Jan 6th – Day 8 on Ice

Weather: Generally cloudy, with about an hour of clear blue sky in the afternoon.

Temperatures: -10F with a windchill of around -30F

Today was a busy day that started with snowmobile training (well, a refresher since I had been trained before)… The basic gist is that it’s cold here, engines don’t much like the cold, and that one should drive safely and be conscious of the many other large vehicles driving around. I then spent the next few hours zipping around behind the station looking for a certain box containing some SPT material. The area behind the station is called the berms because there are long rows of boxes and crates, and palatalized whatevers, which build up these berms of snow over the years.

There are small stickers on the boxes which indicate which project each one belongs to (SPT is project A379, for example), so we were looking for our number among the rows and rows of crates. I was driving the snowmobile with a passenger sled carrying a few other SPT folks, and we covered a pretty good area, but weren’t able to find the specific crate we were looking for…. exciting, I know. Unfortunately I didn’t get any pictures of the berms, but I’m sure the exist somewhere; they’re just not all that exciting.

After lunch, we went back out to the telescope and I learned a few more tricks of the trade; how to command the telescope using the ACU (antenna control unit), enter the receiver cabin, how to climb under the base of the telescope to get to the elevation gears for greasing, and even how to power cycle a crate of readout electronics because a board wasn’t communicating. yay!

The weather has more-or-less been overcast since I’ve arrived, with the exception of a few hours during the marathon, and an hour or so today when it was bright and sunny! We observe even when the sun is up, but the cloudy weather does show up as low-frequency noise in our maps especially at the higher frequency bands. Also, since our detectors are so finely tuned to see the faint CMB signal, they don’t have much wiggle room in terms of extra loading from clouds. So sometimes if the weather is really bad, the clouds can actually saturate the detectors.

My internet browser was being fussy today, so I had to swap to firefox… hopefully I don’t run into the situation where my browsers are borked and I can’t get to certain sites (like Gmail and Facebook… for some reason Edge was throwing security exceptions).