May 03 – Day 123 on Ice

Weather: The weather has been crap most of the past week. Highly variable cloud coverage and high winds made for poor data quality as well as poor visibility. Today the weather has cleared and winds dropped. With the clearing clouds, temperatures have dropped nearly 20C, down to -60C with winds subsiding to 10 knots. We broke 2 wind speed records last month – 39 and 44 mph gusts on the 28th and 30th respectively!

I have been extremely busy the past few days. An interesting plot I had made a few months ago has been dug up and stirred up some interest with the point-source folks. The gist is that I was looking at the brightness of point sources over time (since we look at the same region of the sky over and over, we get a measurement of the brightness of the sources in that field each time). There was apparently a source which shows a high degree of flaring in the Fermi (gamma-ray telescope) data over the last year, and which is also in our field. Not much is known about the mechanism which energizes the source, so it’s helpful to measure the energy over a broad range of wavelengths… SPT observes at wavelengths of 1 mm, so it’s very different from the high-energy gamma rays measured by Fermi.

I’ve also been trying to update some code which allows us to calibrate our pointing offsets in post-processing of field scans… essentially looking at the locations of point sources in our maps and finding the deviation from their known locations, then applying a correction before making the full field maps. This needs updating to more heavily filter the atmospheric noise (since the weather has been really bad recently, it’s become clear that we need to remove as much atmosphere as possible).

I’ve also been trying to write a reasonably intelligent astronomy lecture about the formation and evolution of the solar system… which I gave this evening, and probably failed to sound interested or intelligent (I don’t particularly care about our solar system). We also had a small hiccup in our power plant last night, cause a brief brownout. This meant that we had to go out to the telescope and make sure all systems were operating correctly, and get the data collection back on track… I haven’t even run or gone to the gym in like 3 days! There are just not enough hours in the day!

I feel a weight lifted off my shoulders after giving the lecture, even though I don’t think it was particularly interesting. Now I can focus on making a presentation for Tuesday’s analysis telecon about point source fluxes, trying to get a better offline-pointing model analysis running, and figuring out what to do with my measured polarization leakage (that I found like 2 weeks ago but haven’t done anything with), and not slacking on my exercise… well on the bright side, Saturday’s dinner was surf and turf — beef tenderloin, and shrimp with asparagus and RedLobster-style cheddar biscuits!!