Jan 20th – 21 days on Ice

A large, but thin cloud front rolled in. You could see it coming for a few hours over the horizon, like a slow grey tsunami wave. I don’t know the temps because my stupid browser wont accept the out-of-date certificate of the met’s webpage.. but it’s probably in the – teens.

As a reminder, you can check the south pole live feeds while the satellites are up here: https://www.usap.gov/videoclipsandmaps/spwebcam.cfm

The ‘South Pole Radio Telescopes’ tab observes the path out to the telescope that I walk on every day.

The carp party was a lot of fun. Unfortunately I managed not to take even a single picture :(. But I did get to toss a little Frisbee before the fire twirling started … I’m not sure what they call it, but there were two people who were apparently really good at twirling fire and gave a display to everyone. After that there was much dancing. So much dancing. Too much, some might say, and I didn’t get to bed until around 3am.

I also slept through a handful of pages from the telescope, but luckily some of the other SPTers were able to handle the problems.

Today, one of the members of EHT (the Event Horizon Telescope, which is a conglomeration of receivers at different sites around the world — one of them being the South Pole Telescope) arrived at Pole. Over the next few weeks he will be setting up the EHT receiver and training Geoff and I how to operate, calibrate and observe during the 2020 EHT observing run (likely late April, I think?).

Random thought of the day: As I was walking back from the telescope to the station, I thought about how different the walk is going to be in the dark. I kind of wish that there was a day/night cycle and that there wouldn’t be a few days of twilight so the change could be more abrupt. I imagine my mental idea of the South Pole will change greatly after the winter, and 6 months of darkness.

Random song stuck in my head: Travelin’ Soldier by The Dixie Chicks

Sorry I don’t have pictures or interesting stories to tell. I could bore you with updates on learning to rebuild computing machines, or how to track down bugs in the scheduling code at 1am when the telescope pages you to tell you something is f***ed up… but I think I’ll just let it go for now.

Cheers!