South Pole Teaser

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 […]

Waiting

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 […]

BLAST Ops

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 […]

Termination

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.

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Hungry Like the Wolf

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 […]

After Launch, New Digs

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 […]

Launch Part -I: Christmas

Before launch day, I had collected some more Christmas-related pictures that I was planning to post. But, they were preempted. Now they have been “deempted” and I don’t have many recent pictures to post instead.

This includes two Christmas-related sets: The Christmas Eve party on the 24 (from Matt), Christmas dinner and MAAG on […]