Weather: Colder, -30F with windchills nearing -55F. We did have a day or two of high winds and clouds a few days ago but generally the weather has been nice; sunny with few clouds and light winds.
We are now less than two weeks from station close; nominally on Feb 14th. We had our first winter-over meeting where we met the station manager and talked about the winter ahead. Wayne White is this year’s manager (and was also last year’s manager, and will be the first person to be the winter manager at the South Pole Station 3 times).
Some of the other SPTers leave later this week, and we are preparing to finalize the summer work and return things to a stable configuration that Geoff and I will maintain for the winter. We did our last EHT observation yesterday (a mock VLBI schedule — where we pretend we are part of the extended telescope network and observe sources on a tight time schedule). We will turn off their electronics, and cryogenics until later in March when we do the real observations.
Allen's South Pole Winter-Over 2020 (+) 