(Left) - A "sun-dog" looking at the sun from the base of the ~30 ft tall pile of snow in front of entrance "alpha" on station.  There are bulldozing the big snow drift in front of station, and all that snow is partially blocking "alpha", and creating a nice sledding hill.  (Right) -  Liz on the telescope trying to re-insert some silicon gasketing.  Two days ago we did alot of climbing around the telescope to insert the silicon gasketing, grease the elevation gears, and to inspect the el-motors in the Yoke-arm.

 

(Left) - The BICEP2 team closing up their cryostat two nights ago.  This is BICEP2's first season at Pole (most of them have been down for BICEP1), and this will be their first cooldown of their cryostat. Phil and Justus are on the ground screwing in their Helium tank to their vacuum jacket.  (Right) -  Almost the entire BICEP2 team is in this picture.  Standing are: Walt Ogburn, John Kovac, Rashmi, Jon Kaufmann, and Randol Aiken.  On the ground are Phil and Justus.  Jamie Bock is standing off to the left of this picture.

After John Ruhl left, there were a couple busy days fixing random problems that popped up.  First a breaker tripped in the receiver cabin, causing us to loose all contact with the cabin.  After rushing out to the telescope to make sure it wasnt a telescope power outage, we realized that we couldnt open the roof to get into the receiver cabin because the siders were blocking our roof from opening.  This meant Liz had to climb into the cabin via an emergency hatch, which is somewhat difficult to get to and uncomfortable to climb thru.  Luckily nothing serious was broken, and a breaker had just tripped, but it definitely was a scare.  After we fixed that, we started greasing the elevation gears and noticed a squealing, which we later tracked down to several bolts on the elevation motor working themselves loose.  The bolts are very large, and very hard to get to, so we had to fashion a really beefy ~4 ft long extension bar just to reach the bolts and acquire a torque wrench rated to ~200 ft lbs from the heavy machinery shop here.   Overall, both problems caused a ~2 day delay to our observations, but the weather was pretty mediocre, so I dont think we lost anything.  It was also good we caught both problems sooner rather than later. 

I think there is a ~98 pct chance I will be leaving on Friday December 18th.  Since its the weekend here, I'm going to wait to confirm until Monday morning, because no one is working tomorrow to do anything about me leaving.  But we just heard back this morning from the US that the beams and focus are looking good, so I think that was the last thing to confirm before me being able to make plans.  If I left on the 18th then I think I would be scheduled to return to Chicago on either Dec 20th or Dec21st.  I will keep people posted once I know more!