Weather: Temps near -70F, windchill near -120F ; winds are expected to pick up this week, which will make for a lot of blowing snow and poor visibility.
We are now entering ‘Nautical Twilight’ which means that we can begin to see planets and bright stars (weather permitting). The figure below shows a pie-chart of the light conditions at South Pole.
We’re in a neat position right now, where about 1/4 of the sky is light up by the sun still but then you can see the shadow of the Earth progressively darkening the rest. Bright planets like Saturn, Jupiter (and slightly less-bright Mars) are easy to spot. Even some high elevation bright stars can be seen now.
We’ve been observing pretty smoothly for the past few days, although there was a telescope pager alert at 3:30 am last week that we had to get up and go out to the telescope for. It was an easy fix, but a bit of a mysterious and yet-unknown cause. Such is the life of being on-call 24hrs… if the telescope wants to wake you up, it will!
Yesterday, Zach, Nathan and I did something… fun?
We walked into Mordor… by that I mean we watched all 3 extended versions of The Lord of The Rings in a row, while walking/running on treadmills. It took us about 11.5 hours and I ended up going a total of 41.4 miles!
We decided to try and run during running/fighting action scenes and walk the rest. My legs and feet were aching by the end… I hate treadmills. But we had a good time.. up next — all 8 Harry Potter’s? all the Ocean’s movies? Pirates of the Carribeans? who knows! but needless to say I’ll need a day or two to recover.
Allen's South Pole Winter-Over 2020 (+) 
You walked almost as much as the Fellowship did!
LikeLike
According to fan fiction, we were only about 1740 miles off… though we did it in 11.5 hours, not 13 months!
LikeLike