On the 13th I took a visit to the Dark Sector Lab (DSL). (The “Dark Sector” is the name for the whole zone across the skiway, where the telescopes live. Dark, here, is used in the radio sense: things like walkie talkies and wireless ethernet aren’t allowed.) DSL houses Keck’s single-receiver predecessor BICEP2, and the […]
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On the 12th, I was witness to assembly of the insert for the second Keck receiver: K1. This numbering was the source of much consternation and bikeshedding at the daily breakfast meetings (especially because the first receiver was K3…or the zeroth receiver, depending who you ask…and maybe on the time of day too). Anyway, unlike […] On my second day at pole (11 Jan) the folks from Stanford (Walt, Sarah, and Jamie) received a box of Christmas treats. Most notably, this includes toy tops that make lights and play Axel F (the theme from Beverly Hills Cop!). A while ago (the 10th of January) I finally left for pole, after being delayed an extra weekend in McMurdo. I flew in an LC-130 (C-130 = Hercules, L = with skis!). During the flight, I spent a while crowded around the windows, with people taking pictures of the Transantarctic Mountains. Upon arrival, I spent […] Now that I’m mostly done at pole, I will post a few teaser pictures. The rest of posting will begin when I have better internet access and more free time. Enjoy! To get between the station and the telescopes, requires crossing the skiway. A few days ago I got caught at the beacon while an […] LDB is waiting. Matt and Elio are waiting for good weather near the gondola to fly out for recovery. Most of the riggers, techs, and the super-pressure balloon team are waiting for good weather to launch. Everyone is waiting to go home. I am waiting for a flight to pole, where I will spend a […] A few days ago, Don randomly showed up on his way to pole. Naturally, he visited us in the BLAST Ops room. Since he was there during one of those rare times when all six drivers were in the room, we had him take a mosaic panorama of us working. It was a pain to […] At 9:31 local time (NZDT) BLAST-Pol terminated. It now rests about 630km away, roughly along the South Pole Traverse. The gondola is at rest, we think it might be upright-ish, and systems still work good enough for us to guess that it might be upright-ish. So, at least for now, things are in good shape. […] Yesterday was a momentous day in our flight. We switched from our targets far from the sun—mostly what we call the “axehead” in Vela—and moved a region in Lupus very near the sun. To celebrate, Tristan danced to the region’s theme song: Duran Duran’s Hungry Like the Wolf. (Yes, all of our targets have theme […] Since launch I have not taken a lot of photos. This is partly because there’s less to take photos of, and partly because I’m too constantly busy for new photos. The upside of this is that it’s easy for me to catch up to the present (almost) in a single post. This starts the first […] |
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