stars never go below the horizon, if you
do time-lapse photography, you get something like this.
Photo courtesy Robert Schwarz