Jan 10 – Day 11 on Ice

Weather: Colder today, mostly because of higher winds; Temp about -18F, with wind chill of -40F. Weather was mostly sunny.

Yesterday, a flight full of pax headed north from South Pole boomeranged back to Pole due to weather in McMurdo. This is quite unusual since there isn’t an LC-130 maintenance staff/ facility here at Pole, and it’s a lot colder. Fortunately its been pretty warm, with temps around -10F, but it’s still really unusual, and the flight was full of winter-overs trying to take their “R&R” (rest and relaxation) in MCM.

The plane then took off this morning and seemed to start up fine, so everything went about as smoothly as it could have (and the weather cleared up, so it was sunny and not super grey).

Today, 3 of the 5 SPT’ers scheduled to arrive this past week have arrived, including the other winterover, Geoff. Tomorrow we will begin training him, and next week we will likely get into the deep dark depths of the computing system here at Pole since Judith, the computer expert, arrived today as well. It turns out that we have a pretty complex computing system which not only monitors the telescope but also does automatic analysis, and controls the distribution of data north/south when the satellites are up.

I have now been at Pole for 1 week… which is weird. I can’t tell if it seems like a long time or no time at all. I think I’ve learned a lot and am feeling pretty confident that things are running smoothly, but I know that the hardest part is to come — the computers! I don’t know nothin bout no computers. But hopefully it will make more sense after the next few weeks and repeated instruction.

I haven’t gotten many of my mailed packages yet, so I’m hoping those will come soon. One such package contains my bodywash and another my shaving cream… sooo yea, that will be nice to have.

I took a short ~10 minute video of walking out to the telescope from the station yesterday, but even after reducing the resolution from 4K to 780p it’s still about 2Gb… and according to Google Drive’s upload monitor, it will take upwards of 15 hours to upload… which just wont work considering the sat window is about 4 hours. I will have to find another way…