Weather: The temperatures have been all over the place. It warmed up to nearly -40C with clear skies and low winds which was unusual and very welcome! Then last night it dropped back down to -60C and the winds today have picked up to nearly 20mph. With the increased winds, warmer air from further up in the atmosphere (there is a temperature inversion here at Pole) gets mixed down, so we’re back up to -53C and climbing.

It is definitely getting dark. There is still some sunlight refracting enough through the atmosphere to get here, but my phone isn’t quite capable of showing that. In the panorama above, you can see the Moon, and the red lights from MAPO, the Station and the Ice Cube Lab (ICL) in order from left to right… but that’s it.

Another wonderful surprise came with the clear, still weather…. AURORAS!!! Which decided to show up for 20 minutes or so right as I was walking out to the Climbing Gym!

Having spent 2 months here with only the winter crew, and after a week or so of closed-windows and semi-darkness outside I think I’m coming to find the South Pole a really nice place. It’s weird to think that when I deployed, my friends and family thought that I would be going to the most socially isolated place in the world, with death constantly outside my doors…. and in some sense that view has completely flipped. I’m now in the safest place on Earth (as far as the COVID pandemic is concerned) and am one of the least socially isolated people I know (with daily interactions with most of the 42 people on station).

Lucky for us, the 42 here at South Pole get along remarkably well… so far (we’ll see in 6 months!). But everyone is appreciative of the station, and its amenities; the Galley staff that cooks us 3 meals a day, 6 days a week; the weight room with treadmills and other cardio equipment make staying active easy; the climbing gym which provides me an extra challenge; the gymnasium which allows for social sports such as basketball, volleyball, soccer and even roller hockey (in my case, since I brought equipment to play)… There is nothing here to complain about. Even the telescope I’m in charge of operating is working smoothly with remarkably few hiccups in the past few months!

I write this not only because I think the South Pole is severely misunderstood by people who have never been here, but also because it will be interesting to compare my feelings of being isolated here as the year continues. Sure I can’t leave until November… but why would I want to? (OK, so I have a fiance, and friends and family that I miss… but perhaps having low empathy helps? Certainly I can keep myself busy enough to suppress the longing feelings of home.) Doing only things that I want to do on a daily basis is spoiling. I never have to worry about other peoples’ schedules. I can work as long as I want, or go to the gym or play sports or climb for 4 hours in the afternoon if I want. I can stay up late and sauna, or go to bed early and read. I can sleep in and miss breakfast… though I love breakfast, so I hate doing that…

It will be interesting to see what time does to my South Pole utopia.. and how returning to real-life feels after the ignorance I can feign while here.

Weather: Last night the weather was surprisingly clear for how windy it was. Wind speeds are up around 15-20 mph. Temperatures stay relatively warm, around -70F.

The moon made a very stunning appearance yesterday. Full and low on the horizon, it looked immensely massive. Quite a few stars were also visible in the darkening sky overhead as the clouds cleared. I even saw a satellite passing by while outside during one of my sauna cycles. The darkness and full moon made for an odd sensation that I don’t think I’ve felt since I’ve been here. It reminds me of the fascination I have with the night sky and with astronomy in general… It still boggles my mind that there is a massive spherical object orbiting us millions of miles away; like a slow silent dance that I somehow don’t often notice back home.

It’s amazing how well the human eye is adapted to the light conditions we have on Earth. I could make out the structures on the surface of the moon, while still seeing the dimmer foreground structures (the snow, the station, etc.).. but the camera just does not do it justice. The low light levels make the ccd readout noise stand out, and the image becomes grainy.

I got a 2.5 hour tour of the Atmospheric Research Lab last night, which was a bit longer than I thought it would be! But it didn’t seem long- lots of details of the many atmospheric monitoring experiments here, as well as a good bit of detail about the Dobson spectrophotometers that attempt to measure ozone levels using the sunlight reflected off of the Moon!

I have also begun working on my lectures for the Astronomy and Cosmology course I will be teaching this year… I’m thinking about starting the first lecture ~2 weeks from now, and the first lecture will be about “Cosmic Perspective” and understanding the size and age of our universe, as well as local perspective – that being the South Pole – which is a unique place on Earth for astronomy.

Weather: Temps near -70F, windchill near -120F ; winds are expected to pick up this week, which will make for a lot of blowing snow and poor visibility.

We are now entering ‘Nautical Twilight’ which means that we can begin to see planets and bright stars (weather permitting). The figure below shows a pie-chart of the light conditions at South Pole.

We’re in a neat position right now, where about 1/4 of the sky is light up by the sun still but then you can see the shadow of the Earth progressively darkening the rest. Bright planets like Saturn, Jupiter (and slightly less-bright Mars) are easy to spot. Even some high elevation bright stars can be seen now.

We’ve been observing pretty smoothly for the past few days, although there was a telescope pager alert at 3:30 am last week that we had to get up and go out to the telescope for. It was an easy fix, but a bit of a mysterious and yet-unknown cause. Such is the life of being on-call 24hrs… if the telescope wants to wake you up, it will!

Yesterday, Zach, Nathan and I did something… fun?

We walked into Mordor… by that I mean we watched all 3 extended versions of The Lord of The Rings in a row, while walking/running on treadmills. It took us about 11.5 hours and I ended up going a total of 41.4 miles!

We decided to try and run during running/fighting action scenes and walk the rest. My legs and feet were aching by the end… I hate treadmills. But we had a good time.. up next — all 8 Harry Potter’s? all the Ocean’s movies? Pirates of the Carribeans? who knows! but needless to say I’ll need a day or two to recover.

Weather: The weather has cleared nicely today, and winds have slowed a bit. Temperature has dropped to -80F, with winds nearing 10mph. I’m not sure what the windchill is but probably nearing -120F.

The sky is getting dark; the first planets and bright stars have become visible. It’s strange. It is finally feeling different here. It feels like late evening when I go out to the telescope, although I generally go out around mid day. Even with the weather clearing, only a handful of bright sources can be seen – probably Jupiter, Saturn and some bright stars at high elevation. We are all waiting for total darkness to arrive, so we can see the Milky Way in it’s full glory, and see auroras galore!

I’ve been spending some more time in the climbing gym, trying to get a certain route – green with black stripes. One difficult part of the route is the small, crimpy handholds which I’m not particularly good at holding.

The climbing gym has been staying toasty warm, and is a nice place to work out as well as climb; it’s less crowded than the gym on station and you can blast music and sing without fear of being judged! The only annoying part is walking there and back through the cold!

I also do some work sometimes, too.

I sometimes even go out to the telescope to do rounds, or to grease or fix something. My shoes don’t like the cold too much though, and are starting to crack.

I’ve been on the continent for 3 of the total 10 months. Time has gone by quickly, between work, gym, climbing, sports and movie nights, I’ve been able to keep very busy. I even find it hard to read for an hour before I get too tired and fall asleep. With the internet now up from 11:30 – 3:30pm that also takes up some time during the day; mostly waiting for things to load/ writing my blog/ uploading videos, etc.

On the windy days, blowing snow obscures the horizon, and dims the residual light from the atmosphere. It’s beginning to get dark. People have seen the first sighting of a planet; though I’m not sure which one… probably Jupiter or Saturn.

While it has become much more difficult to run outside, with all the snow drifts and with the increasing (decreasing?) cold, I still generally run out to SPT when I do rounds. With the dimming light, increased winds and cold, foggy goggles make it very difficult to see ahead, and to see large snow drifts. This often results in me crashing through them… must be a real treat to see me trying to run blind out there. Taking the goggles off is unwise, even with only a slight breeze! During winter the time to frostbite for exposed skin is most-always less than 5 minutes, which is shorter than the time it takes me to run from the station to SPT.

Never fear, though. One can always run stairs in the beer can to keep in shape! It’s currently a balmy -70F in there and hey, there’s no wind!

Today, however is “Moving Movie Monday”, which a few of the guys and I decided should be a thing. We get into the gym and run on the 3 treadmills while watching some movie about running, or climbing, or have some kind of exercise-orientation. Today we’re going to watch Maru, which is a mountain-climbing movie.

Then after that is dinner, and then basketball at 7pm. And if I have it in me after that, I’ll go to the gym and lift some heavy things up and put them back down a few times.

Cheers!

Weather: The clouds cleared up for a few hours late last night into early morning this morning. Temperatures and wind stayed nearly the same; 15-20mph winds and temps near -75F.

Weather changes moods… or at least it changes the feel of a place. Yesterday the high winds blew snow off the ground and created a grey/blue light that made the station seem gloomy and foreboding, exactly what you might expect from a horror movie or at least a movie set in some cold location.

As quickly as the snow can blow in, the winds can settle and the clouds can clear if only for a few hours. This morning at 3am it happened to be lovely and look more like a brisk sunrise with beautiful yellow and pink colors.

These two photos were taken about 12 hours apart, but look like two different worlds! The only similar thing between them is that it was COLD taking both of them!

Weather: Windy and overcast, temperatures near -65F, winds up near 20mph keeping the windchill down below -100F. The pressure altitude has been pretty high over the last few days; above 11000 ft.

We got our winter-over numbers yesterday; I’m number 1581. This means that (including this year) there have only been about 1600 people to have wintered at the South Pole. Some more facts and population breakdown can be found here:

https://www.southpolestation.com/trivia/wo.html

It’s a pretty humbling number. I’m one of only 0.00002% of the population of people on Earth to winter-over at the South Pole. To put that into perspective, THIS YEAR 891 people reached the summit of Mt. Everest, and a total of 565 people have flown in space!

So far, our winter-over group has not had any problems and seems to be a tightknit group of respectable folks! Hopefully I feel the same way in 6months… I suppose they don’t call it ‘Stabby September’ for nothin 😛

With the disappearance of the Sun, snow is starting to build up on the outsides of the buildings. This really gives the quintessential ‘cold place’ movie look. It feels almost surreal, looking at the buildings, like I’m on the set of such a movie. But as the station manager likes to say “There’s death outside”, which is really true as windchills are consistently below -100F, even in full ECW you feel the cold begin to seep in before too long.

Today we had an Emergency Response drill, with all-hands participating. Things seemed to go well, and in the debrief we were commended on how smooth it went. Unfortunately, since I missed the fire and medical training before coming to the ice, I was not able to be on either of those teams (though, I probably wouldn’t be able to handle medical team… I hate hospitals!). I am now on the logistics team, which helps provide the fire or medical teams with anything they need; in today’s case we provided a spill kit to contain and clean up the hypothetical spill which caused the emergency.

Tonight is volleyball night; which usually goes for about 2-3 hours and I inevitably dive too much and get skinned knees. Before then I have to get to the climbing gym to keep working on one of the routes, and to do my 7000lbs of lifting for the day. According to my marathon training schedule, I also have to run 2 miles today (which wouldn’t be hard, but I hate the damned treadmill so much!!).

Cheers!

Weather: It has been cold! Temperatures have dropped to nearly -90F as the weather cleared around sunset. Due to atmospheric refraction, the sun was still visible for a few days after official sunset, though today it’s so windy that blowing snow has reduced visibility to a quarter mile.

We had our station sunset dinner on Saturday March 21st. It was a wonderfully delicious dinner, and it was really nice to see everyone dressed up for the special occasion.

The galley staff worked really hard to make the evening special with a full sit-down dinner, appetizers and a 5 course meal! We even had a bar set up for pre-dinner cocktails.

Our main course for the night was steak grilled in duck fat, on top of cassoulet w/ duck confit and some greens from the greenhouse topped with a balsamic reduction! It was magnificent!!

After the dinner, the weather held out nicely so people could get pictures of the sunset (which takes quite a few days, as it turns out). I shot a short timelapse out the galley window sometime later in the night.

The colors of the sunset really show now. Lots of photos were taken over the past few days as people scramble to collect the last bit of sunlight for the next few months!

And of course, what would a sunset be without a selfie? ….

Besides the festivities of Sunset dinner, we also prepared SPT for winter observing; which is essentially the same thing as summer observing, but over a different part of the sky. We replaced a heater in the receiver cabin, which will hopefully keep it nice and warm during the cold of winter!

Hopefully soon enough I will be able to start posting aurora pics!

Cheers!

Weather: Cloudy, windy and blowing snow due to clear by dinner this evening, which will make for a beautiful sunset dinner. Temperature -70F, windchill -109F. Though the sun in technically below the horizon (nearly completely) the atmospheric refraction makes it look as though it is still fully above the horizon.

Tonight we prepare for a most delicious dinner, which the head chef woke up at 0130 this morning to begin preparing! We celebrate the Sun setting, and the last visibility of the Sun for 6 months (well… we have a few days of visibility left due to atmospheric refraction).

With the setting of the sun also comes the change-over to SPT3G winter observing (which is just a different 1500degree field of view, which would be contaminated by the Sun during the summer). We also have to beef up the heating in the receiver cabin of the telescope because it is getting quite cold and windy outside and we don’t want our electronics to get too cold.

Other than that, we continue work as normal.