The temperatures have been steadily decreasing. We’re now around -35F with windchill down near -60F. It has been nice and sunny though, which is a plus!
This week has been busy with EHT training, and mock observations. In order for the EHT receiver to observe, we have to install special secondary and tertiary mirrors on the telescope cabin which pick-off the beam from the primary 10m dish. This means that we’re outside on top of the receiver cabin for about an hour each time we set up or take down the EHT optics (which we’ve done twice and need to do one more time next week).
I still haven’t started wearing my full ECW (extreme cold-weather) gear yet, so I got pretty cold while up there… maybe next week will be a good time to start wearing at least the boots.
Once the optics are installed, we can begin to observe sources in order to calibrate the EHT camera’s pointing offsets and make sure that the signal chain is doing what we expect. During the real observations, we will want to calibrate pointing on sources nearby the target source; but these past two days have been to use sources semi-evenly distributed around the sky.
Below are some photos from Brad Benson during the optics installation process (the internet was not cooperating, so I’ve had to reduce many of these images’ resolutions to the suggested ‘thumbnail’ size…) :
I also took a head-mounted video of the 2nd installation we did a few days later. It’s about an hour long, so there’s no hope of uploading the entire thing, but I might try to cut out clips, or photos showing climbing the ladder, and looking out from the boom.
Allen's South Pole Winter-Over 2020 (+) 