What's left?

Auroras above DA

Well, we are down to our last week of full dark down here at the Pole. Next week the moon rises once more, and once it sets we will be in astronomical twilight. The sun will still be ~17 degrees below the horizon, but things will be getting slowly brighter, until sunrise hits in about 70 days.

We’ve also hit our coldest temperatures so far this season, at –104F, and things are expected to get colder before the end of July. Along with the cold temperatures, we’ve also had some very active skies, due to lots of solar activity. Even though it is supposed to be dark out, today when I walked out of the station to go to cryo there was a glow in the sky, and I could see the outline of the buildings out in summer camp. Compare this to yesterday, when I couldn’t see my hand a foot in front of my face and just about missed the stairs to get back up to the station. 

Moon and auroras from moon set last week

So what is still left of the season? Like I said above, we’ve got less than 70 days until sunrise. After that we’ve got station opening on October 27^th, which is in 93 days. That means less than a hundred days until we get freshies (fresh fruits and veggies), which I am looking forward to. I’ve got at most 111 days until I leave the Pole, depending on weather and when Lockhee-Martin gets around to ticketing us. We’ve got 4 emergency drills, 4 safety stand-downs and 4 two-day weekends left before the summer folks show up. We’ve got about 15 soccer and volleyball nights left.

Out at cryo, we’ve got 6,700L of LHe left, and from my projections, we’ll have about 2,500L of LHe left on the 1^st of November. This winter will just beat the record for most efficient in terms of LHe usage. I’ve got no more than 20 LHe deliveries to BICEP left. Once this winter is over, there will be no more LHe used on station, and the summer cryo tech, who will be closing down cryo, will be the last cryo kid at Pole, at least for the foreseeable future. Two of the LHe dewars will get pulled pretty much as soon as possible and be replaced by a brand new experiment.

In terms of life, this week was pretty uneventful. We started out with pretty warm temperatures, which made my Wednesday delivery easy. By Friday, temps were down to the –90’s, and have been below a hundred for most of the weekend. There is a group of us that have been working out together before dinner most days, and thanks to that I can now pretty consistently do a couple of pull ups, so that’s exciting. And in order to keep out of trouble, some of us have been making our own fun, in the form of office slacklining.