Jan 26th: Day 27 on Ice.

The temperatures have been slowly dropping. It’s now around -20F , but luckily the winds have been pretty still. Usual wind chills are around -40F.

It’s been a busy week. Our winter-over alternate, Maclean, arrived along with the EHT folks. This brings the number of SPT’ers up to 10! We’ve done lots of trainings, including rebooting computer systems, swapping in backup machines and EHT overviews. We also spent a lot of time showing some of the new-to-Pole SPT’ers the ins-and-outs of the telescope.

This week was also busy because we had to get ready for the South Pole Telescope open house/ wine and cheese party, lovingly known as Ladies’ Night. We estimated that this was the 10th almost-annual SPT Ladies’ Night, and is one of the most anticipated events of the year. We host telescope tours and slow dancing during the early parts of the night, and then a full on dance party later in the evening.

It is also encouraged to dress up for this event in some sense of the phrase… Some men on station like to wear dresses and there is a make-up get together beforehand. I had to scrounge around the skua shack to find something suitable to wear. I’m not sure I did, though. The only dress in there was far too small for me and I had to cut it in half just to fit in. I got a lot of comments saying that I looked like Peter Pan; so there’s that.

The transformation from lab space to party space took a few days, but it turned out really nice. The night started with telescope tours, including a nice open-roof viewing of some telescope scans.

People then began to mingle outside of the dance floor, enjoying fine wines, cheeses and an impressive assortment of chocolates.

The night was a huge success, with lots of attendees and lots of dancing. Opening the roof and watching the telescope scan was a great spectacle for many people and they seemed to really enjoy getting up-close to the telescope. Ladies’ Night musical selection also went over really well, thanks to Brad’s DJing skills and an effort to select nearly all female artists.

There are only about 3 weeks left of summer. Many of the rest of the winter-overs have arrived this past week, and I think we start a winter-over team building session next week (or within the next two weeks). After the three weeks is up, we will be only ~40 on station for the next 9 months…. The past 3 weeks here have flown by, but I haven’t even been here for a month yet. Hard to understand what 9 months will be like. And then there’s the fact that it will be dark for 6 of those 9 months… weird.