HAPPY SUNRISE!
The weather has been pretty crappy recently, with high winds, clouds and low visibility. It cleared up nicely for our Sunrise dinner on Saturday, which was a nice assortment of dishes from the original 12 signatories of the Antarctic Treaty.
Today, the winds have reduced visibility so much that you can’t tell where the Sun even is (though in theory it should be halfway above the horizon right now).
We now have only about a month and a half before station open, so they have started grooming the runway! It’s strange to see it again. We also have to begin cleaning other berthing wings in case of need for quarantine during the summer. The first flight is scheduled to arrive November 4th, though I won’t be leaving until late November (for winter-over replacement).
One interesting work-related thing I can share is our Jupiter maps. We observe planets in order to understand our beam shape on the sky, and what kind of light leakage we (light from directions not exactly where the telescope is pointing). The interesting thing here, is that we can see some of Jupiter’s moons orbiting Jupiter! This actually makes the beam measurement more difficult, so it’s probably not great for us, but it’s neat to see anyway!
In the above plots I’ve masked out Jupiter so the moons are more obvious. The left map is from 09/07 and the right map from 09/20. You can see the moon on the left orbit behind Jupiter, while the right-most moon moves further out. The dark horizontal bands are just filtering artifacts from when I made these maps. The speckling you can see around Jupiter is the imperfect diffraction from our telescope optics.
Allen's South Pole Winter-Over 2020 (+) 