May 23rd – Day 143 on Ice

Weather: With the moon down, we are in full astronomical darkness. The weather for the past few days has been very clear, calm and cold. The milky way is visible in it’s full glory and auroras have been really intense. Temperatures have been consistently below -80F and winds around 10mph.

Yesterday, I laid down on the ice for about 10minutes and just stared up at the stars. It’s incredible to see not only the stars, and the enhanced brightness of the galactic plane, but also the dark regions which are obscured by dust — something I have never seen with my own eyes! It was also awesome to see the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds (which are dwarf galaxies that orbit the Milky-Way)… the names now make sense, as they look like clouds to the naked eye.

Since I don’t have a nice camera for taking aurora photos, or timelapses, I decided to scrape the live feed cameras and save images to make my own timelapse. These cameras are high gain (and high noise) but we had some amazing auroras yesterday which I captured and put into the timelapse below.

NOAA webcam looking at the station

Station webcam, looking at DSL

The NOAA webcam is much nicer than the station one, and so the stars pop out much nicer. The bright star you can see moving across the screen is Sirius. Auroras begin to explode in the NOAA cam around 11:30 and the green light can be seen in the DSL cam. These timelapses were constructed using pictures taken in 5s intervals. The speed is a few minutes per second, which is a little too fast to see the SPT scanning cleanly, but better for seeing the celestial rotation.

This weekend is a 2day weekend for the contractors, which means lots of activities going on, mostly movies. On Sunday we have a very special double feature of Frozen and Frozen 2! On Monday we have a plan to watch Space Jam, and then play basketball with the hoops dropped down to 8ft! I’ll finally be able to touch rim… and maybe dunk!

Next week I have a scheduled call with my high school physics teacher and the school’s chapter of the Science National Honor Society to talk about my work at the South Pole and how I got here. I also need to present some work on the polarization calibration analysis I’ve been doing at the SPT3G collaboration’s analysis meeting. My astronomy lecture is pushed back a week since this weekend is so full of events ( and I haven’t started writing the next lecture anyway, which will be on stellar deaths, supernovae, pulsars, and black holes), so I’ll have to do that next week as well… another week of not getting enough work done. Such is life.

Cheers!