April 21st – Day 111 on Ice

Weather: It has been really windy and relatively warm for the past week. Average winds have been around 20-30mph for the day with gusts up to 40mph. Temperatures have been hanging above -60F for the most part but with the high winds it’s been below -100F windchill.

With the increased winds, there has been a lot of blowing snow so unfortunately I can’t really get any good pictures of anything. The moon is waning and also getting ready to set so it’s getting darker! Walking out to the telescope is pretty awesome in high winds and blowing snow and I can barely see one flag ahead of me. I need to use my red headlamp now, but even with that it’s really difficult to see the drifting snow and sastrugi which make for great tripping hazards. I feel like a drunkard stumbling around out there.

This past weekend was a 2 day weekend for the contractors, which means that there are a lot more social events than usual. One of the fun events was on Monday we watched The Sandlot, and then played wiffle ball afterwards!

I also taught my first lecture of my Astronomy and Cosmology course on Sunday evening. The topic was a bit metaphysical, and I called it ‘The Cosmic Perspective’ which was just describing the size and age of the universe and how insignificant the Earth is and how short-lived all of human civilization has been compared with cosmological processes (for example the Milky Way rotates only once in 270 million years). Next week we’ll discuss physics and astronomical measurements and how we actually observe astronomical objects and measure things like distances, size, etc.

I’ve also been chugging away at this one route in the climbing gym, and have almost fully completed it (I’ve completed each move, but haven’t done it all together). I’ve been filming my failures so hopefully soon I’ll have a whole progression to show culminating in me actually completing the entire route in one go.

Other than that, I’ve been getting more comfortable running on the treadmill (though it still sucks!). We’ve been discussing doing another movie trilogy walk, perhaps Indiana Jones this time? Maybe Back to the Future? something… but something not quite as long as the LOTR!

Work has been slow (in a good way) due to the cooperation of the telescope. We haven’t been woken up in the middle of the night in a while! My analysis has slowed down as I’ve been writing my lectures and exercising frequently and playing sports in the evenings and trying to get some reasonable amount of sleep. Currently I’m working on understanding what the magnitude of the leakage of temperature into polarization is for our different detectors. One of the major purposes of the telescope is to measure the polarization of the CMB, which has a much much smaller signal than the temperature (or total intensity). So it’s good to know for sure that you don’t have some T signal leaking into the polarization, or P, signal… and if you do it’s really good to know exactly what that leakage looks like!

The food is still great!

Cheers,

Allen