Long Overdue Gondola Update

A long overdue update on the Spider gondola. It has a new computer box, the new Pinhole Sun Sensor (PSS) array, chicken wire to protect from the reaction wheel, the rotating star cameras mounted, and a cart with really big casters. And more importantly, it scans! […]

Air Shark!

On my Saturday in Princeton, I went into work with the expectation of a quiet day, wrapping up some loose ends. Little did I know that in Sasha’s trunk lurked a nascent (boxed) form of inflatable air shark. While fridges were cycling, we saw it changed into its true form: full-blown terror of the, um, hallways. (Not for outdoor use.) […]

Princeton Highbay

I spent the week before last in Princeton working on installing the housekeeping system for the flight cryostat. Once things started working, I took a photography break and explored the highbay a little. […]

Cambridge

These are some pictures taken while in Cambridge in July for a Spider simulations meeting. I’m playing with using flickr for photos on the site, and had already posted these. Thus, they make for a good test post. Test post! […]

Gluing

Juan loves gluing carbon fiber tubes so much, that he makes sure he gets to keep on doing it. Yesterday he, Jamil, and Steve (our last remaining, though soon-to-depart, summer undergrad) started gluing what will eventually become Spider’s sun shields.

This time they’re doing one end of the first series of tubes. The other end […]

Beard Award

Because Elio is in town (Tristan too), he was able to bring me my award certificate from the BIBLICAL category of the 7th Continent (that’s Antarctica) Beard and Moustache Competition. My flight home was the evening of the contest, so I was unable to retrieve the certificate myself. Enjoy! (I know I do.) […]

Floaty Orangeness

A large bit of orangeness floatied its way around the highbay today. Taking the form of a blimp leftover from Boomerang, Mathew (a summer student) inflated it to test its lifting capacity. Such balloons are used to fly calibration sources so they can be 1km away and still 20° above the horizon. […]

Hanging Spider, etc

While Juan has made a couple posts about the AzEl Gadget (pointed mount for a test cryostat), I’ve been neglecting Spider and the highbay for a long while now. Then yesterday, when we finally suspended Spider for a functioning pivot, I got a good excuse to stop my neglect. […]

Awesome Boxâ„¢

Last Friday I finally got all the parts for my new “Awesome Box” for housing a single BLASTBus2 motherboard. I think it’s pretty cute with its mini-backplane, and it’s all crammed into a box that couldn’t be much smaller. So I got out my camera, and today I’m dusting off my blogging hat. Enjoy! […]

Antarctica 2010-2011: Panoramas

In addition to the “title page” images”, one other already existing set of images I really like are the panoramas. I have recollected them into this post. […]