Weather: It has been oddly warm for the past few days. Temperatures up near -35F, with winds 15-20mph. With the wind came clouds and warmer temperatures. The moon is supposed to rise today, though the visibility is so poor that we can’t see it yet. Hopefully the clouds clear soon and the cold weather comes back!
This past week was busy (as each week seems to be… though I don’t know what I actually get done). I had another Astronomy lecture on Sunday, this one about massive star core collapse supernovae, type 1a supernovae (which occur after accretion of mass onto a white dwarf), and black holes. I tried to introduce general relativity in a few slides… not sure I succeeded :).
I ran 42 miles on the treadmill this week as per my training schedule. I still hate running on the treadmill but it seems to go by pretty fast while watching Seinfeld. I haven’t run beercans in probably a month, so I’m getting close to 200 behind where I should be. I also haven’t gone out to the climbing gym in nearly a month… it just takes a while to suit up and go out and come back, and I’ve been concentrating mostly on running which takes quite a few hours each week.
Seems like I don’t ever have the attention span to get work done here. I’m pretty tired all of the time so things that take brain power (like my data analysis projects) are suffering. Currently I’m looking again at the polarization calibration stuff, and trying to get it in a finalized form for a paper that is being written about the state of the telescope instrumentation.
Mid-winter is in only 3 weeks! After that it’s only 3 months until the sun comes back up! So far the time has flown by, and I’ve enjoyed my time here (especially since the world is falling apart this year). Hopefully the next few months go by just as smoothly!
Allen's South Pole Winter-Over 2020 (+) 