Early this week clouds rolled in completely obscuring the stars and reducing the moon to a light smudge in the sky. The clouds raised the ambient temperature dramatically to the mid-fifties; warm enough to run most heavy equipment.
The station was a frenzy of activity taking advantage of the
warmer temperatures despite the ten knot winds and blowing snow. The tri-walls where we depose of trash needed
moving, the ‘trash yacht’ (the very large sled where the tri-walls are kept to
keep from drifting in) had to be moved to clear the drifts around ‘D-Z’ (Destination
Zulu, basically our main door to the backyard). The drifts outside the beer can
and leading up the large drift to the flag line to ARO were plowed back down to
a nice gradual slope. It won’t take long for the wind to drift the area back in
to a few three or four foot high drifts the stretch across the path but it’s
better than climbing up the side of the huge drift in front of the station.
The warmer weather also allowed for another trip out in the
LMC to find the misbehaving experiment 1.5 miles downwind of the station. Visibility
was a lot worse for this trek out making the going a lot slower. Before heading
out I looked up the aerial photographs of the station from this past summer to
get a better idea of where the experiment was hiding in the dark. With this reorientation
I was able to navigate through the dark featureless landscape that is the end
of the world and was able to find the site without any major issues.
The
mission was only a half success because there was nothing visibly wrong with
the instrument even though it lost communication several weeks ago. It was a eerie sight to see the LMC light up a small bubble of the complete black abyss of the world around us.
The station lights were visible
in the distance, but only just. There is
something strange, exciting and other worldly about being able to count on two
hands the specks of red light that make up the entirety of the habitable world
for a thousand miles in any direction.
Today we leave twilight behind and officially enter night
conditions until sometime in late July or August.
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