Dec 26th – Day 46 at Pole – Allen's South Pole Winter-Over 2020 (+)

Happy Holidays!

We had a busy but productive week practicing for our Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) run in April. This requires installing mirrors onto the telescope to divert light from the primary dish into the EHT receiver, which rides along next to the SPT one. We also have to use an entirely different set of electronics to power and run the EHT receiver. But we managed to get things running and do some practice observations, even observing some sources used for pointing calibrations.

This past weekend was also our Christmas celebration (which consists of a wonderfully delicious dinner, and whatever type of party people feel like having). This year we had a nice “variety show” which ranged from freestyle frisbee, to a solo rendition of the movie Die Hard, to a 4 person band concert.

We also hosted the annual Race Around the World event which is a ~2.5 mile run which encompasses every longitude (i.e. goes through every time zone). I was the “course director”, I guess you could call it, and did some flagging of the course before-hand, which may have given me some advantage since there was virtually no contrast at the time of the race, so you couldn’t even see the ground in front of you. It was a pretty tough run, with all the bumps and drops, and soft/hard snow. But in the end I think it was a great event and lots of people ran or walked, or unicycled or skiid or crawled… yes we had one person crawl the entire thing!

aaaannd they’re off! Start of the race around the world… was pretty much off-road and we couldn’t see any contrast on the ground! I’m the one in the santa hat (and all black).

Entering the backyard. I’m out in front, and would remain here for the rest of the run… perhaps knowing the course helped a bit 🙂

On my way out to the Dark Sector, ceremonial pole and SPoT 2 in the background.

Running out to Dark Sector; tourist camp in the background.

Heading out towards Ice Cube, about 2/3 through the run.

I don’t have the photos from the finish, since the person taking pictures out there hasn’t uploaded them yet, but hopefully I can get those soon. I ended up taking first with a time of 19:55 … I think it was about 2.4 miles (according to my watch), so it wasn’t the fastest running I’ve ever done, but apparently good enough!

The race took place on Christmas morning, and afterwards the weather cleared up to perfectly sunny and calm and a warm -5F , but I think we actually got some snow that morning! A white Christmas after all.

Today, we played a little football. Ok, a lot of football.. About 2 hours worth! But the weather was nice (-5F ish and low winds is about as nice as it gets here!).