September 8th – Day 250 on Ice

Posted byAllen FosterPosted inUncategorized

Weather: Warmer, around -65F with light winds and some clouds.

Today the winds were light enough for me to brave the cold for an outdoor run. Went about 3 miles before I was worried about frostbite on parts of my face and neck that were slightly exposed. Beautiful to see the sun start showing itself again, and really convenient for walking/running outside now that I can see things!

Panorama from the front of DSL. Though it still looks dark out, the eyes are amazingly able to adjust to make it appear quite bright outside!

Horizon shines with light behind the BICEP Array telescope. You can just barely see the Earth’s shadow beginning on the top right of the image.

This weekend was a 2 day weekend due to the Labor Day holiday. One of the big events was watching the Big Lebowski, and many people showed up in robes to drink white russians and watch the movie.

Some work related things: We began observing some planets (Saturn and Jupiter) in order to measure our telescope’s beam shape. This is important when calculating things like power spectra of the CMB because it tells you how light propagates from the sky to our detectors through our optical system. Although planet images with a 1 arcminute resolution camera (i.e. SPT) are not all that interesting (because the planets are smaller than one beam size), here is an over-exposed map of Saturn that we took a few days ago.

There are some dark stripes across the image because the filtering mask I used when map making was too small for the source. The structure you see there is not due to Saturn itself, but is due to optical effects of the telescope, lenses and detectors.

One thought on “September 8th – Day 250 on Ice”

  1. Thanks Allen for the update. Glad to know that you are getting some natural light – must be good for the soul to see evidence that the sun will in fact reappear soon.

    Like

    Reply

Leave a comment

Design a site like this with WordPress.com
Get started