May 18th – Day 138 on Ice

Weather: There has been some overcast and generally high winds recently. The moon is waning so it’s been quite dark outside, but we haven’t had many clear days to see stars or aurora. With the slight cloud cover the temperatures have been relatively warm, between -45 and -50C.

Not much of note has happened in the past few days. The power plant thinks they’ve solved the problem that caused the brownout a few days ago, so they’re running some tests during the SPT downtime. If these tests are uneventful, they’ll call the problem solved and we’ll move back to full time observing with no interruptions.

We had a karaoke night this past weekend, which was…. interesting 🙂 . There was one person in particular who had a wonderful (and unexpected) twangy country voice! I basically lost my voice on the first song and sucked at everything else I attempted 😛

I gave my astronomy lecture on Sunday, this one was about stellar formation and evolution, mostly sun-like stars. Massive stars, supernovae and black holes will have to wait until next week.

We’re planning another movie trilogy marathon for this week. Probably will watch The Matrix trilogy. I’ve been doing more running (following a marathon training schedule), but I have been slacking on lifting, running beer cans, and going to the climbing gym… there just ain’t enough hours in the day! We’ve also been doing 2 nights of volleyball per week, each night usually lasts 3 hours.