Thanksgiving in Antarctica

Sled ride My flight brought be down just in time for the base’s Saturday Thanksgiving feast (because in McMurdo, all celebrations take place on Saturday). But, naturally, we didn’t take the day off. Instead we were busy preparing for Monday, on which we plan to go out to the dance floor to test pointing sensors. (And in preparation for which everyone else had been working very hard prior to my arrival.) I’m glad to be back at LDB. […]

Arrival (of Steve…everyone else had already arrived)

Ivan the Terra Bus Perfectly on schedule (somehow), my flight to the ice took place yesterday. I’m back! (And no longer feeling a little left out, as the last to arrive.) We’ll see if maybe Tristan wants to continue making posts. More photos are better. […]

Christchurch

Pink rose Since leaving Princeton and Spider, I have been heading down to Antarctica for the BLAST-Pol flight campaign (on which Tristan has already made several posts in my absence). Because everything ran on schedule (somehow), I spent only one full day in Christchurch: gear issuing in the morning, and a bit of exploring in the afternoon. The day was spent with a group of people from the WISSARD project, who had been staying at the same hotel as me. Being biologists, they were full of fun information at the botanical gardens. […]

Life in the High Bay

I think we have hit the stage in the high bay where we are settling into a good working grove and getting a little goofy. Then again maybe I’m just taking goofy pictures. […]

Things are coming together

We bunch of stuff happened yesterday so I’m just posting the photos with info in the titles. To sum up, Nat scanned the gondola around a bunch orthoganalizing the gyros, Juan started building his side scope, we mounted the cryostat on the gondola, and much silliness occurred. […]

Driving back from LDB

I have been working late a lot this last week and we got some amazing views driving back from LDB late at night. These where all take between 11:00 and 11:30 when the sun was behind some clouds and giving amazing light. You also get this amazing effect of snow being blown across the ground and looking like water flowing. […]

Cryostat Tests

So I haven’t posted for a couple days because I have been running around doing a bunch of cryostat tests. Well everything checked out and we are getting ready to mount the cryostat on the gondola, so I have a few minutes to post things. […]

The Rest of My Time at Princeton

Solder party - with Spider T-shirts! After putting the gondola together, we spent some time preparing for electrical integration with the cryostat. Mostly this took the form of a "solder party" in which we made cables for several days. There are some other random bits too. These photos sat on my computer for a little while before I got around to posting them. […]

BLAST’s Cookie Monsters

BLAST has long had a cookie monster buy, Elio has made him self a friend. […]

Solar Eclipse from LDB and Marks and his mirror

Hello again, So there was a solar eclipse yesterday but it was more then a little cloudy in that it was snowing. It looked like it was going to clear up just in time to see it, so we shot some pictures, but we either missed it, or the 1% eclipse was just not visible, then again the pictures look fairly nice. (let me know if you can see anything). […]