Feb 15th – Day 47 on Ice, Day 1 of Winter

Weather: Cold, windy. Temps near -40F , winds nearing 20knts (~10m/s) ((~20mph)), wind chill -70F. Lots of snow blowing along the ground, lots of snow building up behind any structure. The sun continues it’s descent and is now at about 12 degrees elevation.

Today was a very smooth workday, observations went on without a hitch, I volunteered in the dish pit, we had an all-hands meeting to discuss the coming winter, and the work schedule, including house mouse (housekeeping) and dish pit, and we greased the elevation gears of the telescope.

Greasing gears on a windy day is kind of fun… for the first few minutes, until your goggles freeze up. -70F windchill will quickly do damage to any exposed skin, so I had to use this ridiculously giant hood to help block the wind.

Here’s a video of some blowing snow, just to show you how quickly snow can accumulate when there is something to obstruct it; even small chunks of ice will build up large drifts. Already today there were some ~2ft deep drifts along the walkway out to DSL — https://drive.google.com/file/d/1L53xLIrNuNzxyi8KVyxtUHlgUpaGhL8y/view?usp=sharing

As promised, here are the videos (super low-res, sorry) videos of the EHT optics installation from a few weeks ago. WARNING: Strong language, view discretion is advised :P, and also I did not edit the video at all, so there will be plenty of boring parts to skip over!

Installing the crane

Lifting the Secondary Mirror

Lifting the Tertiary Mirror

Installing the Secondary

Installing the Tertiary

Let me know if there are any problems with the videos.

Time to go watch The Thing (all 3 versions!!!).

Cheers!

One thought on “Feb 15th – Day 47 on Ice, Day 1 of Winter

  1. Thanks Allen for sharing the video’s. Very fascinating to see the work you are doing. Really appreciate getting a sense of the day to day adventure.

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