Full Moon

 The full moon was out today. It was so bright, I could see fine without a flashlight. Things cast shadows and it felt like day time . It was so clear and bright I could even see the telescopes from more than a mile away and not just the lights on the buildings or blurred dark smudges, the actual buildings.

There aren't very many stars that can compete with the moon, but you can still see Scorpio very clearly.

In the shadow of A-Pod. That cloud is the power plant exhaust, which creates a thick fog bank that you can see trail off to the horizon down wind.

Power Plant

 Here is the wall where we are posting all the winter greetings we get emailed from other stations around the continent and else where in the world. We got a happy solstice greeting from Greenland and a letter from the president.
 The past few days I have been going down to the power plant and learning about generators and helping do some maintenance work on generator 4.

 This is the power plant. It is down in the arches, buried under the ice.

 We have four main generators and we only run one at a time. The waste heat from the generators is run through a glycol heat exchanger which carries the heat up to the station to keep it warm.

I helped replace the part that houses the valves that regulate intake, fuel injection and exhaust (the slightly darker metal part below the lighter metal part and above the yellow parts). 

Good wintering over comic in the power plant office.

Lunch Time Show

I finished up my lunch quickly today because we could see auroras on the aurora cam screen in the galley and headed outside. The moon was out, and normally you can't see aurora when the moon is above the horizon so these must have been very bright auroras. They were moving very fast and small high energy bright streaks were pin wheeling around and running up and down the bands of light. In the picture below you can see a couple of the flecks of detail that dance around too quick for my camera to usually capture in the top right.

Someone was able to get some real time aurora video (as opposed to time-lapse like I do, you need and super fancy camera for real time, that is cutting edge camera magic right there).

 Someone taking pictures happened to get into my shot.

Someone else unknowingly walked in front of my camera to look at the auroras and it turned out quite nicely.

CME

We had a large CME (Coronal Mass Ejection) hit earth this past Monday/Tuesday. The geomagnetic storm it whipped as it hit earth brought us some awesome auroras that filled the whole sky. These are just a glimpse of the many that have been dancing all over the sky since Monday. I haven't bee able to capture them all.

This two pictures are part of a time lapse that maybe eventually I'll be able to upload.

Darkest Days of the Year!

 This is just one picture of series that I made into a time lapse. The internet has been pretty slow lately so I'm not going to try to upload it just yet.

 A solid red aurora early this morning! Very strange and a little eerie.

Tent, milky way, pole and aurora... how much better can it really get? We are back in the low -90s F and it definitely felt colder out there today.

Midwinter

The wind finally let up and the stars came out again for the darkest day of the year.

This was for twin/nerd day. Although I had to change to be able to go outside after lunch but it was fun while it lasted.

 The ceremonial pole flags decorated the galley for the dinner. Look at those fancy menu and center pieces! The sunflower made an appearance near the appetizer tables.

I didn't have any nice shoes so my meteorologist friend made me some as a midwinter present.

 Some of my fellow winter overs enjoying an awesome greenhouse salad. The guy in the maroon shirt has been coming down to Pole since before I was born! He has great stories.

 Awesome salad. So nice to have a fresh salad with tomatoes and sprouts. (I didn't grow those sprouts, but I grew everything else.)

 The vegetarian fare, very tasty gnocchi!

 For meat-etarians.

 A very fancy dessert wrapped up a fantastic midwinter feast.

 

This picture took me nine tries over the course of the past week. I'm pretty happy with the result. 

An Article on South Pole Records

I didn't write this article in the Antarctic Sun but it mentions me!



 

Midwinter Preparations

Midwinter is a big holiday for all winter overs across Antarctica. Every station will be celebrating the day when the sun starts to come back up. (The sun is currently 23.5 degrees below the horizon and next week it will begin it's slow progress back to the southern hemisphere.) All inhabited Antarctic stations will send each other greeting cards and some stations will get calls from celebrities or important folks. At south pole we will be having a fancy dinner on Saturday night and will be getting a two day weekend. This week have been a frenzy of getting things ready for our midwinter dinner on Saturday. Here is the menu for the midwinter dinner.

We are having a "spirit week" leading up to Saturday. This is what I did for crazy hat/hair day:

I'm also wearing my new flip flops that I finished earlier this week. They are made from yellow foam we had laying around that people usually cut up and put in their carharts for knee pads and cargo straps from the strap bin the craft room that I sewed on by hand.

The sunflower has bloomed just in time for midwinter! I will be transplanting it into a bucket so we can bring it up to the galley as a center piece for the dinner.

The 'booze barn' where all the soda/beer/wine/booze/other store supplies is stored lost heat over the weekend and most of the cans of soda/beer froze and exploded (see example of almost exploded can above). Lots of the wine bottles blew their corks out. The booze barn was a mess of frozen exploded drinks.

Those trash cans near the wall heaters are full of cans we are thawing out, salvaging the unbroken cans, and draining and recycling the broken cans. People are starting to call it 'The Great Booze Barn Freeze of 2015".

And since I can't have a post without stars/aurora/milky way here is a friend of mine taking advantage of a perfectly shaped drift for star gazing out of the wind in front of ARO.

Another beautiful Saturday at work

 

 

I don't have much to say besides this place is awesome, the sky is beautiful and I love winter.

Might be in love (with auroras and the Milkyway)

The auroras were amazing today. They danced across the entire sky, lighting up the snow so bright I could walk around without a flashlight.

 I wasn't carrying my camera for the best parts of the show, because I had taken these pictures about 15 minutes before the real event happened and the camera was cold and so were my fingers so I left it inside and warmed up a bit before heading back outside to finish my walk out to SuperDARN.

I am constantly in awe of how beautiful and amazing our planet is and how lucky I am to be here witnessing some of the least seen and best displays of wonder it has to offer. 

Windstorm Auroras and Stars

 We had a pretty big aurora event today. I wasn't able to capture more of it and I didn't do a time-lapse because it is still so windy the camera would have been too unstable.

The wind kicks up a layer of blowing snow that drops visibility and gives everything a pretty eerie softness which is amplified by the green light from the aurora. The red  light in the bottom left is the station lighting up the blowing snow around it.

 Super eerie, those flags weren't visible tot he naked eye.

 Lasers! Milky Way! Aurora! Oh my!

It's crazy that visibility can be so bad horizontally but the stars are still so clear when you look straight up.

This place has a very alien feel to it sometimes, like we really aren't supposed to be here, but it's absolutely amazing that we are anyway.  

Greenhouse Update

I haven't post anything in awhile, mostly because I have been busy with the greenhouse (we had a few malfunctioning pumps and complications that needed a lot of attention over the past week) and the moon has been up so there hasn't been anything too interesting to take pictures of. We've also been having a pretty big wind storm the past couple days (sustained 20 knots winds with gusts up to 30 knots). The wind storm has made it a lot warmer outside (-53 F right now, and maybe I'm going crazy but it feels so warm!), which is great if you are not walking directly into the wind or tripping over new drifts that weren't there yesterday. Since conditions outside haven't been great for pictures here is an update on the greenhouse.

 This system is mostly taken over by my cantaloupe plants but is also home to our sunflower which is about to bloom and the two hibiscus and pepper plants.

 All of my cucumber plants have died off so I've had to start over with new ones. This side has a strawberry plant that won't produce even with me pretending to be a bee.

 I took these picture just after I had trimmed the tomato plants so the whole place is a bit of a mess at the moment.

 One beautiful bell pepper!

The pumpkin plant is blooming! Hopefully we will get a pumpkin by Halloween!