Commute and Watermelon

 This is my first attempt at trying to capture my entire afternoon commute in one picture. Today was a bit too cold and the camera died when I reached ARO and it didn't capture the return trip on the left flag line. But the aurora and the stars turned out nicely for the moon being out. I'm going to try again on a warmer day.

The watermelon is getting bigger! I sewed it a hammock so it's weight isn't hanging on the vine.

Playing with a 14 mm lens

 I borrowed a friends lens that has a wider field of view (14mm vs. my 24mm) to play around with. I wanted to be able to capture the south celestial pole and the station in one shot.

 Winter is awesome.

 The moon is rising, it's just a sliver right now but it brings noticeable light to the sky already. The moon will be up until August. The first of August is also the start of astronomical twilight so these are some of the last pictures from the darkest days of the year.

I'm especially proud of this one.

Antarctic Sun Article, Whiffle Ball and Green House

Here is the link to the newest Antarctic Sun article.

 

This is currently my favorite sastrugi.

It was a very warm yesterday (-47F) and I even sat down in a wind protected drift and looked at the stars and read a couple pages in a book.

 

We have been playing whiffle ball on Tuesdays. It's been pretty popular, we consistently get a quarter of the station playing.

The score board!

 The green house is doing great. There is bell pepper plant that went crazy and has 3 huge bell peppers on it. The heirloom tomato plant is taking over and there are about 7 huge tomatoes coming along.

I finally got a watermelon to grow, this picture was taken last week, it's now the size of a baseball and growing noticeably more everyday!

Last days of solid darkness

 The sky started to clear up a little bit, which is really nice because the moon will be coming up near the end of July and after the moon goes down we will be back in astronomical twilight and my camera might be able to start picking up hints of the sun and the milky way won't be as bright.

There was a small not very spectacular aurora event yesterday afternoon and I happened to be outside for it.

This is such an awesome place.

Spice Core Visit

Since it has warmed up  (-63 F for this trip) we were able to use the LMC to check up on Spice Core again.

 There was no moon and it was little overcast so this time so it was very, very dark.

 Spice Core is still there, so that's good.

 This pallet fell over in a wind storm at some point since May.

 It's dark out there!

 My Nalgene froze solid.

After driving back in I took a field trip up to the roof of the power plant and learned about insulating generator exhaust pipes from a friend that has been coming down to the ice for at least 20 years.

We played Halley station today in darts and won! Next game is on Saturday against Rothera. Troll station (a Norwegian station) has also asked to join the tournament so now it's a nine station/five country tournament!

Fun with a Head Lamp in a Wind Storm

 Pretending to be a laser up on top of the roof of ARO.

The wind was blowing so much snow that it lit up my head lamp which made for some awesome pictures. And made goggles very necessary.

 Lighting up the flag line out to SuperDARN.

 Enjoying the warmer weather in the wind block created by ARO.

 The wind picks up snow and that insulates the area near the ground and we warmed up to the mid -60s, which feels very warm after the week and a half we spent below -90 F, and most of it below -100 F. These pictures were all taken in 25 knots winds (it was a bit nuts)!

 Staring into the abyss.

 My favorite drift, it looks like a sand dune or a big mountain.

The way home. In real life I could see one flag not three like in this picture. Visibility was pretty bad and it was very dark because the clouds blocked out the stars. I can easily see how it could make someone nervous or claustrophobic or agoraphobic or just plain disoriented to be surrounded by so much black nothingness and blowing snow but I thought it made pretty cool pictures. I tried to capture that empty darkness in these.

First Darts Match

 

I organized a Trans-Antarctic Darts Tournament with seven other stations (Halley (UK), Concordia (FR/IT), McMurdo (US), Scott (NZ), Rothera (UK), Neumayer (GE) and DDU (FR)) with the help of a "pen pal" at Halley station. It is possibly the first Antarctic Darts Tournament with more than two or three stations across the continent playing and also quite possibly the most international one ever played.

We won our first game versus Scott Base (the kiwi station near McMurdo), but it was very close. Six more games!

Timelapse

I made this time lapse up on the roof of ARO today. It was -104 F /-75 C for most of the day and many of the out building that are run on there own furnaces are failing due to gelling fuel. They have been running around moving fuel tanks around with 'warm' fuel (-60ish) to try to keep buildings warm, so far they have been very successful. We hit -109 F over the weekend apparently (I was asleep for it) but the is only 8 degrees from the all time coldest record at the south pole.

I experimented with blowing soap bubbles at -104 today, I have a video but it is too big to upload. They freeze, crack or shatter and the pieces float around. It's pretty funny stuff.  

Setting Moon and Celestial South

The moon is setting finally! We will have nice dark skies again for a couple weeks before we will enter astronomical twilight again (still very dark but the sun is slowly creeping back). I don't particularly want the sun to come back, the sky is just so amazing when it is gone... who wants boring old blue 24/7 when you could walk to work in this?

 

The brightest, left most star in the picture above is actually Saturn.The only planet you can see from the south pole this year.

 This picture is with the camera pointed pretty much straight up from the roof of ARO. Milky Way, South Cross and Alpha and Beta Centauri on the left, small and large Magellanic Clouds and lasers on the right.

If you ever are in the southern hemisphere and need to find South this is how you find it. Draw a line from the long end of the Southern Cross's kite shape and draw a line that perpendicularly bisects Alpha and Beta Centauri and where the lines intersect is the celestial South Pole, the point in the southern sky that does not move. (Conveniently straight up.) It's a little easier in the North because there is an actual star that happens to be at that location, the north is just got lucky.

Awesome Aurora Pictures and 4th of July Activities

Here is the link to Robert "Ice Man"  Schwarz's pictures of the aurora this winter so far. They are awesome, he probably has the most experience photographing aurora of anyone in the world.

In other news it has been below -90 F for about a week and below -100 F for about three days now. The coldest is got was -108 F. (That's only 9 degrees from the all time record.) We warmed up again to -97 F today. When fuel is exposed to these temperature for a prolonged period of time it starts to gel up. All of the out buildings that are run off of fuel tanks are gelling up and the heaters can't keep up with the temperatures so many of the out buildings are holding around 40 F. The vehicle fuelling module (VFM) has gelled up (fuel has even gelled up in the 1.5 inch fuel lines) and we can no longer fuel equipment with it. To get fuel into equipment to be able to fuel the out buildings, fuel has to be siphoned from the main fuel tanks in 55 gallon buckets. These fuel tanks are under the ice in the arches at a constant -65 F so the fuel is still a liquid. When it is this cold equipment can't be run outside for very long and has to be brought back inside, or else the steel could get too cold and could shatter like glass.

For the 4th of July we had a "summer carnival" and a cook out style meal. Notice that California poppy on the dessert tray, they finally started blooming! There was a homemade two hole mini golf course, ping pong, a homemade cotton candy machine, snow cones (the snow came from outside), pin the tail on a Chihuahua with the radio comms guys head photoshopped onto it (this is one of our winter crew inside jokes, it's a bit of a story to explain that one). We watched "Sandlot" in the gym and it was good time.

This is the winter site manager, me, and the "Ice Man" trying to fix the cotton candy machine. The machine is made with a heat gun, and a rotating element run off a car battery. It's been around for a while but it's a good example of classic South Pole ingenuity. It actually works okay, but it could be improved upon.