Post Christmas Post

This is the view out my window.

Clear night on the way back from TAWO. 

This is the mini salads I made for Christmas dinner from locally grown lettuce!!

Christmas Dinner!

Presents!! I got some chocolate, some nice herbal tea from Montana, and a funny mustache. Other gifts were a whooppee cushion (which has been a ton of fun), a yoyo, a very interesting, fun, easy to learn Japanese board game with a submarine and diving for treasure which was a great time to learn to play.  It was a fun weekend!

On Tuesday we had super high winds, highest it reached was 58 knots gusting to 62 knots. Very windy!! Windiest I've ever experienced in my life I think.The big house was shaking like we were in a big earthquake.

It's sometimes very useful to have a gigantic extremely cold freezer outside! These are balls of left over mashed potatoes and cheese that I needed to freeze to form into balls to roll in egg and bread crumbs and fry. Instead of having to wait a few hours, all I needed was 10 minutes! (They were delicious!)

TAWO Timelapse

It took a week to upload but here it is!!!!!!

An afternoon at TAWO from Marissa Goerke on Vimeo.

Christmas Prep

 We had a nice night full of auroras!

The Summit winter crew! We took a group picture to be able to send seasons greetings to all the stations down in Antarctic that sent us a picture for the holidays. 

Made some cookies!

In my free time I've been working on this charcoal drawing of Silver Pass from my PCT hike and it's finally done! Woohoo! Now I have to find a new project. 

Happy Solstice!

 It took three of us to get this picture right, I think this one turned out okay! Happy Solstice! Today is the darkest day of the winter, the sun will start making it's way back to us now. I won't see it until January 28th so I still have over a month of darkness left. We still get quite a bit of twilight between 10 AM and 2 PM, so it's really not that dark during most of the day, I wish it was darker, that dang sun gets in the way of taking cool night time pictures!!

 I usually do my TAWO trip in the morning when it is much brighter ( and easier to see what I'm doing when I clean stuff on the roof) so I normally can't see any stars out here. But yesterday I had to do a run out to TAWO in the afternoon to switch a valve for one of the science groups and it was much darker and clearer.  The blue in this picture is the last of twilight which is still visible around 3:30 PM.

 Best pictures of the winter so far I think!!

I turned them into a time lapse, it's pretty short but it's going to take me at least 4 days to upload it, stay tuned!!

Catastrophe

Today I ran out of cheese its. I really should have brought more up with me. 

The last cheese it in Greenland.

 I'm surprised they lasted me this long really. I suppose I will have to start baking my own now.

It's been a bit colder out recently and colder means clearer skies which is always nice!

Cool Clouds and Timelapses

 Woke up to some very fluffy clouds today! We don't get to see fluffy clouds very often so that was a nice treat. It was also only -8 F out as well which was nice too.

Under the drift that creeps toward the greenhouse door.

A new time lapse!

Aurora Over the Big House from Marissa Goerke on Vimeo.

TAWO

It's been getting darker. 

 Once a week out at TAWO I load that suitcase with glass flasks and carry it outside into the clean air sector. I raise the inlet mast and turn on the pump. The flasks are flushed with clean outside air for 5 minutes while I'm away from the case. Next I close the valves so the samples can pressurize while I hold my breath so my breath doesn't contaminate the samples. These samples are sent back to boulder to have there CO2 levels and other trace gasses tested.

This is the inside of TAWO. My main work area. It looks way bigger than it really is in this picture... it's pretty tiny actually.

After filling the balloon I have to wait for it to get used to being in it's inflated shape so it doesn't go into some kind of balloon shock when I take it outside. This means a good 10 minutes of hanging out with it before setting it free. 

Decorating!

 We opened the box of Christmas decorations to decorate the tree and hang some stockings!

Man in the moon. Girl and balloon.

More Balloons and a Tree

 It was so clear out that I was able to capture the balloon for much longer than normal!

Another photo shopped bear, I think this one turned out better!

We also put up our tree! I wrapped the last can of cranberry sauce on station and put it under the tree. 

Thanksgiving on top of the world

 Thanksgiving was great, we all pitched in and made a few dishes. I made apple pie, pumpkin pie and roasted beets. I also sorted the greens, which is a big under taking because they are now about 5 weeks old and the outer layers of the lettuce heads are slimy and rotten. But there is still good lettuce under all the gross layers. We had run out of fresh broccoli, fresh spinach, fresh chard, fresh asparagus and a few other things I can't think off off the top of my head.

 We had a nice spread of food! So many left overs!!

Pie is the best! We got Saturday "off" and are having a rare two day weekend. I still pretty much had a full day of work to do on Sunday though and did a couple hours on Saturday as well. Really 'off' just means I got to sleep in a little bit and we had no meetings. It's okay though I don't mind walking out to TAWO, it's good exercise. And doing ozone sonde prep is a lot of waiting in between small tasks.

The crew. Photo by Marie

HF Radio and North

On Thursday, (Thanksgiving for the rest of the world), we hit -70 F! I tried to get the North Star to line up with the tower on top of the Greenhouse.

 When we get wind out of the north the generator exhaust is blowing towards the clean air sector. When this happens we can't take air samples, or drive any equipment unless we are very low on water or there is an emergency.

My Dad was flying over the Atlantic today and was going to be about ~1300 miles south of us. I gave him the the HF radio frequency that we use and we tried to use the HF radio to contact him as he flew by. We actually heard him calling us!! We tried to reply but it turns out our HF radio system was not high enough power to reply.  Still very exciting to use the radio for something and have it actually sort of work!!

I cook every Thursday. This week I made lasagna, it was tasty!

Good Evening

 We had a very nice clear evening last night and I finally got some nice aurora pictures!!!

Another balloon shot that turned out nice!!

Snow Crystal Laser Scattering

We had a lot of blowing ice crystals in the air yesterday night. It was very dark and the cloud altimeter laser on top of the MSF (Mobile Science Facility) was glowing very strongly. The science tech who takes care of the science in that building found that the ice crystals were scattering the laser's light all over the ground. I was able to sort of capture the phenomenon. The light was dancing and jumping and flashing and streaking across the snow. It was beautiful and super interesting.

Big house and Green house lights.

Another Busy Week

 Not many pictures for this week. I was pretty busy fixing science. Definitely settled in now and hopefully things will slow down a bit now that a lot of the larger beginning of season tasks are completed.

I have an irrational fear of polar bears when I'm walking between buildings, especially when it's dark out. A few years ago a fox wandered into camp. And birds show up in summer time a few times a month. A polar bear was seen a couple hundred miles from here last year, so I guess it isn't entirely implausible. 

ICESat and the Supermoon

On Monday we drove out away from camp about 5 miles and did an ICESat traverse, which is basically driving a GPS antenna along a special pattern of flag lines. This is to double check NASA's ICESatellite values. ICESat is part of NASA's Earth Observing System and is gathering information about ice sheet mass balance around the globe, it passes directly over the traverse we measure every month.

We also measure the height of the flags. Takes about 3 hours to complete. It was a beautiful day for it. About -50 F and barely any wind.

It was clear enough out to see the full moon rise!

It was awesome!!