Once SPIDER finished, I spent a week at Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. The BICEP3 telescope deployed this year, and I went down to help integrate electronics for which I am the expert. While there, I made a mandatory visit to the two south poles: the geographic South Pole marker (which is updated annually), and the shiny looking ceremonial pole for photo ops. […]
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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. […] After taking over 13000 photographs—and posting almost 2500!—I have a lot to show for my trip to Antarctica. I would like to fulfill a request to come up with a set of my favourite images, but the task daunting. While that work is in progress, I do have one premade list of images I liked: […] On the 19th I left the pole, back to McMurdo and eventually home. In the previous evening, I had convinced a few people to join me spending some time building up warmth in the sauna and then dashing outside to the poles (and then right back to he sauna, of course). Back in McMurdo there […] The 18th was my last full day at the pole. So, that morning Don and I posed for the obligatory photos at the ceremonial and geographic south poles. Because this was also the peak of the Keck population, the group photo shoot rounded out my obligatory photos for the day. No huge event happened on the 17th. The weather had been nice (no clouds), so competition for time monopolizing the telescope was fierce. While waiting for my turn, I made some non-BLASTbus hardware for the mount. I wandered around the telescope for more random pictures, and did the same at the station when I went […] The 16th was a Sunday, so many people were taking it easy. I spent a bit of time exploring the station and surroundings. The most notable occurence of the day saw a few folks taking it the opposite of easy: they ran a marathon! Winners of the Christams Day “Race Around the World”, they had […] My post for the 14th left the K1 closing process when the 14th ended. The closing process did not end, so here are all events that took place after midnight. After successful closing and pumpout overnight, the cryostat’s pulse tube was connected in the afternoon, and cooling started. While the K1 cryostat was closed on the 13th, the 14th was spent debugging issues with the waveplate rotator. At the end of the day, it was ready to go, but at this point the process didn’t end until well past midnight. But, because my posts are sorted by day, this only includes everything up […] 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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