Sunday, August 26, 2012

Twilight

A few last auroras before it gets too bright

We had our first (and hopefully only) power outage of the season this week. Outages aren't unheard of, and we've been lucky so far this winter. The generator only failed for about 30 second, so not long, but long enough that I got to run out to cryo to check on the compressors just as I was getting ready for bed. And then I got to hike out to MAPO to restart one of the experiments I'm monitoring. So, a late morning, but I did get treated to this on my way out to MAPO.
Flaglines in the early morning
Along with a beautiful skyline, the lack of wind and "warm" weather (~-60F) made for a pretty nice walk. And things are definitely getting brighter. In fact, if you look closely, you can see shadows (which are, admittedly, partially due to the moon being up right now). We are officially in nautical twilight. Another couple of weeks and we'll be in civil twilight. Then sunrise!

Other than that, we had our monthly ERT drill this week. Not particularly exciting, although we did lose our dummy patient, who was asystole when we got to the scene. But our other patient survived and is doing fine.
The pole marker with the sunrise, moon, Mars, Saturn, and Spica
in the background

The moon behind the power plant

Blog note: I also wanted to point your attention to a new link, South Pole Tumblr. It has pictures, and a few comments, that don't make it onto the blog.


Sunday, August 19, 2012

Glow

A glow around the station.

It has been pretty amazing to watch the changes outside the past couple of weeks. Things have gotten brighter, at least when it's clear. Along with the rising light, we've also gotten a little bit wilder weather. Today it is cloudy and in the -60's, yesterday it was clear and in the -90's. While we probably won't make it back down into the -100's again this season, we'll probably get some pretty big swings in temperature as the sun comes back up and more energy is pumped into the atmosphere because of that.

On clear days, we've also been treated to a view of Mars, Saturn and Spica trailing the sun along the horizon.
Spica, Mars, and Saturn off to the right. Wave hello to Curiosity!
That picture is a couple of days old, and since Mars has been moving fast in comparison to the others, those three now form something close to an equilateral triangle, rather than a line. Also, while the picture doesn't show it, now instead of a hint of light, we've got a little bit of orange and pink just above the horizon to go along with the general glow. I think that the prospect of the sun rising has also brought the mood up around the station.

This weekend was our monthly two-day weekend, and to celebrate some folks organized a small fair. There was a chili cook-off, a photo booth, a bean-bag toss, a pie-eating contest and an auction. I somehow got talked into doing the pie-eating contest, so now I will never have to do one of those again. I did come close to winning, but Shawn beat me in the tie-breaker (30 seconds to eat as much pie as we could) by a half an oz. I think his beard gave him an advantage, what with being able to stick more pie to his face. I'm trying to get pictures from some of the spectators, so I will post those when I get them.

Also, I finished up my biggest milage week so far at Pole. 42 miles on the treadmill, and felt good for most of it. I was pretty pleased with myself, and then I read Nicole's blog, where she did 115 miles. So, while I'm still pretty happy with myself, that certainly put things in perspective. Also, the group I've been working out with finished up our P90X rotation and we are now moving on to Insanity, which we should be able to finish up before we redeploy.

Oh yes, we've finally gotten an ETA on our redeployment. No ticketing info yet (we probably won't get that until October), but at least we've got some info. I, and most of my friends are scheduled to get out of here on Nov. 2nd, so depending on weather, it could be the 5th or 6th before we get to New Zealand.

Auroras out by SPT and BICEP2



Sunday, August 5, 2012

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