Nov 29th – Day 19 at Pole

Wow, it’s been 11 days since I last posted. Whoops.

Weather has warmed up a lot! We had a few record daily high temps (around -8F) but are now back down to -25F. Weather has been really calm the past few days too, so I could get some semi-comfortable runs in outside.

Biggest news is the departure of our final winterover from last year! He left for greener pastures today. It is now just the three of us – Me and the two upcoming SPT winterovers… I guess this means I need to remember how to run the damn thing!

The 2nd biggest news is that we did our first pole run of the season (or last run of the two previous WOs’ season)!

which was also the first time I got to see my year’s pole marker (designed by my WO partner Geoff Chen) in action!

A completely random event that happened was a world record attempt. The record to be set? The southern-most game of musical chairs… Turnout was pretty great for the event (I was surprised, but I guess it’s early summer and people are still eager to do things). I did not participate since I don’t really like the idea of a “southern-most” world record; I mean, everything we do here is the “southern-most” version of that thing. It was pretty entertaining to watch, though.

We had a great Thanksgiving dinner and fun afterparty. I volunteered in the dish pit most of the day / evening which was fun. Can’t go wrong blasting music and cleaning dishes!

So far the summer is going great. We have several turnover/maintenance tasks left to do and will be shifting to observe our summer field in a few weeks (in order to avoid sun contamination).

Other than that, not much has changed. We haven’t had many flights in or out so the station population is about the same; minus the handful of people who left today.

One thing to look forward to here is the Solar eclipse, which will be ~90% visible from Pole on December 4th. Below is an animation I made of what the eclipse will look like from here; the sizes of the circles are actually pretty accurate to the real apparent sizes of the Sun and Moon.

I’m not sure I’ll be able to get any good pictures with my cell phone, but there are plenty of people here who have nice camera equipment, so hopefully I can steal some of those photos :).

All for now. Hope everyone up north is having a nice transition into winter!