Dec 5th – Day 25 at Pole

Lots of stuff going on. Where to begin.

Weather has been super nice; clear and relatively cold for this time of year (around -30F).

I got my COVID booster shot a few days ago – that sucked. Felt just as bad as my 2nd Pfizer shot, but hey now I’m boosted.

We had our first science lecture of the year, hosted by the BICEP collaboration. Weird that they’re on Thursdays this year — kind of ruins the alliteration of Sunday Science Lecture… There was great attendance, and SPT will be giving the 2nd lecture of the year; either next week or the following depending on the COVID leveling of the station (we’re expected to have some flights in early in the week next week).

BICEP also had an open house tour this weekend which was neat because they had one of their receivers opened up so people could see the insides of the telescope.

The most exciting thing this weekend was the Solar eclipse. We didn’t get totality here at Pole, but we got 90% obscuration. 10% of the Sun is still pretty damn bright, so it didn’t get dark, but it did get noticeably dimmer (and 10F colder) during the peak of the eclipse. Several methods were used for viewing the eclipse; we didn’t have many proper eclipse glasses (maybe one or two pairs total) but we did have lots of welding masks and myself and one of the SPT winterovers set up one of the station’s optical telescopes for projecting the sun onto a surface for indirect viewing. I’m currently uploading a timelapse of the telescope projecting (don’t get too excited…) but here’s a still from early on in the event.

Near the maximum obscuration I went out to SPT for photos (the SPT winterovers were hard at work setting up some spectacular photos that I will be excited to share when they’re ready)! Less spectacular is this selfie I attempted to take during the max:

Well that’s about all the excitement I can handle for one week. Stay tuned for my crappy timelapse and actual good photos / timelapse that I steal from others.

Gotta start working on the SPT science lecture (by that I mean piecing together old talks and adding in new science – yes I’m going to talk mostly about transients and AGN monitoring :P)