March 4th – Day 65 on Ice

Weather: Cloudy, windy, low visibility. Temps near -45F, winds nearing 20mph. Sun is below 6.5 degrees. There are only 17 days until sunset!

I have finally actually googled how to import my timelapses from my phone to my computer… Unfortunately I still can’t upload videos to wordpress, so I’ll just keep posting them in Google Drive and linking here… it’s a little clunky, but seems to work.

I took some time lapses of the telescope moving in various locations

Telescope scanning from outside (taken a while back).

Telescope scanning from inside.

I’m standing in the blue building underneath the telescope that you can see in the previous video. The whole telescope rotates on a large bearing that is unfortunately out of view in this video (I’ll try to get a better one later..), and there is a brush seal with some insulation that mates with the stationary building.

Telescope scanning from inside Az-wrap

The Az wrap is a specially designed spring-like system where we send the readout cables, helium lines, thermometry, communications, etc, etc up into the receiver cabin, which is attached to the end of the boom on the telescope, and obviously moves with the telescope as we scan. I think the az-wrap as 1.5 rotations worth of play, and there is a limit switch inside the az-wrap which tells it when to “unwrap” so that it doesn’t destroy all of the cabling.

Yesterday I went to the climbing gym; to get there you have to go past a few ‘hypertats’ which are basically long, cylindrical, sturdy tents which are used in summer for station population overflow. Anyway, point being that they are spaced out by about 15 feet, and happen to be aligned with the wind, such that drifts build up in between them. After only 3 days of windy weather the drifts were already a few feet deep… that should make for a fun time mid-winter in the dark, trying to climb through feet of drifted snow…

After the climbing gym I went to dinner (lamb-stew!), then went to the gym and did some rowing. I then played “pickle ball” which is like a mini version of tennis, played with wooden paddles (about 2x the size of ping pong paddles) and a wiffle ball (and subtly different rules from either tennis or ping pong). It’s pretty fun, but definitely frustrating, like most other racquet sports are for me.

This morning was the SPT analysis telecon. I want to keep up with the haps up north, so I decided to call in. The Iridium (satellite system) phone is kind of unwieldy and the volume on it is pretty garbage, so I found the best way to call into telecons is to gently rest the phone on my shoulder…. the only problem is that the cord is like 2 feet long, so I’m basically slouching under the table to keep it near my ear.

Tonight is my off-night from sports; there is the “Polar Rollers” which is unicycling, but that ain’t my speed. So I will catch up on some cardio and try to get some miles on the treadmill. I need to watch a movie or something because I can’t stand running on the treadmill, and I get dizzy and claustrophobic in the small gym.

Cheers!