The Icewife Cometh

2012-01-06T17:33:00.000-08:00

Above is the SPTpol group photo from this season. Yesterday was the day with the largest population for SPTpol during this season, 18 people, so we decided to take a group photo on top of the cabin just under the main dish of the telescope. Pictured above are: (first row) Nils Halverson, Jay Austermann, Nick Harrington, (second row) Abby Crites, Tyler Natoli, Liz George, Stephen Hoover, Ryan Keisler, Kyle Story, Dale Li, (third row) Chris Kendall, Clarence Chang, Tijmen de Haan, Bradford Benson, Jason Henning, Bill Holzapfel, Erik Nichols.

Below are some alternate takes, and then a picture of me on top of the cabin looking towards the main South Pole Station.

2012-01-04T11:35:00.000-08:00

The SPTpol focal plane. The inner seven hex-shaped modules are our 150 GHz array (made by NIST in Boulder, Colorado), and the outer 100 GHz array (made by Argonne National Labs, just outside Chicago). Every detector has its own individual horn, which couples light to two detectors, each sensitive to two different types of polarization.

Today we just started our second cooldown of SPTpol! It has been a marathon last two weeks; starting and finishing the first SPTpol cooldown, the re-working the receiver and optics (secondary mirror) cryostats to be in their (hopefully) "final" configuration for the observing season, and then closing them up and starting another cooldown.

A "cooldown" as I refer to the above basically consists of:

1) ~3-5 days of work assembling the innards of both the receiver cryostat (which holds the actual detectors and is cooled to 0.25 K degrees above absolute zero, and is what I usually refer to as the camera for the telescope) and the optics cryostat (the cryostat that holds the secondary mirror, and is cooled to 10 K degrees above absolute zero).

2) one day of "pumping" on the cryostats, and bringing their pressure down to about 1 / 10 millionth of an atmosphere,

3) ~3-4 days of "cooling" the cryostats, bringing each down to the base temperatures above, and

4) ~2-several days of tests, where we characterize the cryogenic (cooling) performance of the cryostats, and the characteristics of the detectors (e.g., their optical efficiency, noise, sensitivity, etc.)

We began our second cooldown today, so if all goes well, we should be on the telescope by about January 12th!

Abby and Jason assembling the SPTpol focal plane. In this picture, they are testing the electrical connections to each detector by probing wires on the back of the focal plane pictured above.

Liz, Jason, and Abby putting the focal plane into the SPTpol receiver (the black and gold plated thing below), which will cool the detectors down to 0.25 degrees above absolute zero.

A significant effort in preparation for this cooldown was working on the inside of the optics cryostat pictured above. The cryostat is about the size of a Volkswagen Beetle and weighs nearly 2,000 pounds. We are lifting the top half of it so that we can work on its innards, specifically the heat strapping that cools the radiation shields to 10 and 77 K degrees above absolute zero. The shiny silver material is "super-insulation", which is basically multiple thin layers of mylar with aluminum deposited on its surface, which shields the cooler shields from the hotter exterior shields.

Me reaching into the radiation shields looking for a lost allen key.

A picture of me working on the underside of the optics cryostat, thats 2000 pounds above my head!

Nils taking a picture of the heat strapping from our pulse-tube cooler to the shields. The pulse-tube cooler is a mechanical cooler, which alternatively pulses low and high pressure helium gas, and cools each of the shields to 10 and 77 K.


Bill Holzapfel and I re-connecting the pulse-tube heat strapping to the radiation shields.

A close-up of Bill and my hard work, replacing each one of these screws so that they have double-conical washers and Apeizon-N grease between each interface.

The SPT team at Pole mating together the optics and receiver cryostats, pictured are Kyle, Liz, Jason, Abby, Tijmen, Bill, and me, Nils is taking the picture.

In parallel to the receiver team's work, another team has been working at night to install a guard-ring to the SPT. The guard-ring effectively acts like a ground-shield, which reflects detector power to the "cold" sky instead of the "hot" ground, and extends the diameter of the primary by about 1.5 meters.

2012-01-03T19:22:00.000-08:00

Sorry for not blogging in a while! I've had three big responsibilities since coming to South Pole: 1) Successfully deploy the SPTpol receiver (going well so far!), 2) Apply for professorships (I've applied to eight professorships since coming to Antarctica), and 3) finish Benson et al. 2011 (or B11, the main scientific result I've been working on for most of this year). Thankfully, B11 was submitted on December 23 (!!!) and just in time too because it was right about when the work on SPTpol really started to ramp up hard. The sum result is that I've been really really busy, good thing there is not much to do down at Pole besides work :)

As far as B11, above you can see the title, author list, and abstract, but if you want a more thorough read you can download it at:

http://arxiv.org/abs/1112.5435

2011-12-15T18:42:00.000-08:00

Group photo at the South Pole to celebrate the Centennial. I'm the tallest person in the back center.

To celebrate 100 years since the first human arrived at the South Pole, there was a big celebration at the South Pole to celebrate the centennial anniversary. Roald Amundsen led the original Norwegian team that arrived, so to celebrate this Norwegian triumph, the Prime Minister of Norway came to the South Pole for 4 days to engage in the festivities. See the BBC article below describing the ceremony.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-16173847

Me giving a tour to the Prime Minister of Norway (Left), describing our observations of the radiant light left over from the Big Bang. He seemed genuinely interested, and was pretty amazed that we have measured the universe to be 14 billion years old.

BICEP2 / KECK team photo with the Prime Minister, and me. Jamie Bock was the official BICEP2 / KECK representative and I was the SPT representative, so I followed him around for both parts of the tour.

Jamie Bock describing how we can test BICEP2 tests the theory of Inflation, which postulates that the Big Bang was caused by a superluminal period of expansion caused by physics at energies scales where the four known forces (Electromagnetic, Gravity, Weak, Strong) combine.

Me explaining how our detectors work to the Prime Minister.

Waiting to hear the Prime Minister speak, and unveil the ice sculpture bust of Amundsen at the ceremonial South Pole. This speech is linked to in the above BBC article (maybe you can see me?)


The Prime Minister speaks!

Visiting the bust afterwards.

2011-12-09T19:23:00.000-08:00


The South Pole Telescope!!! Note the new backing frame on the back of the telescope; we are adding a ~1 meter wide guard ring around the telescope this season for SPTpol.

At Pegasus airfield (on Ross Sea Ice Shelf) waiting for my plane to South Pole.

The toilet was behind a few pallets of cargo, so the ladies on the plane had to scale it to go to the bathroom. Men had a funnel up front that they could pee into.

There was some important cargo on the plane to Pole: an old Nintendo 8-bit game console!

Here is a broader picture of the plane, note the cargo netting seats on the side.

Half-way through installing the guard ring backing/supports on the telescope.

See the guy climbing around in the guard ring backing/supports, our very own John Carlstrom, perilously hanging dozens of feet off the ground.

A closeup of the guard ring backing/supports.

I've arrived at the South Pole! I've been here for 3 nights and 4 days, but havent had much time to blog. We've been very busy doing some final tests with the SPT-SZ receiver, mainly trying to get the SPTpol readout and telescope control software / interface working better. At night Carlstrom has been working with a team of iron-workers to install the new guard ring on SPT, its coming along well but probably wont be completely finished until ~Jan 1st. We've also been unpacking and assembling the SPTpol focal plane, more pictures of that coming soon, need to stop now before the satellite goes down!

2011-12-05T14:30:00.000-08:00

We have arrived in McMurdo, Antarctica, and we're leaving for South Pole in ~5 hours. Above is Abby, Liz, and Jason over-looking the Ross Ice Shelf near Scott's Hut by McMurdo. Below I take you through what I did for the my last day in Christchurch and then the trip to McMurdo.

Our main responsibility in Christchurch is clothing issue; getting fitted for your Extreme Cold Weather (ECW) gear. On the wall, they have on display all the different cold weather gear they are, or could, give you. I tend to give most of it back, and just use my personal stuff for most things. The gear that is most important are the Carhartt snow pants, parka, and winter gloves. They also gave me six pairs of the knee high wool socks, that I know several people back home like - in Chicago they can double as around the house slippers, or are great for boots when hiking through the slushy Chicago streets.

Below is a picture of me dressed in my ECW gear with my cart full of luggage about to check into the flight to McMurdo. The check in for our flight was 230 am New Zealand time, and we had to catch our shuttle to the airport at 2am. So I ended up just not sleeping that night. Between the jet lag, and this early check in time, my sleep schedule is pretty screwed up.

On the C17 cargo plane to Pole. Sitting on the side next to Abby, Liz, Jon, and Jason. The plane had 55 passengers, and alot of cargo. Though two of the larger pallets were full of Coors light and Tui, a New Zealand beer, there were also a fair bit of scientific equipment and a large incinerator for McMurdo. I couldnt find the SPTpol receiver crates, so hopefully they made it down to the South Pole already.

Once nearing Antarctica, you start flying over the edge of the continent and parts of the sea ice shelf. Through the limited windows that we have, there are pretty spectacular views.

Aboard Ivan the Terra-Bus, the large wheeled bus vehicle that takes us from Pegasus Field to McMurdo. Its about an hour bus ride, and this was only the second flight into Pegasus this year, so the road wasnt very well packed down and there were a few stuck vehicles along the road. Luckily this didnt stop Ivan. They pack you in pretty tight, so the trip isnt that comfortable. Here is me sitting next to Abby.

When we got to McMurdo, we ended up going for a walk to Scott's Hut, a hut build by Robert Scott in 1902. In 1911, Robert Scott attempted to be the first person to make it to the South Pole, though was beaten by Roald Amundson by about a month. Scott made it to Pole, but unfortunately died on his way back, with the rest of his team. Its cool to see the hut, but you can also get great views of McMurdo and the sea ice. Today there were about a dozen sea lions sunning themselves on the ice near the hut.

A view of McMurdo.

Leaving for Pole in about 5 hours, flight takes about 3 hours, so should get there just after dinner time. Delays and cancellations are common, though the weather is great in McMurdo today, so fingers crossed.

2011-12-03T00:39:00.000-08:00

Today, I've arrived safely in Christchurch! All the flights were on time and there were no problems. I caught a 620pm CST flight from ORD to LAX, a 1120 pm PST flight from LAX to Auckland, then a 1210 pm NZT flight from Auckland to Christchurch. Overall, about 19 hours in the air, and I didnt sleep very much, so I'm pretty tired today. But the nice weather and familiar sights have re-invigorated me.

Though the sad part about walking around Christchurch is seeing all the damage from the Earthquake earlier this year. A ~2 block radius around the Christchurch cathedral (picture above) is still mostly shut down, though they have added an entry point for foot traffic to walk around, no stores in that radius are open and their are guards at the opening and a warning sign that you risk your safety walking around.

Below is another landmark, the Crown Plaza Hotel which is completely shut down, with broken and boarded up windows, a common sight of the closed down buildings around the Cathedral. Also, other favorite hotels like the Devon B&B and Windsor Hotel are completely torn down.

Below is one of the fenced off streets. On one street a guard came out of a station and told us we couldnt walk any farther.

Below is a collapsed church near the Avon river. Many of the churches around downtown seemed to collapse in the Earthquake, presumably because they tended to be older brick-and-mortar based buildings.

The Christchurch botanical gardens were still open though, and the flowers looked as good as ever. Pictured are Jason, Liz, and Abby, three grad students from U. of Colorado, U. of California-Berkeley, and the U. of Chicago, respectively. They are my three SPTpol companions that I'm traveling down to Pole with. Though not pictured here, we also have been hanging out with Jon Kaufman, from UC-San Diego, who is traveling down to work on another CMB project at the South Pole, BICEP2. I overlapped with Jon 2 years ago at the South Pole, and he works for a Professor, Brian Keating, who I
overlapped with at UW-Madison and Stanford, and considered post-doc'ing for in 2004.

Below is a close-up of some of the beautiful roses in the Rose Garden.

Below, Abby hugs one of the bushes in the Rose Garden, we need to enjoy greenery while we still can (before 2 months in Antarctica).

Towards the end of our day getting a Kebab and Beer in a nice new outdoor garden near our hotel. Many "container" stores have popped up around downtown, which are temporary stores in brightly colored truck containers, the stores have significantly helped invigorate the downtown. People were pretty tired at this point, so I dont think Abby was too happy during the picture. Here is my lone picture of Jon from UC-San Diego.

2011-11-18T18:14:00.000-08:00

I'm heading to the South Pole again this year, for my 5th time! Its hard to believe that I've spent about 8 months down there over the years. Having last year off, I'm sort of anxious to go again. This is also a big year, because we are retiring the SPT-SZ receiver / camera (the thing I started working on in Berkeley in 2004) and installing the new SPTpol receiver / camera. SPTpol should be 3x more sensitive than SPT-SZ, and also measures the polarization of light; a capability that should allow us to probe the physics responsible for the Big Bang, and also measure the mass of the neutrino. Pretty exciting stuff. Above is a picture that one of our winter-overs, Daniel Luong-Van, took of the South Pole Telescope (SPT).

I will tell you more slowly throughout the blog, however this is just to let you know that I will be leaving the U.S. to fly to Christchurch on December 1st, and should be at the South Pole on Dec. 6th. As some of you might remember, you can actually send mail to me at the South Pole for standard U.S. mail rates (it uses an Air Force PO address). If you send me something I promise to send you a postcard. Though, as you might imagine, it takes a while to get mail down there, so make sure not to wait too long! Address is below:

Bradford Benson, A-379
South Pole Station
PSC 468 Box 400
APO AP 96598

Also, to get you excited for some of the action shots that await you, here are some pictures of us assembling SPTpol in Chicago for some tests. Below are Abby and me tilting the SPTpol cryostat so that we can get a better look at the inside. All the gold stuff gets cooled to less than 4 degrees above absolute zero, and the green that you see is a electronics circuit board where the detectors live. They need to get to 0.25 degrees above absolute zero, so that they are sensitive enough to see the relic light from the Big Bang that we are observing.

Below is a little better look on the inside of the cryostat. If it looks familiar to you, it should be, because we designed the SPTpol cryostat to look almost identical to SPT-SZ, it is mounting to the same telescope after all. The thing that is really different are the detectors, though those are for a discussion another day.

Below is a picture of Kyle, Tyler, and I helping to close up the cryostat for some tests. There have been many late nights of testing in Chicago in preparation for deploying SPTpol, but the hard work in Chicago is almost done.

2009-12-21T07:49:00.000-08:00

I'm back in Chicago, as of ~3 hrs ago, and very jet-lagged. That was a brutal series of flights. Its bad enough to have two redeyes, but on top of that, the 4-hr layover in Sydney, the 6-hr layover in Honolulu, and the 3-hr layover in Los Angeles add to the misery. I really hope NSF makes a point of changing that next year, there were several Polies on the flights that shared the misery, none of us were very happy and I think Abby was going delirious. Regardless, I'm very happy to have made it back on time and with no serious delays! My car even started this morning, yea! Now I just have to stay awake for a telecon ~2 hrs from now!

2009-12-19T13:19:00.000-08:00

Currently I'm in Christchurch, and in ~5hrs will start my flight back to the US. My flights are from Christchurch -> Sydney -> Honolulu -> Los Angeles -> Chicago, and involves two red-eyes! So I expect to be thoroughly jet-jagged by the time I arrive at 6am Monday in Chicago. I'll spend a couple days in Chicago recovering, getting organized at home and work, and then will probably drive up to Madison on December 23rd.

Also, some people have asked for my Chicago address, it is:

Bradford Benson
731 W. 18th Str. Apt# 2
Chicago, IL 60616

Thanks to those who sent me mail at the South Pole, you will be receiving postcards (sent from the South Pole) in 2-4 weeks!

2009-12-18T14:32:00.000-08:00

It look like my flight to Christchurch is on for today. It will depart McMurdo ~3 pm New Zealand time, and it should land at ~8pm in Christchurch. My flights out of CHC will be at ~320pm tomorrow. I have a pretty insane route back. It goes: CHC -> Sydney, Australia -> Honolulu -> Los Angeles -> Chicago. It has two red-eye flights! Sydney -> Honolulu and LAX-> O'Hare. Hopefully tonight or tomorrow I will have a chance to blog from Christchurch, and will let you know that I'm on the way back.

2009-12-18T03:54:00.000-08:00

I'm in McMurdo, and so far everything is on schedule for me to return to Chicago on ~6 am on December 21st. Tonight should be my only night in McMurdo, but as of midnight McMurdo time my flight departure time to Christchurch is still "TBD" (to be determined). Hopefully we are out tomorrow, but there are no guarantees yet, apparently there are some weather issues that could delay us. If we don't make it out tomorrow, the following day is Sunday (there are no flights on Sunday), so it would be a two day delay, meaning I couldnt get into Chicago until Decmber 23rd at the earliest. Wish me luck!

2009-12-14T18:52:00.000-08:00

Its official. I'm leaving the South Pole on Friday December 18th. I'm scheduled to spend one night in McMurdo, then fly to Christchurch on December 19th, before flying back to the US on December 20th. If all goes well, I should arrive in Chicago sometime in the morning of December 20th. One caveat, is that delays leaving Antarctica are not uncommon due to weather. Delays are so common that they dont actually book your commercial international flight before you are actually off Antarctica, even if it means only ~1 day advance booking. Several day delays are not uncommon, John Ruhl was delayed two extra days in McMurdo on his way out and currently Bill has been stuck in Christchurch for two extra days. So I will have to keep everyone posted if there are any weather related delays, but barring anything crazy I should still make it back to the US at least a few days before Xmas. Abby is leaving with me, so I will at least have someone to hang out with if we are delayed awkwardly in either McMurdo or Christchurch.

I dont really have any pictures, except to say we are planning to have the 3rd annual SPT Ladies Night on Thursday, the day before I leave. In the end, I figured we would have a going away party anyway and Abby missed Ladies Night last year, so we might as well have it then, even if its earlier than the previous two years. I anticipate it will be a fun event again this year, its gained a good reputation on station as a fun party, I know alot of people look forward to it, and its a nice way to give people on station an opportunity to come out and see the telescope, which many of them dont get to for most of the season (the dark sector is technically off limits to most people here).

(I cant get this image to rotate, so you will have to use your imagination)

2009-12-11T20:08:00.000-08:00

(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!

2009-12-07T19:41:00.000-08:00

(Left) - 6000 pounds of new batteries for the SPT load leveler. The SPT has a huge battery bank in DSL, which is designed to supply ~20 minutes of ~50 kW of power (or ~400 Amps of current) to SPT, in case the South Pole station power goes down. The old batteries never worked as well as advertised, we suspected that they got frozen and lost their charge. So we're replacing all of them. There are 100x batteries in total and each weighs 58 lbs. We had to move all of them ourselves, so this involves taking 100x 58 lbs batteries out of the UPS and putting the 100x new 58 lbs batteries from these crates in. (Right) - The battery bank in the UPS. There are 100 batteries, each is equivalent to ~2-3 car batteries. The cardboard is there just so we dont accidentally short across the rows of batteries while removing them, and potentially electrocute ourselves.

(Left) - John Ruhl and Liz working on the bottom row of batteries. Note the cardboard for saftety again! This was on the second day. John and I moved most of the batteries and were pretty sore by the second day. Overall it was a pretty good workout though, so it wasnt so bad. (Right) - John turning back on the UPS after we replaced all the batteries. We were definitely all nervous about it turning back on ok. Our real fear was putting in even ~1x of the 100 batteries in backwards, which would have probably been an explosive mistake to make.

(Left) - John Ruhl left today! Here is a picture of him putting on his clothes before getting on the plane. Pictured in the foreground is the Boobah!, the unofficial SPT prank toy. The joke usually is putting it the unsuspecting victims bed under the sheets, and then when then jump on it, it shreiks "Boobah!". (Right) - John had just recovered the Boobah! from his room, after Abby had put it in his bed. Here is John returning it to her.

The receiver is on the telescope, and pretty much in autopilot as we run tests to verify its performance. The first few days on the telescope the weather was really bad for observing, it was very overcast and even started to snow at some point, which is actually a rare event for the South Pole! During that time it even got up to -8 degrees F, a record so far this summer. The last ~30 hrs or so has been really good weather and we've been able to get alot of quality observations in. Early returns look really good, so we are very encouraged. There is already talk of me being able to leave before Xmas. I think there are a few more tests we need to do the next couple days to know if that is for sure going to happen, but right now everything is looking encouraging! The satellite will be down soon, and I need to get back to work, I'll keep you posted if the next few days tests go well!

2009-12-03T21:51:00.000-08:00

(Left) - Abby recently gave me some pictures from a couple weeks ago of me working, since I dont have many pictures of me on the blog, I include them. This was from ~2 weeks ago when we were closing up the cryostat, I was putting in some final screws to a filter in front of the lens in the receiver. The cone that I'm reaching down into mates onto the big white optics cryostat, and the cones define the path of the light to the detectors from the telescope. (Right) - Me analyzing some data on the 2nd floor of DSL, Abby said she had never seen me so happy!

(Left) - Abby working on moutning the coupling lens, which couples light from the detectors into the Fourier Transform Spectrometer (FTS), which is the big metal thing on the left. We use the FTS to measure the spectral response of our detectors, or how senstive they are to different colors of light. (Right) - A picture of Liz from last year doing the same thing, but this picture actually shows the innards of the FTS. Its very complicated in there, and I only expect experts, or me sometime in the future, being interested in the details of whats what, but its pretty interesting in its complexity.

(Left) - Abby re-adjusting the flat mirror on top of the receiver. We use the flat mirror to couple light to the detectors when we're doing on the ground tests. Only the sky is "cold" enough for us to look at, otherwise the detectors are so sensitive they saturate. (Right) - At the beginning of this week we had a near whiteout. This day was the worse. Normally you should be able to see the telescope looking in this direction. Luckily we at least have the flags to follow.

(Left) - Re-lifting the receiver back up in the telescope. Notice Liz standing on the cryostats. (Right) - Perched from my usual position during the receiver lift. Liz mounting the cryo-cooling lines to the optics cryostat (the white thing).

(Left) - Another long task associated with re-lifting the cryostats, is re-cabling all the readout electronics for the receiver. All those cables and electronics were also on the ground for our on the ground detector testing, and we have to hoist them all up there. While it is tedious, its not too terrible at least, the connectors are all well labelled on what goes where (Right) - Professor John Ruhl has been taking alot of cat-naps when he's not too busy, mainly because he hasnt been sleeping well here, and also because there are lulls when we dont need everybody. He'll usually make a makeshift bed from the window covers, and lie down on the floor somewhere. I just woke him up when I took this picture (I was in the receiver cabin at the time, about 10 ft above him, hence the viewpoint.

Sorry for not blogging for a while! After Thanksgiving, things have gotten really busy at the telescope and I havent had much time. Worse yet, I found my camera, but in the process of taking pictures at
the telescope (the day after I found it), I dropped it on floor and it broke :( I still have my iphone, so I can take pictures with that. Above are some more pictures, satellite is going down soon, so I'll have to blog more later! Anyway, tests are going well, and we're on schedule so far.

2009-11-25T19:09:00.000-08:00

(Left) - A picture of the "daily scroll", an overview of the current time, weather, and flight schedule at South Pole station. LCD monitors with the scroll are in several places around station. In this picture you can see that it's a balmy -30 deg F right now, which is about the high temperature for as long as I've been down here. (Right) - Cooldown curves of the various different thermometers in the receiver cryostat. The "UC Stage" is the stage that all the bolometers is on. Since it needs to get the coldest, its the most thermally isolated from everything else, which means it both stays cold when its cold and stays warm when its warm (meaning it takes forever to cooldown). Currently its at ~150 Kelvin, meaning we are about halfway to zero (which approximately hold cold they need to get).

Happy Thanksgiving! Well, technically today is Thanksgiving at the Pole, because we're 19 hrs ahead of Chicago its really Thursday here. However, we really celebrate Thanksgiving on Saturday, so that most people get a 2-day weekend, instead of working 6-days a week which is the standard schedule. Tomorrow night, I'm going to help with pie making for Thanksgiving. They make ~50 pies for Thanksgiving for the ~250 people on station, so they always ask for volunteer help on the big holidays (Thanksgiving and Xmas). For those who remember, Thanksgiving dinner is sort of like Xmas here. There are not enough seats in the galley/cafeteria for everyone, so there are three 1.5 hr meal settings (starting at ~4pm, ending at ~9pm). And then after the last meal ... dance party!

The last few days have been slow at the telescope. We've been waiting for the cryostats to pump down to low pressure and cool to ~0.25 degrees above absolute zero (0.25 Kelvin). This process takes ~5.5 days, and for much of that there is not a whole lot to do at the telescope. We've done a few things related to wiring up the readout electronics for the receiver, re-greasing some of the gears and bearings on the telescope, but overall not alot of telescope work to do. The detectors should get cold enough to work on Saturday night (just in time for official Pole Thanksgiving!). We'll let the frirst few tasks run automatically, so hopefully we wont have to miss any of the Thanksgiving dinner. But then starting on Sunday, we should start getting really busy for the next week or two, verifying that the receiver is working better after our changes. If there is a big problem we'll have to re-open up the receiver again and fix it, which will delay us a couple weeks, if everything is working good, I'm likely to get out of here and home for Xmas. So the next week will be really important!

Even though the telescope work has been slow, I've still been pretty busy because I need to put together an application for a facutly job at the U. of Chicago. The main thing I need to do is to update my CV (which is really out of date), and write a "Research Statement", which is supposed to be a ~3-5 page document stating my research interests and what I would do if I became a faculty. The latter I've had to do some thinking about so its been taking a while. I need to finish it by Tuesday next week, so I should really make sure to finish it in the next few days before the detectors and cryostat are cold.

I also couldnt find my camera today (I'm sure I just misplaced it somewhere), so I dont have any real pictures, sorry! My next post I'll make sure to find it so that I can at least have alot of Thanksgiving related pictures (pie-making, the dinner, etc.).

While down here, I've also been corresponding with some 3rd graders about the South Pole. For fun, here are a list of their questions and my answers, enjoy!

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- Do you have your own igloo?

I wish! At the South Pole, there is a research station large enough for 150 people. Here I have a fairly normal looking bedroom with a bed and desk for me to sleep and work in. There are also labs for me to build and test my experiments, a cafeteria with cooks (tonight we had spaghetti and chocolate ice cream), and even a basketball court.

- Could you send a picture of penguins? Narwhals?

I will send pictures of penguins. There are none at the South Pole, but I've seen many on the coast of Antarctica. I don't have any pictures of Narwhals.

- How cold is it there? How do you dress for the weather?

Right now the outside temperature is about -30 degrees, and the wind-chill is -60 degrees. When we go outside, we wear alot of extra clothing to protect us. On top of my normal clothing, I usually wear snow pants, a parka, a scarf, winter gloves, a wool hat, ski-googles, and wool socks. We try to make sure all our skin is covered when going outside. If you don't, you can get frost-bite in only about 10 or 15 minutes.

- How did you choose Anarctica? Is it fun being a scientist?

I work at the South Pole, which is in the center of Antarctica. The South Pole is one of the driest and coldest places on Earth, which means there is very little water in the air. This is important for my research, because we are trying to measure microwaves from very distant stars and galaxies. Much like how your microwave works at home, microwaves are absorbed by water, which is why your food gets hot in a microwave oven. So its very important that there is very little in the air here, so that microwaves from distant stars and galaxies aren't absorbed by air in the atmosphere.

Its alot of fun being a scientist. Not only do we get to go to exotic interesting places, like the South Pole, but we also are trying to build experiments that answer very difficult questions about how the world works. It's hard to appreciate how big and vast the Universe is, but there are more stars in the Universe than grains of sand on all the beaches on Earth (thats alot of stars!) As a scientist, I'm trying to build experiments that help us to understand where all these stars come from and how they work. The more I learn, it helps me appreciate what an amazing and beautiful place the Universe is.

- Do you like to read? Do you have any pets at home?

I do like to read. In addition to scientific papers, I also love fiction and I try to read one book a month. Currently I'm reading "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle", its a book about a man in Japan looking for his lost cat (I promise that it's better than it sounds).

I have a cat at home, his name is Pookie. He is 17 years old, which is quite old for a cat, but he's still very active and happy for a cat is age. He likes to be pet and purrs easily.

(and here are some pictures of my from three years ago when I saw penguins in McMurdo, Antarctica)

2009-11-20T22:12:00.000-08:00

(Left) - Top of cabin, chain hoisting the optics and receiver cryostats down. (Right) - Liz un-doing the lines to the pulse tube cooler to the optics cryostat (the thing that cools the secondary mirror for SPT to 10 K). To remove the cryostats Liz and I have to climb to the top of the cabin, Liz is responsible for un-doing the optics cryostat side of things, I'm responsible for un-doing the receiver cryostat side of things. She has a much harder time becuase she needs to sit on a ledge, while I have a platform to stand on.

(Left) - Middle of cabin, chain hoisting the optics and receiver cryostats down. A continuation of the above photo on the left. (Right) - The optics (white) and receiver (red/right) cryostats finally separated. Liz, John Ruhl, and Abby all in the picture.

(Left) - Bottom of cabin, chain hoisting the optics and receiver cryostats down, cryostats nearly on the ground, a continuation of the top two pictures on the left. (Right) -The BICEP2 team finally arrived at Pole, hoisting their crates filled with the BICEP2 cryostat up to the top floor of Dark Sector Lab (DSL), the building that SPT and BICEP2 share.

(Left) - A rare picture of me with my camera, helping Liz put on the back plate of the receiver cryostat. (Right) - Abby trying to attempt a pose that Bill has popularized the last two years at Pole on the back of the receiver cryostat. The back-side of the focal plane and readout wiring is visible.

(Left) - Another rare picture of me with my camera. I was checking some dimensions on the newly blackened focal plane. (Right) - A top-side view of the focal plane. Part of the re-work this year was to blacken the metal pieces that hold down the copper filter holders to reduce refelections out of the cryostat, hopefully this change doesn't cause other problems.

Its been a busy few days at Pole. About two days ago we filled up an entire day taking down the receiver and optics cryostats out of the telescope cabin, so that we could begin the re-work that we came down here for. Doing this is an intensive process, because you have to hoist down ~2000 pounds of cryostat out of the cabin, while two people (Liz and me) have to climb up into the cabin ~25 feet off the ground to detach the cryostats from their mounts, and de-cable the cryostats.

Since then, we've opened up the cryostats and begun the receiver re-work in earnest. I think we have ~24 more hours before we start pumping on the cryostats again, and then ~24 hrs after that we can begin cooling them down. I have to give the Pole science lecture on Sunday so I still need to prepare a little for that too.

Anyway, I have to post quickly the satellite is almost down! I'll write more when I get a chance, bye!

2009-11-17T21:59:00.000-08:00

(Left) - SPT winter-overs Ross and Erik just about ready to board a plane to McMurdo (and then home) after having spent ~10 months at the South Pole. They like to play up their craziness, hence the head slapping. (Right) - Just before Erik and Ross were going out to board the planes we posed for this photo with the SPT'ers currently on station (minus Ken). Left to right are Abby, Erik, Ross, Liz, and myself.

(Left) - The SPT team out by the runway waiting for Ross and Erik to board the plane out of the South Pole. One of the nice traditions at Pole is either seeing people off or greeting them at the runway. (Right) -Lounging around science waiting for Ross and Erik's plane to arrive. Ross was feverishly trying to copy files off his computer at Pole.

(Left) - There goes Ross, Erik, and the two Ice-Cube winter-overs out to their plane, after having spent approximately a year at the South Pole over winter. (Right) - Also of note this weekend, was the first significant party of the year, a dance party in the summer camp lounge.

Yesterday the SPT winter-overs, Ross and Erik, left the South Pole after each having spent ~10 months here, even over the winter. It was sad to see them go, its been fun catching up with them after having not seen (only heard them on telecons) for so long. Typically, winter-overs are known to get a little "toasty" after not having interacted with the normal population for nearly a year, but overall I think both Ross and Erik were doing really well. That is not to say they weren't anxious to leave, but they were happy to see us, and we had fun doing activities with them the whole week, including using the sauna, playing foosball in IceCube lounge, and attending the first dance party of the season.

Besides socializing, we've also had to finish up the last of the 2009 observing season's observations and download as much information from Ross and Erik regarding the telescope operations. The last ~4 days have been great weather, which has allowed us to do Venus and Jupiter observations, which we use for making beam-maps for SPT. A beam-map is basically a measure of the spatial response of our optics to a point source on the sky. Planets are most useful because they are so bright that we can get a detailed beam-map in a very short amount of time, however they typicall only get to ~20 degrees elevation (similar to the Sun) because of our location at the South Pole. We've also had to get several different tutorials from Ross and Erik on running the telescope. This includes various things like: greasing the telescope's gears and bearings (notice how dirty Ross and Erik's coats are), running the auto-processing computers that pre-process and analyze the data from SPT, going over the paging system that alerts us if there is a problem with the telescope, ... and the list really goes on. But it was very useful to have them around to refresh us on all these different tasks.

Last Saturday, was also officially the first dance party of the season, which of course took place in Summer camp lounge (the collection of tarp tents that ~100 people stay in during the summer construction season, because there is not enough room on station). It was a fun dance party. Similar to most dance parties, the dance floor has a larger percentage of women than the total station population, but there were definitely a few energetic men (of which I might be considered one). The early season favorite for best dancer on station goes to Eli, the greenhouse tech, very impressive dancing Eli.

Currently we are officially on our last day of observations for the 2009 observing season. So approximately 24 hrs from now the camera should be off the telescope, and we'll be waiting for it to warm up. So tomorrow and the next week should be pretty busy as we do that, and do a handful of improvements to the camera. If all goes well, we should start cooling down the camera again before Thanksgiving, so that we can have that day off and enjoy the dinner down here. Apologies if I dont have time to blog between now and then, because it could get busy, but I'll do my best.

2009-11-12T22:58:00.000-08:00

(Left) - Walking back to the station (where we eat and sleep) from the telescope. The station is about a kilo-meter walk from the telescope and is that structure furthest in the distance between the building. The weather for observing has not been very good lately. (Right) - Ross, Abby, and Liz climbed on top of the receiver cabin to sweep snow and check on the foam cabin window.

(Left) - Abby climbing down from the top of the receiver cabin. Its really slippery up there, so I dont like going up there, getting down involves feeling your way over the edge to this ladder that Abby just is getting onto. (Right) - Abby getting a tutorial from Erik about how to move the telescope.

(Left) - Ross, Liz, Abby, and Erik in the control room waiting for the receiver cabin to dock. The telescope comes down from above, over the hole in the roof, allowing us to access the receiver. (Right) - Ross, Liz, and Abby working on blackening some parts to put in the receiver. We've made several parts to improve the baffling and reflections of stray light inside the receiver for next season.

I've been at the South Pole three nights now. So far not much eventful has happened.

At work, we've been mostly waiting for the weather to clear so that we can get final planet observations for the season. The problem is that planets are pretty low on the horizon (~15 deg) and in the summer the weather is not as good, particularly recently where its been really cloudy outside (see the first picture on the webpage). In the meantime we've been doing some observations that are less weather sensitive, getting trained by the winter-overs on some various maintenance and regular telescope tasks, and prepping some parts that we want to install in the receiver. Overall, things haven't been really that busy though. There are several stateside related projects that I'm still trying to work on while down here, so its good that I have a little time right now. But I'm certainly not as efficient on them as I would be in Chicago.

I've also slowly been trying to catch up with, and meet new, people on station. I really dont feel like I have as much time down here as you might expect to do those sorts of things, but its nice to catch up with people after not seeing many of them for a year. Regardless, many of my social activities have mostly revolved around catching up with the winter-overs. Tonight we're going to the sauna for the first time this season, which also means my first shower since coming down here. I've been here three days, so I'm due for my first two minute shower for the week.

Anyway, right now I need to get back to work. Later.

2009-11-09T22:59:00.000-08:00

(Left) Picture from the cockpit of the C-7 flight from Christchurch to McMurdo. Notice the Antarctic mountains in the background (Right) Same flight to McMurdo, getting close to McMurdo and starting to fly over significant sea-ice

(Left) Hiking up a ridge to get a better view of McMurdo, Abby and Liz with McMurdo in the background (Right) Hiking up the ridge, looking back towards Abby. Notice the sea-ice in the background and mountains in the background. McMurdo is actually on an island, surrounded by the Ross Ice Shelf.

(Left) Same hike in McMurdo, Liz pausing to hug me near a cross memorializing a failed Antarctic expedition in 1903. (Right) Finally in the South Pole! Ross (a SPT winterover), Liz, and I are walking back from the telescope.

So I'm finally at the South Pole! Overall, the trip down here was exactly as planned and on schedule. I arrived at ~noon New Zealand Time on Tuesday 10 November 2009, so ~5 pm Chicago time on Monday Nov 9th.

Yesterday, we caught a 6 am shuttle to go to the Antarctic center to check in and prep for our flight to McMurdo. This involves formally checking in all your luggage, and gearing up in your extreme cold weather gear, which you must be wearing when you board the plane. This flight does have a standard TSA-like check-in service, but run by New Zealand milatry personnel, who are all in their miltary khakis. By ~1030am we took off, and ~5 hrs later we landed in McMurdo.

The time in McMurdo moved pretty fast. By the time we made it to the main building it was ~4pm, we then had to sit thru an ~1.5 hr orientation. They give you the basic talk of: welcome to the ice, these are the basic rules for McMurdo, info on weather, rooming, redeployment off the ice, drinking, computer info, medical, ... it goes on and on. The part every year that I find funny is their lecture about altitude sickness. The doctor always tries to push "Diamox" a pill to help with high altitude adjustment because the South Pole is ~10,000 feet high, and occasionally someone gets altitude sickness. This is almost always because of over-exertion at work, because people go to work the next day and immediately start shoveling snow and doing regular manual labor. But the doctor blames it on people not taking Diamox, and has a real fire and brimstone speech, where he says you have two options: 1) take the Diamox and you'll be fine, or 2) don't take it, and come back in a body bag. Its 10,000 feet people! Its not that bad.

Anyway, also in McMurdo, Abby, Liz, and I did a short ~1hr hike out to Scott hut, an original hut from an early successful South Pole expedition, and then up the ridge-line to get a better view of McMurdo and the ice sheet. It was a nice hike, and the weather was pretty good for McMurdo, about 12 F with not much wind.

This morning, we took the ~3hr flight from McMurdo to the South Pole and arrived here around noon. We spent most of the afternoon catching up with Ross and Erik, SPT's two winter-overs last year. Ross is a new postdoc in Chicago, and Erik is a grad student from Berkeley, who built all the detectors in the camera for SPT, and was dedication and attention to detail in doing this was invaluable to the project. I'll get better pictures of them tomorrow, but they both seem in pretty good spirits, although both are anxious to leave a week from now. This afternoon, we mostly caught up with them, talked about the plans for the next few days, and then got a quick tour of the telescope.

Anyway, I got to end this before the satellite goes down. I'm safe and sound at the South Pole, more to come later!

2009-11-08T02:37:00.000-08:00

(Left): Waiting in the US Antarctic Center and listening to the Antarctic flight instructions. Notice a few regulars from previous years in Pole (e.g. - Nate, Curtis, Liz, and Abby). (Right): Me in the changing area, trying on some of my ECW gear.

(Left): Liz climbing a tree in the Christchurch Botanical Gardens. (Right): Abby and Liz standing next to some flowers in the gardens.

(Left): Some parent and baby ducks in the water lily pond at the gardens. Feeding attempts by me were unsuccessful. (Right): Me trying to entice some ducks with a leaf, pretending it was food, which totally worked.

I'm in New Zealand! The timeline for travel to Pole basically is as follows:

Thursday: Chicago to LAX, arrive 9pm in LA, take 1030 pm flight to Sydney, Australia (14 hrs long)
Saturday: land in Sydney at ~8am
Saturday: Fly to Christchurch, New Zealand (3 hrs long), arrive ~3pm
Sunday 1pm, get fitted for extreme cold weather (ECW) gear
Monday 10am, fly from Christchurch to McMurdo, Antarctica (~4.5 hrs long)
Tuesday 9am, fly from McMurdo to the South Pole (~3 hrs long)

So as of now, I'm basically finished with number 4. Today we went to the U.S. Antarctic Center and got fitted for our ECW. Before going to Pole, the Antarctic program give you all the weather gear that you possibly need: multiple hats and gloves, thermal underwear, a parka, carthart snow pants, ... Now I basically have my stuff picked out exactly like I wanted for previous years, so this goes much faster now. I also bring alot of more comfortable stuff from the US.

The fitting and orientation only takes ~2hrs so one has the rest of the day to explore Christchurch. Today we went shopping for some last minute thermal and cold weather stuff during the morning, then in the afternoon we did some shopping for more Pole food related surprises (including gifts for winterovers) and walked the Christchurch Botanical Gardens, and then in the evening got a beer at the Dux de Lux (favorite Polie hangout) and then got some sushi nearby (you cant get Sushi at Pole).

The thing today I took the most pictures of was the Botanical gardens. The gardens in Christchurch are really gorgeous, and today was a perfect day to walk around them (~70 deg and sunny). Abby, Liz, and I spent only a little over an hour there, but it was so so nice to get out and walk thru some greenery, especially before going to Pole. Liz had urges to climb several trees, one of which she really climbed high (see pic). There were also a fair amount of flowers in bloom, although the rose garden was pretty dead this time of year. As always, there were also alot of ducks milling about, including many baby ducks. At one point, I tried to entice some babies nearer for cute photos, but was pretty un-successful. Luckily, later I found some adult ducks that were more easily tricked into thinking a leaf that I was holding was actually food, and I was able to get within a couple feet.

Tomorrow, I'm scheduled to fly to McMurdo at 10 am, so with any luck in ~15 hrs from now I should be in Antarctica!

2009-10-15T17:56:00.000-07:00

(Above: Abby watches an outgoing C-130 cargo plane. It is about a kilometer walk between the station and the telescope, and we have to cross the runway to get there (yes, where planes land). If a plane is coming or going, we have to wait at the sign next to Abby until its clear. This sometimes means ~15 minute waits in -30 degree weather)

Has it been one year already?!? Well not quite, but regardless it means that another trip to the South Pole awaits me. I'm scheduled to leave the U.S. on Thursday November 5, 2009, and then arrive at the South Pole on Tuesday November 10th. Five days sounds like a long time to get to the South Pole, but remember we lose a day traveling to New Zealand (its ~19 hrs ahead of us in Chicago), and then I need to spend two days in New Zealand to land, get de-jet-lagged and re-fitted for cold weather gear, before flying to McMurdo. I'm scheduled to be there until January 14th, 2010, however there is a good chance I will leave early. How early depends on how well things go, but it could possibly be before Xmas. However, that would definitely be the best-case scenario, so cross your fingers friends and family! (If that happens, apologizes to my South Pole family!)

The same deal goes as last year, I love mail at the South Pole, if you send me a postcard or some mail/package I will send you a postcard. My address at the South Pole is:

Bradford Benson, A-379
South Pole Station
PSC 468 Box 400
APO AP 96598

That is an Air Force postal address, and U.S. domestic postal rates apply (i.e. - a letter still only costs 42 cents, or whatever it is). Apparently mail is the lowest priority cargo to the South Pole, so it can take several weeks to arrive, you can't send perishables, and they recommend not to use packing material, since it will have to be disposed of, but if you must to use "clothing or something similarly useful and non-polluting". Anyone who sends me a postcard is promised one in return, just make sure to send me your address because I might not have it on hand.

2009-02-04T14:31:00.000-08:00

After a hectic last several days (work and socially), yesterday morning I left the South Pole and now I'm in New Zealand. It was another fun and productive season. At first I was dreading coming down, but in the end it ended up being a great season. SPT is working great, the new detectors are working great, and this season's receiver should be several times more sensitive than last season. Every year its hard not to get nostalgic about leaving the ice. After spending several months at Pole you get to know all the people and they become like extended family spending every day with them in such close quarters, its a little sad to see them go. The regular world definitely feels more foreign to me now.

Above is a picture of Curtis, John Carlstrom, Liz, and a bunch of other Polies waiting at Pegasus field near McMurdo (on about 10 feet of sea ice), waiting to board the C-17 Air Force Cargo Plane to Christchurch. We arrived last night at ~10 pm, went out to get some food and drink at Bailey's with some other Polies, and now this morning I have a 230 pm flight to Auckland, and will head to Los Angeles afterwards. I think I'm in Los Angeles from February 5-8th, and then will head back to Chicago. Below is a shot I took in front of the telescope my last day, at the time the telescop was observing what us in SPT call "the most interesting object in the Universe" (paper in prep). Anyway, I had a great year, see you all soon!

2009-01-28T07:28:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I got the official ok for setting my return flight back to the United States. I had been scheduled to leave the Pole on February 15th on the last flight out, but things are working well enough that its been deemed that I've put in my 2 months and can go home. Basically the receiver for the camera is working great, we've met our goals for upgrading the focal plane sensitivity this year, its making great maps of clusters of galaxies, and there should be no reason to open it up again for at least another year.

I'm scheduled to leave the South Pole on February 4th, spend one night in New Zealand, fly to Los Angeles on February 5th, and finally fly to Chicago on February 9th. Some of my Bay Area PIB friends are having a get together in LA over that weekend (mainly because amongst our friends there are no weddings planned, and we wanted one get together this year), I'm getting out of the Pole just in time to attend, so I'm abandoning and notion of exotic vacations in the Southern Hemisphere to go. I plan to take more time off when I'm back in Chicago, but I haven't quite figured out what that will be. I'm eying some European conferences this spring and summer so hopefully at least one of those works out.

2009-01-27T04:27:00.000-08:00

This past Friday we had the 2nd annual Ladies Night. My first day on station in December two people asked me about Ladies Night and if we were having it again, and this year's party had alot of buzz on station considering how well last years party went.

For Ladies Night, we decorate the first two rooms in the Dark Sector Lab (the building attached to the telescope) to accommodate the party. The first room is a wine and chocolate room, where most of the people hang out and socialize. While people are socializing we take small groups back to the main part of the telescope, give them a tour, and explain to them what we do.

The other main party room, is normally a storage room but we set it up as a dance floor. We cover all the windows with a pink foam to set the mood, put up Xmas lights, and then play some combination of 80's slow dancing music and faster music for people to dance to. The party both years started off pretty low key with adult chatter, polite dancing, and tours, but then as people drink more people dance more, and then around midnight most people go home to bed.

One nice thing about the party is that its the one party of the year where there is hope to have a respectable guy to girl ratio. On station the male to female ratio is usually about 3-to-1, and this year its closer to 4-to-1. For last year's ladies night, we had about 60 people show up, with 40 women and 20 men. This year we had about 70-80 people show up, with equal numbers of men and women. This year the rec coordinator on station, Hilary, was a big fan of Ladies Night, and put announcements for it on the normal rec schedule. Since knowledge of the party was more widespread, disdain for it from the men on station also seemed higher, and there was definitely a larger number of men who crashed the party. Its not a big deal really, but the magic of throwing a party on station where the number of women vastly outnumber the men was something that I appreciated.

Towards the end of the party, two girls on station decided it would be a good idea to bite the nipples of some of the winter-overs, as some sort of mark that the winter-overs could remember Ladies Night by (and also because it would probably be their last contact with women for ~9 months over the winter). The pictures above are of Robert getting his nipple bitten, and then our winter-over Ross crumpled on the ground still recovering from the bite. It was a very strange tradition. Needless to say, this was near the end of the party around midnight so not many stragglers were around to see the branding.

2009-01-22T05:41:00.000-08:00

You might think that inauguration day might pass somewhat quietly at Pole, but it was a big event down here. On Monday, ~80-100 people gathered outside the South Pole to pose for a picture with a banner congratulating President Obama. You can see me in the right of the picture in the back row. Then today, they flew in a CD copy of the main part of the inauguration, and they played it three times in the galley. I went to the showing right after dinner, and there were about ~80 people there. In the picture you can only see half the galley, the other half was behind me, and I didnt grab my camera quickly enough to get a picture of Obama himself speaking. The only time that they've flown video of any sort of event down here to be shown on such short notice is the Super Bowl, so I was impressed they made the effort with the inauguration. You can see that much of the crowd were the 20 and 30 somethings on station, and I think its true that the type of person that Antarctica attracts (the global traveling outdoorsy adventurers) are generally Obama supporters.

I don't like to get too political, but I was pretty moved by the Obama election and inauguration. I think Obama will be a great President. He's smart, thoughtful, inspirational, well-spoken, and seems to be very well-advised. His multi-cultural background and unusual name are a very powerful sign to the world that America has changed its ways, and is hugely motivational to so many people. I definitely was moved by several of his speeches throughout the campaign.

Even as great as Obama is, so much of my excitement is really because I'm so happy to see Bush go. There are just so many things that he did not only do wrong, but actively screwed up.

The war in Iraq never should have happened, there was no reason for it, and that was clear in 2002, before we went to war. Now all these years later, there are nearly a million Iraqi and American lives lost, families burdened by the war, and all the disabled Veterans whose lives will never be the same. The American soldiers made a commitment to this country to dedicate their lives, then they were needlessly sacrificed by an administration that was too eager and careless to go to war, and who I honestly don't think gave a crap about their lives. I think they truly thought it would be an easy war, popular with the public, could be "spun" to fit in with their war on terror, and meanwhile they would get to funnel taxpayer money to the defense and oil contractors that they were tied with. Saving lives was clearly very low on their list, given how little post-war planning and concern was giving for American soldiers and Iraqis.

He's obviously made a host of other mistakes including: further de-regulation of the financial and banking industries, turning a trillion dollar surplus into a multi-trillion dollar deficit, his home buying initiative which allowed Freddie and Fannie to expand their sub-prime holdings and helped the sub-prime mortgage industry explode, ignoring global warming and the increase in our (foreign) fossil fuel dependence, the response to Hurricane Katrina, the attacks on American and foreign civil liberties, ... and the list goes on.

As a scientist though, I'm very happy to be rid of Bush because of his disregard and disrespect towards science. The most significant offense in my mind is his treatment towards evidence of global warming and the delay it has caused us in shifting to more renewable energy sources. Official government science reports were changed to downplay global warming's impact, and the administration was actively involved in a mis-information campaign to confuse the public regarding global warming and human's involvement. Also I was pissed about his re-organization of NASA, which downplayed science missions (like the Hubble telescope), in favor of the under-funded Mission to Mars, which is basically an excuse to funnel money to big government contractors. Certainly I consider it less of a waste of money than the war in Iraq, but I still don't think its a good idea.

The picture of Bush in the main conference room here was also taken down, and I was amused to find that someone had written graffiti on the back. I dont think we have an Obama picture yet, but I would imagine its coming soon.

2009-01-18T07:17:00.000-08:00

The 2nd annual SPT Ladies Night is Friday this week. Liz has been super-excited about Ladies Night for some time, so last week while we were waiting for the receiver to cool, she had Abby and Tom help make ~120 of the above personalized invites and the below flier. She posted all the fliers in the women's bathrooms, and then additionally we go around and hand out personalized invitations individually. Today, we also compiled a list of women on station, so we could keep make sure that everyone gets an invite. There are currently 51 women on station (out of 248 total), a worse ratio than I thought.

Last years event was one of the best parties of the season. We basically have wine and chocolate in one room, where it is more chill and conversational. The room next to it has cheesy 80s slow dance music, where Ladies can in fact slow dance with a cosmologist. And then we also give tours of the telescope, and explain some of the science that we do. Overall its a pretty chill party really, but there is enough quirk and novelty to it to make it interesting. Its going to be totally awesome, I'm looking forward to it.

2009-01-17T07:20:00.000-08:00

Prince Albert of Monaco came to the South Pole a few days ago. He's the son of the royalty formerly known as Prince of Monaco Raineer and the American movie actress Grace Kelly. At the South Pole, there is a Distinguished Visitor (DV) program, which NSF uses to promote the station and its science to very important people, be it foreign heads of state, congressmen, or under-secretaries to different government agencies. It basically allows these people to come to the South Pole for about 6 hours and see whats going on down here (and then hopefully not cut its funding). They usually fly the DVs in at 1130 am and leave at 530 pm, and the regular tour consists of: 1) the station, 2) the station's gift shop, 3) the South Pole, 4) IceCube, 5) South Pole Telescope, and 6) Atmospheric Sciences. They try to take people around in that order, so often SPT is one of the first things to get cut if planes are delayed, or IceCube takes too long with their tour, or there is a sale in the gift shop.

So when the Prince walked in he was accompanied by this huge entourage of three assistants, about five people from station management, a driver, and they even got a couple people on station to act as video-grapher and photographer to document his visit. We were busy trying to take some data with the telescope (I think this was our second day of observations), so Liz, Tom, Abby, and I pretty much kept working while Bill took the Prince on the regular tour. He actually seemed like a pretty regular guy, very unassuming, modest, and interested, so overall I was pretty impressed by him.

If you do a wikipedia search on the Prince, one of the main things that comes up is bachelorhood and playboy image, having dated super-models Angie Everhart, and Claudia Schiffer, and actress Brooke Shields. He also has three out of wedlock children with three different women. So I was amused that they made a point of having the Prince pose with the one woman in his entourage, Shelby, who works on station and was along to videotape the Prince's visit. Shelby is a pretty awesome character, very outgoing, friendly, funny, and has this gorgeous smile and positive personality that is very contagious. Being as outgoing as she is, she may have very well thrown herself in there to get her photo with the Prince in front of the telescope, but regardless I was amused that she was the only one to get a picture alone with the Prince given his playboy reputation.

2009-01-15T06:43:00.000-08:00

Last night (January 14th) SPT achieved first astronomical light for the 2009 season!!! It might not look like much, but SPT observed the galaxy cluster AS1063, thru some pretty terrible weather (there were thin high clouds covering the entire sky) for a little less than two hours, and achieved the above detection of AS1063. For those not familar, AS1063 is one of the two biggest known galaxy clusters in the Southern Hemisphere. It weighs about one million billion (10 to the 15th power) times the mass of the sun, and is made up of several hundred galaxies. When the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) passes thru this massive cluster, roughly 1 pct of its photons scatter off the gas in the cluster to higher energies, and makes the cluster look colder relative to the rest of the CMB sky (so the cluster is the dark blue blob in the center of the maps). We are all very excited at Pole because it is the first time that the receiver camera has been installed well before the closing of the South Pole station (February 15th), so this should give us plenty of time to troubleshoot things and train the new winter-overers (who arrive two days from now actually).

To install the receiver in the telescope is quite the operation. First the telescope is "docked", as in the above picture. Extending from the telescope towards the viewer is the telescope arm, which holds the receiver cabin, the room in which the receiver goes. When the telescope docks, the green curtain comes down to mate with the control room (the plywood building below), the roof of the control room slides open, and we can reach up to the receiver cabin and open some fridge doors into the receiver cabin.

To lift the receiver this time, we had a total of 6 people, the total amount of SPT people on station right now, but also sort of the minimum number of people that you need to install the receiver easily. The SPT team on station now is: Bill, Abby, Liz, Ken, boyish Tom Plagge, and myself. Four people stay on the ground of the control room and lift the receiver into the cabin via chain hoists. While two people have to climb up ~20 feet high into the cabin, and attach the receiver when it gets to the top. This whole effort has to be fairly rushed, because to do the lift we disconnect the Helium lines going to the receiver pulse tube cooler, and as the receiver warms up, the Helium over-pressurizes, and if you dont re-attach the lines soon enough, a pressure relief valve will explode on the receiver.

I ended up being one of the two people, Liz being the other, going up into the roof of the cabin, for the second year in a row. Of the two of us I have the cushy job, because I get to stand in this little space above and behind all of the readout cabling to the receiver. My main responsibility was to attach two of the four bolts that hold the receiver in the cabin, watch for collisions while they lift the receiver, and the reattach the receiver Helium lines (before it explodes). Liz has a much tougher job, because she has to work in literally a crawl space behind the receiver, basically doing the same thing as me, but in a much more tightly confined space on the opposite side of the receiver. Below I'm attaching some pictures of Zak doing this task that I took last year, to show how tight it gets behind the cryostats where Liz went. There is basically a 18 inch crawl space that Liz/Zak had to work in to get behind the receiver. The picture of Zak below, shows the cryostats a couple feet from their final position, when they get bolted into place, there is only ~1 inch of clearance between the top of the receiver and the cabin roof in places.

Anyway, its been a busy couple of days finishing up the last of the receiver tests in the control room, lifting/mounting the receiver into the cabin, and then starting observations on the sky. The weather has been bad the last few days too, so many of our observations havent been too successful. However, tomorrow the weather is supposed to improve, so hopefully we can get more observations. Wish us luck!

2009-01-09T05:29:00.000-08:00

One popular South Pole weather phenomena for people to photograph is the "Sundog". Sundogs are sort of like rainbows, excepts instead of water droplets causing them, ice crystals do. However, the ice crystals bend the light differently and in such a way that there will be a ring around the sun. If there are enough ice crystals in the air, there will be a second ring, and if there are really enough ice crystals you will see a host of other secondary smaller effects, like an inverted ring around the sun, or a ring around the entire sky at constant elevation.

Sundogs happen alot in January, because the skies are really clear, but there tend to be alot of snow crystals being blown around. Last week we had a few really good days for them, so we tried to take several pictures capturing them. The standard shot is having your head block the sun, so your head glows, but it dims the background enough so that you can see the Sundog. This week there was a particularly good picture of a sundog on the "daily scroll", the southpole website which has the daily weahter and a nice South Pole picture, where someone blocked their kite with the sun. This season I've actually seen several people flying kites, a few even use them to para-ski, so that the kite is large enough to pull them on skis. This is actually a fairly common aid for people ski-ing to the South Pole to use.

2009-01-07T06:38:00.000-08:00

About five days ago we opened the SPT receiver again, and re-arranged the focal plane for one last time. The goal this season had been to replace about half the detectors in the camera, or three of the six wedges of detectors (a wedge consists of 160 bolometers, the focal plane consists of 6 wedges, therefore the focal plane has 960 detectors). This austral summer, the first two cooldowns of the receiver were to test 8 new wedges of detectors, to characterize them and pick the best 3 wedges. Now having done, that we have installed those 3 new wedges, kept 3 of the wedges from last season, and should have a focal plane which should be about 2.5 times more efficient for finding clusters of galaxies, the main science goal of our project.

After the last cooldown, we ended up warming up the receiver on new years eve. A couple days later we had a telecon to decide on the final configuration of detectors, and then that same day we closed up the receiver again. That was a ridiculously long day. The day before we had prepped our seven favorite wedges, knowing that some combination of those seven would be picked. I ended up not going to bed until 230 or 3 am that night, but then had to get up for this 730 am telecon the next day. I think I ended up getting only about 4 hours of sleep and felt pretty wrecked the next day, but then I had to re-assemble the newly decided on focal plane and close up the receiver.

The final installation of the focal plane in the receiver is a fairly tedious task. It involves heat sinking down all the mechanical parts and wiring going to the focal plane. Since the focal plane needs to be cooled to 0.25 degrees above absolute zero, you want to reduce the heat load from the outside world on the focal plane as low as possible, by intercepting all these parts at several different temperatures, so that the focal plane is only weakly connected to things that are already pretty cold, like 0.5 to 3 degrees above absolute zero. What this practically means, is that I have to re-install ~400 screws, some in very hard to get to places. Since the clearance inside the receiver is fairly tight, and there are alot of delicate things in there that are easy to screw up, the task of doing all this final assembly is left mostly to me, since I designed much of it and have now reassembled it ~15 times. Still, most everyone hung around for at least moral support, and to help me whenever I needed it, and we ended up finishing around ~10 pm that night.

When we got back to station, I still wanted to do something fun, so Abby, Liz, Freija (a grad student on Icecube) watched Top Gun together, drinking wine whenever any line with homo-erotic undertones was said (e.g. - when watching a video of a "kill" in Veitnam, Iceman says "this is giving me a hard on", and his co-pilot says "dont tease me", or when Iceman tells Maverick "Maverick, you can ride my tail anytime!"). It was a fun end to an exhausting day.

2009-01-05T04:02:00.000-08:00

Xmas morning at 9am there was the annual "Race Around the World". The race consisted of a 3.7 km run/walk/ski/vehicular-transport race around the South Pole, hence you are actually running "around" the world. Liz, ended up waking me up about 15 minutes for the start of the race, and I barely got out there in time to compete.

I think about ~50 runners, walkers, or skiers participated, and then a host of people in different vehicles. People tend to get pretty inventive with the vehicles, two years ago they build a mobile shower that was pulled on the back of a sled, and then people were actually taking showers during the race. However, this year there was nothing that really stood out. Some people just drive bulldozers or trucks around the track, one person hooked a couch to the back of a van, one group made a sled look like a chariot, and then that was pulled by about 6 people.

The weather was ok for the race. It was very overcast but the winds had died down to ~10 knots (from ~20 knots the day before) and the temperature was about -20 F. When the air is this cold and dry, it becomes pretty tough to breath in heavily when exercising. Liz ended up inflaming her trachea pretty bad, even coughed up some blood after the race, and had a bad cough for a few days afterwards. In addition, the path is only slightly trampled down snow, so the running can be fairly uneven at times. During the race, I just tried to keep a comfortable pace, not run too hard, and then walk when necessary. I was still pretty winded by the end, but I felt like it ensured I wasnt killing myself for the race. I ended up racing the 3.7 km in about 25 minutes, which was somewhere between 20-25th overall. It doesnt sound fast, but considering the conditions I was happy with the time.

Next to the spot where they run the race, they also annually put out this Xmas tree made from junk around station. The day after the race, Liz, Abby, and I had another sauna night and posed in front of the tree. The Ice-cubers are jealous that I'm so lucky. Merry Christmas everybody!

2008-12-27T12:36:00.000-08:00

Every year there is a big Xmas dinner on December 24th. Since the station population is about 260 people, and there is only seating for ~100 people in the galley, its broken up into three shifts. This year, I was on the 2nd shift, meaning we had dinner at 530pm. They do a pretty good job decorating the galley and setting the mood, by putting up Xmas lights, covering the windows, putting up Xmas decorations, etc. The dinner the last two years has mainly consisted of Beef Wellington and Lobster tail, and then several very rich deserts. At dinner I sat with all the other SPT'ers, Bill, Helmuth, Liz, Abby, and Ken, and the cryo-tech Flint.

While the dinner is good at the South Pole, I mostly look forward to the party afterwards. I like the parties because you can talk to more people and be a little crazier than a regular day on station. This year's post-Xmas party was mostly comprised of us going to Summer Camp Lounge, which has been recently remodeled to be more conducive to partying. Summer Camp Lounge had mostly been known for having a stripper pole in the middle of the room, now it also has a bar, colored lighting, a more open dance floor, and a better TV set up in a more cozy location in the corner of the room. The only bad part to the remodeling is that they got rid of the foosball table, which had been a main reason for me going to Summer Camp Lounge in previous years. The party was mostly a 20-something age crowd, with lots of dancing and drinking involved. I was pretty tired by the end of it and ended up crashing sometime not too far past midnight. The race around the world was at 9 am the next day, and I wanted to make sure I woke up for that.

2008-12-26T04:49:00.000-08:00

Last week we made a frantic 6 day push to finish up some critical work before Xmas. First, we had to start and finish the measurements on the new detectors that I had brought down, next we needed to open up the receiver and install new detectors that my former advisor from Berkeley, Bill, had brought down, and then start the cooldown of the those detectors before Xmas eve (the time of the big Xmas dinner).

Testing the detectors is harder than it sounds. The detectors are basically infra-red detectors built to study the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), which is three degrees above absolute zero. They are tuned to observe this pretty cold CMB, which helps keep their noise low, and can get saturated if they observe anything much hotter. For example, the room that we work in is about 300 degrees above absolute zero, a factor of ~100 hotter, while the sky during a typical day is about 10 degrees above absolute zero (at these frequencies at least, how "hot" the sky is depends alot on which frequency or wavelength of light you are talking about and how transmissive the atmosphere is there). So we have to go to great lengths to make sure that the detectors are mostly seeing the sky and not the ground or room. Since we are observing microwaves, we can just use a normal piece of Aluminum sheet to reflect the light path of the detectors to the sky. The beams are very fast though (they spread very quickly), so this is somewhat tricky. You can see in the above photos, Bill and Helmuth, spending some time adjusting the Aluminum flat mirror/sheet so that it is coupling light from the sky to the detectors more efficiently. When we do these tests we have to leave the roof to the control room open to the outside, so the room gets pretty cold, ~40 degrees F, and this gets worse the longer you have to poke your head out the hole in the roof to adjust things.

Luckily, we were able to finish all the tests we needed on the set of detectors that I brought down in about 3.5 days. During that time, Bill, my former adviser from Berkeley, also arrived at Pole with a set of four more wedges to test. So we wanted to quickly finish the first set of detector tests so that we could open up and install these four new wedges. On the last day of tests, this meant I had to stay up from 8 am to 8 am to finish, but luckily I got to sleep in the next day.

At that point, we had to go our standard procedure of prepping the wedges, by putting the right horn arrays, which help couple the light to the detectors, and the infra-red blocking filters, which make sure only the right frequency of light that we want hits the detectors. Abby, the grad student from Chicago, has been mostly helping me prepare the wedges and focal plane. In addition to helping with this, she has also mastered the art of screw sorting which makes my job much easier, Thanks Abby!

The rest of the pictures below are just the standard mounting the cryostats together pictures. We had a pretty frantic two days opening and then re-closing up the receiver again. We were able to get it on the vacuum pump by ~5pm on December 23rd, and then turned on our pulse tube coolers (which cool the detectors down to 3 degrees above absolute zero) on the morning of December 24th. Later that evening we had the official Pole Xmas dinner, which I will blog about in the next day or two. The receiver will be cold again Monday morning December 29th, so I should have two fairly relaxed days ahead of me waiting for the receiver to cooldown.

2008-12-25T07:04:00.000-08:00

One of my favorite traditions down here is to go to the sauna, and then make a run to the South Pole in our swimsuits. There is a sauna on South Pole station, you get it up to ~200 degrees F, and then have to run ~200 feet outside to get to the geographic South Pole. The marker that Yuki is holding above is the official marker which is supposed to mark the exact location. In the other picture below, we are in front of the ceremonial South Pole (the barbershop looking thing), which is only about 200 feet away from the actual South Pole, but is more centered on the station to make it better for pictures.

Most people question the sanity of this tradition, but after being in the sauna for ~20 minutes at 200 degrees F, the 5-minute run outside is actually fairly comfortable, especially when the wind is low. Last year, I introduced Yuki, a grad student from Berkeley onto this tradition, and this year both Liz and Abby, two newer grad students from Berkeley and Chicago, respectively, have been enthusiastic participants as well. Flint the cryo-tech on station also has been a regular for our runs. So far I've been at the South Pole about 3 weeks, and we've made four of these runs. Since we're only allowed two showers a week, they have to overlap with our shower nights. For the run above, it was Yuki's last night, and we wanted to go on one more run in his honor.

2008-12-14T05:38:00.000-08:00

A few days ago there was a BICEP farwell party. BICEP is another CMB experiment that shares lab space and a building with us. They just finished their third year of observations, and the last few weeks have been dismantling and packing up their experiment. To commemorate their leaving they held a party at Dark Sector Lab (DSL, our shared lab space). One of the saddest parts of seeing them go, is that the BICEP team is also a great group of people, and its been particularly fun having them around the last three years to hang out with and to get to know better. Above is a picture of two BICEP grad students, Yuki and Cynthia, myself, and this season's science cryogenic tech, Flint, hanging off the BICEP telescope mount.

For the party the BICEP team took apart their cryostat camera so that people could see the inside of their instrument, and also had wine and snacks for people. Above is a picture of the BICEP focal plane. BICEP relies on similar detectors as SPT, except they also measure polarization of the CMB. They are looking for a certain polarization signature in the CMB that can tell them about inflation, the theory that explains the physical mechanism for the expansion of the universe during the Big Bang.

Parties/Events at the lab are often controversial amongst station management because of the presence of alcohol. I have to say though, each of the two parties that have been out at DSL the last two years (Ladies Night and this one) have been the most tame adult parties that I've been to at the Pole. Its basically just friends drinking wine, and beakers giving tours of their experiments, no one is getting drunk at these things. They have also been one of the few opportunities to give more lengthy tours to most of the people at Pole, and I think the more informal setting works well. In addition to the wine, there was about six beers there, and it was also the one of the only times that I've ever seen Yuki drink beer, so I had to take a picture.

Another popular picture at the party was to set yourself up on one end of the BICEP cryostat and get your picture taken from the other end. Above is a picture of Travis posing on one end of the cryotat. Then the other picture is me, Yuki, and Freija, an ICECUBE grad student, posing on one end of the cryostat.

2008-12-10T09:15:00.000-08:00

One of my first tasks after arriving at the Pole was to help open up the receiver and replace some of the SPT detectors for testing. Above are pictures of the receiver (the red thing, which I work on) attached to the secondary mirror cryostat (the white thing, which Case Western and Chicago built). The secondary mirror on the telescope is cooled to 10 Kelvin (-263 Celsius), is ~4 feet across, and so requires its own very large cryostat to cool it down (the secondary is literally the 2nd mirror in the optics chain, light from the sky first hits the primary mirror, 10 meters across, then the secondary mirror, then the detectors). The receiver is attached to this cryostat, but weighs ~400 lbs, so we have to use a set of pulleys to get it off, and requires some team effort. Above are pictures of Martin and Liz, two Berkeley grad students waiting for people to get ready for this task, and on the left shows a side view of the cryostats, as we start unscrewing some of the screws that hold the two cryostats together, which are on the end of that red cone in the picture.

Once the receiver is taken off the secondary cryostat, our first order of business was to remove the focal plane, the mechanical structure that holds the actual detectors inside the receiver and is located at the "focus" of the telescope. The focal plane comes out the square opening on the back of the receiver (on the side opposite the cone). Above and to the right, you can see Abby (U Chicago grad student) and Helmuth (Berkeley Scientist) helping open the back of the receiver and getting the focal plane out.

Above, we've now taken the focal plane out of the receiver, and this is a picture of me starting to dis-assemble it to take the detectors out, with Steve Padin (Chicago Scientist), sitting down next to me talking about schedules for the receiver detector testing. The focal plane consists of six wedges of detectors, each wedge has 160 detectors (for those interested, technically our detectors are called "bolometers" (by definition, this means it detects light by changing its temperature which we then measure, so its more of a thermodynamic measurement of the brightness of something).

Here is a picture of an individual wedge of detectors in two different states of assembly. On the left is the wedge fully assembled and ready to go into the cryostat. On the left, I've removed the horn array and infra-red filters for these detectors. The horn array is the gold plated thing that focuses/concentrates/couples light to the detectors, it consists of 160 machined cone-like holes, which couples the light on the detectors. The infra-red filters are several layers of mylar with copper deposited on each layer, glued together, and they block all infra-red radiation above a certain designed frequency, which basically makes sure that only light in the frequency range that we are interested in is getting absorbed by the detectors. On the right are the detectors themselves and some readout electronics. The detectors are the 160 circles, each ~4 millimeters in diameter, and they consist of a thin layer of gold deposited on silicon-nitride in a spider-web shape. And then at the center of the spider-web is a small (~100 micro-meters) resistor that is operated at its super-conducting transition, and whose resistance is therefore very sensitive to the exact temperature that the web is at. We monitor the current through this resistor, and this tells us how much light is coming from the sky and getting absorbed by the detector.

We're going to start cooling down the receiver again soon with new detectors, so my schedule will likely be: busy for a few days, not-so busy for a few days, and then really busy for a week.

2008-12-10T08:52:00.000-08:00

Well, I'm finally at the South Pole. I actually only had to spend a day in McMurdo, but upon arriving at the Pole, immediately remembered how bad/slow the internet is here (the fast internet is up from 230am-630am, with some slow internet from 630am-1130am), which has prevented me from blogging more than I wanted.

The flight to the South Pole went pretty smoothly. To get here we boarded a LC-130 Air Force plane in McMurdo around 9am, and then land at the Pole around noon, in time for lunch. There were only 10 people on the flight but lots of cargo. One nice thing about the flight is that it always offers pretty spectacular views. Obviously most of Antarctica is covered in ice (e.g. - the South Pole is covered by a 2 mile thick layer of ice), but midway through the flight you fly over the trans-Antarctic mountain range. I particularly like the one picture where you can see the propeller to the plane. There are a range of mountains jutting up under the ice, but for the most part everything looks flat and white as far as the eye can see.

Another nice Pole tradition, is that people/friends will always come out to greet you (or send you off) when your plane arrives. So after you walk ~100 feet from the Plane, there is a gathering of people waiting outside in the cold, that gives you hugs and says hello. The picture I show I took hurriedly after dropping a bag, but shows the plane I got off of in the background, and then the two U. Chicago grad students Abby and Lindsey happy to see each other.

Above is a picture of the actual South Pole, as viewed from the South Pole Station's galley. As you can see the Pole is only ~100 feet away from where we eat everyday. I like this picture because people always ask "How far are you away from the actual South Pole?" and as you can see, we're pretty damn close. I also liked the random celebrity culture magazines on the cover of the mags that happened to be sitting on the ledge to this window. Even though we are at the South Pole, we still care about "How to Look Your Best!" and what Gwen Stefani is up to. There are alot of random magazines around the station. I think they trickle in when the season starts, the old ones get spread around for random reading, and the newer ones are hoarded somewhere.

2008-12-04T00:55:00.000-08:00

Today we flew from Christchurch to McMurdo, the coastal base in Antarctica. We were delayed an extra day in Christchurch, so got some more time to go around the city. I took the opportunity to buy like 75 bucks worth of chocolate (for a yet to be named party at the Pole), and walk around Christchurch, where I ran into three different winter-overers from this past season, Steffen (the BICEP winter-over), Adid, and Bill Spindler (who runs the southpolestation website). I also had dinner from a crew from the Exploratorium, including Mary Miller, who has been our main contact their in our outreach efforts the last few years.

This morning, our departure went as scheduled. We took off around ~930 am, landed in McMurdo at ~230 pm, went thru an hour orientation (that seemed particularly long and useless this year), and then had the rest of the day to explore, eat, and bag drag. Bag Draging is when you take all your bags and person to get weighed for the next days flight. It was done by ~730pm, so Abby and I went on a hike to Observation Hill, overlooking McMurdo. McMurdo is on Ross Island. So we actually land the plane on ice on the open ocean, and then get bused over to McMurdo, which is on the coast of Ross Island. To the North of McMurdo is Mount Erebus, and then its surrounded by water on all sides, but in the distance you can see the White and Black Islands (I might be a little loose with the geography, but thats my impression of things).

The hike up to Observation Hill was kind of cold, but not too bad. I think the temperature was around 0 Celsius, and there was a bit of a biting wind out of the East, but overall it wasnt really much worse than Chicago (you can judge how cold it is based on my clothing). After finishing the hike, I took Abby around McMurdo a little bit, and we stopped at the Coffee House, one of the bars in McMurdo. There was a 5 piece band playing Talking Heads covers, I had a glass of wine, and Abby and I played the child's game "Sorry", which was worse than I remembered. When we left, Abby posed in front of the "Women of Antarctica" poster that is displayed at the entrance to the Coffee House. Overall, the Coffee House is my favorite McMurdo bar, its definitely the most chill. The other bar is called "Southern Exposure", its actually pretty nice too, but more of a traditional bar (with pool tables, foosball, more classic rock music, ...)

Tomorrow I'm supposed to leave for the South Pole at 8am, hopefully we make it!

2008-12-01T18:51:00.000-08:00

Abby, Helmuth, and I all landed in Christchurch yesterday. Helmuth was at Pole last year with me, and is a senior scientist at Berkeley. Abby is a 3rd year grad student in my group at Chicago, and this is her first time at Pole.

Yesterday we spent most of the day wandering around Christchurch and not trying to fall asleep. You land in New Zealand at ~6 am NZ time, and by the time you get to your hotel its ~11 am. You didnt sleep much on the plane and are pretty tired by the time we got settled at our hotel. So Abby and I walked around Christchurch all day, familiarizing her with the town, and then doing some shopping for things that we forgot to pack (e.g. - camera cable, eucalyptus oil for sauna, ...). We ended the day at the Dux de Lux, a favorite bar/restaurant of Polies.

Today our big responsibility was to get fit for cold weather gear at the Antarctic center. They give you two big orange bags full of cold weather clothes, and you're supposed to try it all on and make sure it fits you. Having been to the Pole enough times, I know the routine pretty well now. In particular, I know that I dont want half the stuff they give you. So I first go through and give back half the contents of the bag, before trying on the essential stuff like the parka and snow pants. I was also pleased to find this year they still give you warm tube socks. The rumor had been that due to budgetary cuts they stopped giving socks and you had to pay for them. I had several requests for some extra socks to bring back home (they actually throw away the socks after you hand them back in, so you should take them if you want them), so I was particularly pleased that they gave me six pairs this year, rather than the standard two. So people expecting socks back home (you know who you are), you will be getting some.

2008-11-23T13:35:00.001-08:00

I am going to the South Pole again! I'm scheduled to leave the United States on November 29th, and will be there until either February 15th or ~January 15th depending on if things go good or bad.

The same deal goes as last year, I love mail at the South Pole, if you send me a postcard or some mail/package I will send you a postcard. My address at the South Pole is:

Bradford Benson, A-379

South Pole Station

PSC 468 Box 400

APO AP 96598

That is an Air Force postal address, and U.S. domestic postal rates apply (i.e. - a letter still only costs 42 cents, or whatever it is). Apparently mail is the lowest priority cargo to the South Pole, so it can take several weeks to arrive, you can't send perishables, and they recommend not to use packing material, since it will have to be disposed of, but if you must to use "clothing or something similarly useful and non-polluting". Anyone who sends me a postcard is promised one in return, just make sure to send me your address because I might not have it on hand.

2008-11-23T12:46:00.000-08:00

We flew to McMurdo on February 14, and had to spend a night there. I usually hate spending time in McMurdo because there is nothing to do there and you are just killing time between Pole and New Zealand. This time it was actually pretty fun becasuse all the Polies on the last flight out were there for one night, and it was sort of one last night of hi-jincks and fun before heading back to New Zealand. The night started with Cynthia and I going to Scott Base (the Kiwi base, which is ~2 miles from McMurdo), because the bar there was having some sort of American night. Also I thought it would be fun to see Scott Base, which I had never been to. Cynthia also had a friend that she flew down with who was going to be over there, and she wanted to meet up with him. Scott Base is a little more picturesque than McMurdo, it just looks a little cleaner and less dirty mining town. The bar there was pretty nice, and had this unique tandem shot glasses on ski thing that we watched people do shots to. They had to be very well synchronized otherwise people got spilled on easily. I dont think the way they cleaned the shot glasses were very hygienic, but several of us did shots ourselves after this group finished up. We then went back to McMurdo to meet with the rest of the SPT crew, who were finishing off the last of the alcohol that they had brought back with them from Pole. The next morning I woke up somewhat early, and met up with Carla and Michele, two friends of mine from Pole, and we went for a hike around McMurdo. We saw some baby skuas, and hiked up a ridge over-looking the sea and McMurdo. Later that day we caught a flight back to the Christchurch, NZ, but overall it was easily my best stay-over in McMurdo ever.

2008-11-23T12:30:00.000-08:00

Before leaving the Pole this year, it was very important that Yuki, Tom, and I, that we get in one last run to the Pole in our swimsuits. I introduced these runs to Yuki this year, and he quickly fell in love with them, describing them as "exhilarating" and wanting to do them twice a week before our shower days each week (for those who forget, we are only allowed 2 two-minute showers per week, so its very important to align our sweaty sauna nights + Pole runs to overlap with a shower day. I love the fogged up iced over picture of Tom in his swimsuit at the Pole, it really gives you an idea how quickly you ice up after running out to the Pole.

2008-11-23T12:13:00.000-08:00

The final lift of the receiver and optics cryostat happened on February 5th. It alway takes alot of people to do the lift, because 3 people have to position themselves sort of perilously hanging in the cabin (~20 feet off the ground), while on the ground high pressure helium lines to the cryostats are being disconnected and the receiver needs to be hoisted up. And then you only have ~30-60 minutes to get the receiver up there and reconnect the helium lines because you dont want the receiver to warm up too much, or the helium cold head could over pressurize and explode (well a pressure relief valve would explode/vent, but that would still be pretty bad).

This year I was positioned up in the cabin. Its not the best position for the biggest guy on the project to be in because its pretty tight up there, but I wanted to be up there to help reconnect the helium lines and make sure everything was plugged in and positioned how I wanted. Zak had the toughest position in the project being wedged in the back behind the optics cryostat. Once the helium lines are reconnected to it and the cryostats are screwed into place on the optics bench frame in the top of the cabin, its extremely tight between the cryostats, the roof, and the sides of the cabin, so it takes some effort to crawl out of the space. I don't know who we are going to enlist next year to do this very difficult task with Zak not going down.

2008-02-23T21:37:00.001-08:00

Its official, I will be back in the States at ~noon on Monday February 25th. Today I'm finishing up the last day of my vacation in Sydney, and then tomorrow I board the 12 hour flight back to San Francisco.

2008-02-13T01:48:00.000-08:00

Well, its been a busy year at the South Pole, so busy in fact that I've been terrible in updating my blog. Fortunately, the instrument is working great, and the hard work has paid off. Now they are kicking us out of the Pole a day early. I'm on the official last flight out leaving at ~1230pm February 14 NZT. This year with work schedules and satellite problems I haven't been able to blog as much as I wanted to, but I'll probably tell stories to most of you later. I'll be spending ~7 days in New Zealand, and ~5 days in Sydney, Australia, and I should be back in the US on February 26th. Thanks for paying attention this long!

2008-01-22T03:12:00.000-08:00

Last week at the telescope we had a "Ladies Night". Ladies Night was the brain child of Jake Speed, a 5-time winter-overer, and Joaquin, as a way to have a chill laid back party at the South Pole (not an easy task) while guaranteeing that the maximum number of women would attend. It seemed natural to combine this party with something that offered the South Pole community a way to tour the telescope, something that hadn't been officially done all season, so SPT's "Ladies Night" was hatched. Joaquin made an ultra-cheesy poster that promised the opportunity for "intimate tours of the telescope, sensual man-lift rides, and slow dancing with a cosmologist". He also themed the party as a "junior high slow-dance", so that (to quote Joaquin) "no self-respecting man would come", and then took it one step further by only advertising in the women's bathrooms on station, and handing out personalized invitations to all the women on station, and some of our closer male friends. We also had a professor on the project, Nils, buy ~$120 worth of chocolate in Christchurch, while Joaquin, myself, and a few other contributed ~20 bottles of wine, and the galley staff made us a cheese plate. We then cleared out one of the side-rooms in DSL as a dance room, put some pink anti-static styrofoam over the windows to give the room a nice pink glow, and Joaquin came up with a ~120 song "fast" dance playlist, and a ~50 song "slow" dance playlist, with ultra-cheesy music.

Overall the party was an outstanding success. Roughly 50 people showed up, with at least 30 women, and when people started showing up it became a thing to "slow-dance with a cosmologist". Never would have I thought that any woman would come up to me and shriek, "I haven't slow-danced with a cosmologist yet!" and then grab me by the arm to lead me into a darkened room to slow dance, but it did indeed happen several times that night. We also had a saying to "make room for Jesus" while slow-dancing, in an effort to keep it clean on the dance floor. Several women also came very nicely dressed up for the event, and the wine, chocolate, and cheese, combined to make it the most tame adult party that I've ever seen at the South Pole. Towards the end of the night, Yuki even started teaching a couple of the women to breakdance. After the party we got numerous compliments about how nice a party it was, and thanking us for the chance to come out and see the telescope. Personally, I thought it was the best party that I've ever been to at the South Pole.

2008-01-08T07:55:00.000-08:00

A couple of days ago, the station winter manager Katie, took Joaquin, Kevin, and I on a tour of the tunnels underneath the station. They are tunnels carved into the snow using basically chainsaws that are mainly there for the water and sewage lines on the station. The main tunnel is probably about a kilometer long, and then along the way there are 6 side tunnels that intersect with the main one, and are each ~200 feet long. The side tunnels are not always used and seem to be there for possible future expansion but are now mostly empty, so people have taken the liberty of erecting their own individual shrines. Over time a few winter-over crews have erected shrines to commerate their winter, with various South Pole

pictures. Above Joaquin is pictured in front of a random Mexican candle Christian themed shrine, and later in front of a frozen sturgeon fish that was abandoned here at Pole ~20 years ago but now lives on a ledge in one of these tunnels. The tunnels are actually very cold too, they equilibrate to the average year round temperature at the South Pole, which is only -57 degrees F.

The very first side tunnel holds the sewage line that goes to a Rod-well that holds all the station sewage. A Rod-well is basically a very large chamber that is drilled, where ice is continuely melted and pumped out to provide the station's water. Each Rod-well they melt to a certain size and then its abandoned, or in one case used to store the station's sewage. As I found out this year, all the station's sewage is actually stored in this one old Rod-well, and is called "Lake Patterson" by people at the Pole, because its rumored that a guy named Patterson fell in years ago.

Apparently this semi-permanent sewage holding at the South Pole is allowed, as long as the US maintains a base at the South Pole. The tunnel leading to Lake Patterson is pretty foreboding, as you go deeper in it there are more and more icicles, which form from all the heat and steam being emitted by the sewar line. Also as you get deeper and deeper into the tunnel, the smell of shit gets worse and worse. At the very end of the tunnel, there is a port which you can take off and literally peer down looking at the river of shit going through the sewage line. Every week, Katie gets to drop a 200 foot plum bob into this hole to make sure that there are no obstructions in the line. One of the pictures above is Kevin bending over trying to get a good picture of the river of shit.

Today was also my first day back on day shift, after having worked since Xmas day on the night shift for this receiver cooldown. Nightshift is weird because you don't overlap with 80 pct of the people that you are used to seeing, and then you're working all the time on the receiver, so I would only come back to station at odd hours, and it really felt like I didn't see anyone for ~2 weeks. I was also on the opposite shift as Joaquin, so I missed many of his crazy antics, including his latest plan to hold a "Ladies Night" at the telescope for which he even made a flyer which offered "intimate tours of the telescope - sensual man lift rides - slow dancing with a cosmologist" and will "feature the music of Hall & Oates".

2008-01-05T09:19:00.000-08:00

On Xmas day the big event at the South Pole is the Race Around the Pole, which is sometimes called the Race Around the World. Its a 1-km loop 3-lap race around the South Pole (it starts and finish at the barbershop ceremonial South Pole), and people are encouraged to walk, run, ski, bike, or take any other of mechanized transportation. This basically means that most people run, some walk, a few ski, one or two bike, and then there are a contingent of people that prefer to ride some of sort of mechanized whatever. The mech vehicles range from snow machines, to the station fire truck, to people sitting on a sofa being pulled by a snow machine, ... Last year, someone actually rigged up a working hot-water shower that was pulled by some sort of wheeled vehicle, although I suspect most people that ride mechanized vehicles do so because they have been drinking.

Even though I am grossly out of shape, having basically not worked out at all the last two months except for biking and/or walking to work, I decided to run in the race for historical purposes. I ended up finishing 16th (out of 60 or so people), running a 21 minute 30 second race, which is more impressive considering you run the whole race on snow that isn't always well-packed down. From SPT, Martin, Nils, Dana, and Helmuth also participated in the race, as well as Yuki, from BICEP. Nils ended up skiing the race. He had won the race back in 1999 on ski's, before they acknowledged ski's as a legitimate form of racing gear, so I was anticipating a high finish from him. However, he claimed to be really out of shape (being a professor and all) and ended up finishing 6th, but judging by how winded he was at the end of the race, you could really tell he went for it. The race was dominated by last year's winner, Curtis (or so I will call him), a construction worker who I first met last year, and have been hanging out with a fair amount recently since my switch to night shift right after Xmas. Curtis runs on the treadmill ~1000 minutes/week (I only know because they send out weekly emails about who works out the most on station), and I think runs marathons, so he is quite the runner, even when not on snow. Above you can see pictures of the start of the race, the finish of the race, during the race, and some cosmologists posing by a Merry Christmas sign (and a super cool junkyard Xmas tree, which was unfortunately mostly cut out of the photo).

2008-01-05T04:46:00.001-08:00

I've been getting grief at the Pole for including people's names in my blog and not doing it anonymously. For the most part, I didn't really feel like the inclusion of any of the names that I did was a big deal. There were two main instances of me doing this: 1) talking about the cute IT girl, snd 2) talking about the fight. As far at the IT girl, she is cute, she did look great that Xmas eve, and so what if I think so or if she knows about it via my blog. As far as the fight, I figured the fight was public enough information at the Pole, everyone knows who was in the fight, everyone knows who was flown out on Xmas eve, that it doesn't really matter if I include their first names or not. And as far as anyone else's names that I included from that night, I don't think anyone else did anything wrong that night, and I like all the dudes that were there, so I didn't feel like throwing any of their names out was a big deal either. If any of them did read it and were offended by anything I wrote, I'm sorry that I offended.

Anyway, just to make sure I don't offend anybody, I'm going to start keeping the blog more anonymous, hopefully my bland nameless sugarcoated descriptions of events going on down here isn't as dull as I anticipate it will be.

2008-01-01T11:40:00.001-08:00

There was a long article about my project in the Chicago Tribune a few days ago at:

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-telescope_31dec31,0,6168513,full.story

2007-12-30T10:35:00.000-08:00

A couple people emailed me about the pre-Xmas fight at the South Pole. See link:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,2232455,00.html

2007-12-30T09:43:00.001-08:00

The main Xmas celebration at Pole is the Xmas dinner, which actually takes place on Xmas eve. Since there are ~250 people at the Pole at Xmas time, and there is only enough room in the galley (eatery) to seat ~100 people, Xmas dinner is broken up into three servings. People in the "know" at the Pole, know to sign up quickly for the last seating because it tends to be the most raucous and fun, and is immediately followed by a Xmas dance party, to celebrate the birth of our lord.

I ended up sitting mostly with SPT people, Kathryn, Joaquin, Martin, and Dana, and a couple iron workers that we knew from last year, Eric and Kate, and Yuki, another grad student in my lab who works on a different project. The dinner is basically serve yourself, each table is called up one by one to go through the food line, where the main course was Beef Wellington, which was prepared by Chris, the ex-marine cook. But then to add to the formality of the dinner, people from other dinner shifts volunteer as servers, to serve wine and water, and eventually the dessert and coffee. The food was pretty good, and I ended up eating way too much. During dinner, Eric, the iron worker near me, was given a present, a paint by numbers picture of Jesus on velvet, which was the envy of all at the table.

One thing that definitely struck me, was the number of nice clothes that people brought to the South Pole. Several girls looked gorgeous in beautiful dresses and high heals. It was definitely a big change of pace from the usual Carharts and work clothes that people tend to wear daily. Since so many of the people on station have serious hands on work (construction, carpentry, cargo, materials, electricians, cooks, ...), people tend to look grungy most days. So to have everyone do themselves up for one meal was an unexpectedly nice change.

2007-12-22T10:51:00.000-08:00

Three days ago, another member of the SPT team arrived, Nils Halverson, a professor from Colorado, who also overlapped as a postdoc with me at Berkeley for a year, so who I know quite well. Nils is notable for being on the DASI experiment, which was the first experiment to measure a polarization signal from the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), and also for being a quarter inch taller than me (although I have a longer wingspan). He is a welcome addition at the South Pole.

This week there has started to be a build up of Xmas activities at the Pole. Two days ago in the

galley there were gingerbread house and pie-making teams. When I went into the galley I was surprised to find Nils and Yuki, a grad student in my lab at Berkeley on the BICEP experiment, helping to decorate the gingerbread house (see above photo), so I decided to help as well. At the neighboring table there was a pie-making table, which looked more involved and requiring more instruction, so I stayed away and let my creative juices flow on the gingerbread house. I never got a good picture of the completed gingerbread house because my hands were covered with the white egg-white stuff we used to cement the pieces in place.

2007-12-20T11:10:00.000-08:00

Last Saturday I went to my first party at the South Pole. There had been others, but usually I was working. This party was the "carp" party, hosted by the carpenters on station. Before heading out to work for the night, Joaquin and I went over to the party for ~15 minutes to check it out, and then afterwards made an agreement that we would leave work at ~1030 pm and return to the party. When we made our 15 minute stop over after dinner, it was still a fairly tame party. A few people were drunk, but overall it was just people standing around drinking beer. The biggest attraction was this two foot diameter one foot tall cylinder of ice, with two channels carved into it, so that people could poor alcohol into the center, and it would run down the two channels into people's mouths. Unfortunately I didn't have my camera with me to capture it.

When we went back to the party after work, the remnants of the party had dispersed around summer camp, mostly in the summer camp lounge and smoker lounge. The summer camp lounge seemed a little dead, and people were using the foosball table already anyway, so Joqauin and I decided to go to the smoker lounge, and found a much more happening party.

Within a minute after arriving a full scale wrestling match broke out between two guys. After a couple minutes of them wrestling, they got up, gave each other a hug, and the party went on. Over the next hour there were at least three more full on wrestling matches. One of the guys even got up afterwards and had a big cut on his head, with blood dripping down the side of his face. It turned out several of the guys there were ex-marines, and most of them knew each other pretty well. At some point, one of the ex-marines left and then came back in a mariachi outfit that was pretty stylish. Most of the people there I had never talked to before, and a couple of them thought I was in cargo, which I was happy with. As a beaker (aka - scientist) on station, you are somewhat purposely ostracized from the other workers (e.g. - you wear a different color coat, you work different hours, there are different rules, ...). So I was happy to be left thinking that I might have established a look/cred that I might not be a beaker. Overall, it was a good night out, I got to meet several people I had never met before, and got to hang out in the smoker lounge without getting wrestled to the ground.

2007-12-17T12:02:00.000-08:00

The last week has been very busy with re-assembling the receiver/camera. Joaquin and I literally had removed everything out of the receiver, and re-built it back up. Most of the changes were part of an effort to improve the cryogenic performance of the camera (i.e. - how cold it gets), and to test new detectors that we might use for next season's observations. Yesterday it all culminated with a 24 hour work day/push to get the receiver connected to the secondary cryostat, and begin the ~36 hour pump out process to get the cryostats under vacuum (i.e. - removing all the air, and getting the pressure down to a million times less than normal outside air pressure). So I decided to dump several pictures over those 24 hours or so onto the website while I'm up late and the internet is working. The pictures start with:

1) Me doing the final assembly of the focal plane (the thing that holds all the detectors/pixels, and which is cooled to 0.25 Kelvin (K), just 0.25 degrees above absolute zero). The focal plane consists of 960 detectors broken up into 6 wedges. The detectors themselves are under the copper triangular pieces, which filters out light at wavelengths shorter than we are interested in. Much of the metal you see is gold plated to reduce the radiation loading from the hotter stages surrounding the detectors (i.e. - gold is shiny so it reflects light, rather than absorbs),

2) Joaquin pretending to smash the focal plane with a mallet,

3) Me inserting the focal plane into the receiver, the big red metal box that holds the refrigerators which cool the detectors to 0.25 K.

4) A picture of how the focal plane looks after just getting inserted into the receiver. Again most everything is gold plated.

5) A picture showing the focal plane again, but after Joaquin and I wired up all the readout wiring to the detectors. The wiring takes a long time to insert because most of the wiring is at 4 K, and there is alot of effort spent to heat sink the wiring to intermediate stages before the focal plane (only 0.25 K), to minimize the heat loading on that stage.

6) A picture of some of my helpers assembling the receiver. Joaquin (a grad student from Chicago) is in yellow and working on installing a re-imaging lens inside the receiver. Dana (one of our winter-overers) is in gray and black, and he is assembling one of the infra-red blocking filters, which decrease the infrared radiation that can get into and heat up the 0.25 K stage inside the receiver. And Kathryn (postdoc from Chicago) is taking pictures of the work.

7) Martin (grad student from Berkeley) and Joaquin positioned around the receiver just before it gets hoisted up and mated to the secondary cryostat (a large cryostat that holds the 1.5 m diameter secondary mirror, the second mirror in our optics system after the 10 meter diameter primary, which itself is cooled to 8 K).

8) The receiver mounted onto the secondary cryostat and pumping down to vacuum.

Tomorrow we should turn on the pulse tube coolers that cool the receiver down to 4 K, and then by Christmas Eve the detectors will be cold enough to measure and see how/if they work. We'll then probably take Xmas day off, but afterwards it will be followed by a busy testing schedule. Anyway, good night, I'll blog more tomorrow about other adventures, but now I have to go to bed.

(The formatting in blogger sucks, so the pictures are all over the place, I cant deal with it right now, sorry!)

2007-12-10T10:30:00.000-08:00

In two days, three of the people on the project leave, including two of the people pictured here, John Carlstrom (the PI) and Jeff McMahon. So there has been a frantic last few days for them to finish up the measurements that they were brought down here to do, which was to measure the surface accuracy of the primary mirror. The measurements have taken a little longer than expected due to various systematic effects that they hadn't expected. One problem, that required a unique solution, was that the receiver that Jeff made to measure the accuracy of the mirror was seeing stray light which was contaminating the measurement. So the solution was to add "baffling" to protect Jeff's receiver from seeing stray light. The "baffling" solution turned out to be to add four "pee buckets" (literally the Folger's-like tin cans they give people in summer camp to pee in) taped together into one really long cylinder, which then goes in front of the receiver. Jeff was really proud of his solution to add pee-buckets to his receiver to make it work better, however judging from the grin on John's face in this picture, I think he's more amused than proud about this particular solution.

Another interesting thing about Jeff's measurements, is that after he measures the surface accuracy of the primary mirror (the 10 meter dish, which defines the telescope), then they have to adjust the panels which make up the primary mirror to take out whatever deformities that he measures. Our 10 meter primary mirror is broken up into ~200 panels, so after Jeff's measurement, Jeff and John have to go outside, in a man-lift, and adjust ~1000 screws to tweak the telescope surface. He then repeats the measurement, goes up there again to tweak the surface, and then will do this as many times it takes to get the surface to an accuracy that we want. So far, they've only done this twice, but they will likely have to go up again tonight. The killer about changing the surface, is that its a 4 hour process, which you have to do outdoors, in a man-lift elevated ~60 feet off the ground, in ~15 mph winds, with a -50 degree F wind chill. Above is a picture of them hoisted up behind the telescope getting ready to start turning screws, and adjusting the surface of the primary mirror.

2007-12-09T12:06:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I went down to the store/gift shop to buy some beer, and check out this year's collection of South Pole t-shirts and trinkets. After leaving the store I quickly looked in my mail box (not having done so for my 10 days at the Pole), and was thrilled to find a package/letter addressed to me. At first I was a little scared by the scrawled block lettering, written at a slanted angle, but after seeing the return address was that of Amar and Aliza, I knew it was just an Amar thing and there was nothing to fear. The package included a recent Entertainment Weekly (very random), an issue of the comic book "Optic Nerve", and a note from Amar with some cool moon imagery on the inside and out. The Optic Nerve was particularly appropriate, because Joaquin and I recently burned through issues 2-6 at Berkeley, and also his Adrian Tomine's "Shortcomings" book. Thanks Amar and Aliza! It was a very cool package!

What have I been doing the last 10 days work wise? Well the first 4 days or so were spent helping Kathryn and Martin run FTS (Fourier Transform Spectroscopy, a means to measure the spectral/color response of our detectors to light) measurements of the receiver. I worked pretty non-stop during those measurements, however they also included a fair amount of sitting around as scans were taken, or Martin ran different components of the setup script to run the receiver. The last two days were actually pretty frentic, and we managed to really pound out the last set of measurements that we wanted quickly and sucessfully.

Since then we have warmed up the receiver, opened it, and began a major reworking of its interior to improve its cryogenic/thermal peformance. Why did we do this might you ask? Well the receiver basically worked its first year, and I think overall people were satsified with its basic performance, however there were a several issues that popped up, which caused the receiver to perform less than optimal. These ranged from the easy to fix (e.g. - a few screws actually came loose after the receiver had been thermally cycled several times), to harder to fix (e.g. - the wiring that we use to readout our detectors conducted much more heat along it than we specified, lowering the duty cycle, or the amount of time that we can use, the receiver). So Joaquin and I have literally taken everything out of the receiver. The left is a picture of the lab we work in at the Pole, with receiver parts strewn across it (notice the redish outer shell sitting on the table on the left, all the detectors, SQUIDs, and cryogenics/refrigerators used to be in that thing).

(Even on the most compressed setting this picture didnt load, so I'll do it tomorrow when I wake up eariler for the better internet satelite).

2007-12-05T11:28:00.000-08:00

One untold benefit about going to the South Pole is learning about the current status of the other instruments doing Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB, i.e. - the left over light from the Big Bang) and talking with/hanging out with the other people on those projects. The three CMB projects at the South Pole are: 1) The South Pole Telescope (my project), 2) BICEP, and 3) QUAD. QUAD and BICEP are both polarization experiments, but QUAD is especially notable because the principal investigator (PI) on the project is Sarah Church, my PhD thesis advisor. Above is a picture of Joaquin, Martin, and Ed, all on their way to the Dark Sector Laboratory (DSL). In the background on the left, you can see SPT, the blue structure in the middle is QUAD, and the white building on the right is an abandoned experiment/building, ASTRO.

When I was in graduate school Sarah had two main projects that she was working on, SuZIE (my thesis) and QUAD. Even though I wasn't on the project, I went to all the collaboration meetings at Stanford, and generally kept up to date of the goings on talking to the grad student and postdoc on the project at Stanford, Jamie Hinderks and Ben Rusholme. Also, Ben, Jamie, and I were pretty good friends throughout grad school, Jamie being the same year grad student as I, and Ben being a young British postdoc when he started and overlapped with me for 3 years. This past year was the last year for QUAD, so early in the South Pole season there has been a spike in QUAD collaborators at the Pole to help take some final measurements, then to disassemble it and ship it back to civilization. Unfortunately, I missed Jamie at the Pole by ~1 week, but Ben and I turned out coming down on the same flight. On that flight there was also two other QUAD people, Ed Wu and Angelino, both of whom overlapped with me for a couple weeks at the Pole last year, and Ed and I even went on a SuZIE observing run to Hawaii in 2005.

Everyday we walk by the building in which QUAD is located, and recently they have started to put some significant pieces of

the QUAD instrument outside. Most noticeably the 2.5 meter diameter primary mirror, and the foam cone that went over it to support the secondary mirror, and to provide environmental protection. The last couple days we've stopped by several times to muse over how the primary that large was made exactly, and think about using the foam cone to put in as a sky-light at SPT. Above is a picture of Joaquin and Martin looking at the primary, with the foam cone that goes on top of it in the background. I think over the next couple days Angela is going to be opening up the QUAD cryostat and gut the innards, so I hope to stop by sometime and see the inside before she gets too far.

2007-12-03T12:27:00.000-08:00

Well I'm at the South Pole! My trip to the South Pole went smoothly, and I arrived last Wednesday actually. However, upon arriving here I found out we only have 8 hours of internet a day while we wait for one radio dish to get fixed (which will likely take months). Those 8 hours are from 4am-1145am, which have been my sleep hours generally since arriving here because that has overlapped with down time for the receiver/camera when we are not doing tests. Anyway, this has severely limited my blogging.

My trip to the Pole went quite smoothly actually. All my flights were on schedule, and I arrived at the Pole on Wednesday ~noon NZT (New Zealand Time). The above photo is actually us getting off the plane at McMurdo, the coastal base of Antarctica, where we spent one night. It was a nice quick stay, we had time to go to "Gallagher's" the local Irish pub at McMurdo, and had a couple of beers and played a few games of foosball before going to bed, and then catching a ~8am flight the next morning.

The flights to the Pole have fairly few amenities, we fly on Air Force propeller C-130 planes, which have cargo netting seats against the inside walls of the plane for us to sit in. The flight is not very comfortable and very loud. On that flight we had a few DV's with us (Distinguished Visitors), who are usually higher up NSF up types that fly down to the South Pole for a single day to see the facilities, and hopefully give us more funding. Sometimes you get really lucky and there will be a senator or congressperson or two (John McCain came down two years ago, praised us openly for all our hard work, and then later voted to cut off funding to the South Pole station). The main benefit of the DV's on this flight was that the pilots on the C-130 flew unusually low to give us better views of the Antarctic continent, mainly mountain ranges and ice sheets. Above is a picture from the plane, we were flying so low that we were actually below a few mountain tops.

Anyway, I actually need to get out to the telescope right now. The tests we were doing on it when I got here are finished, and we are going to open it up today. The good news is that I'm on day shifts now (~8am - 11pm work shift), so I should get a couple hours of internet per day in the morning. I hope to post something tomorrow as well. Bye!

2007-11-27T00:58:00.001-08:00

Well, I've arrived safely in McMurdo, the coastal base of Antarctica. We arrived ~3pm NZT, and did the standard de-briefing about "being safe on the ice". Afterwards, we had to repack all our things and then "drag" them to the cargo/loading station for them to get re-weighed the night before the flight. Then we had dinner, and several of us went to the "smoker bar" at McMurdo to have a couple of beers and play a pre-emptive game of foosball. We couldnt stay long though, as we have to report at the boarding area at 745am tomorrow. Unfortunately I cant write long or post any pictures, but if things go well I should be at the South Pole by ~noon time tomorrow.

2007-11-26T02:00:00.000-08:00

Yesterday Joaquin and I landed in Christchurch, New Zealand. We left LAX at about ~8 pm PST on Friday, and arrived at ~9am NZT on Sunday.I was pretty beat pre-flight, I had went

into work after Thanksgiving dinner to work, got into work at 8pm, finished some things at work, and after doing my last task of helping Erik (grad student in charge of building all of our detectors) beep out the last of the three new detector wedges I was to take to Pole, it was ~6am. So I ended up getting only about 1.5 hours of sleep Thursday night before boarding the red-eye to NZ. I slept on and off on the flight down to LAX, and then met up with Joaquin (grad student from Chicago) and his girlfriend Thu in LAX for a couple hours before the flight. I was felling pretty good by then, and even though I didnt sleep much on the plane to NZ, I was feeling ok upon landing in NZ.

Joaquin and I had to make a day of it in Christchurch on Sunday, while we waited until Monday for our official cold weather gear fit. After taking a couple hour nap at the hotel and answering some emails, we headed over Dux de Lux for drinks (the local outdoor beer garden), then wandered around Christchurch for a while, and finally ending up at an art gallery, which was having an auction. We stayed for maybe half an hour. Overall the gallery was pretty cool, although Joaquin agreed the worst in show was the triangle picture up and right over Joaquin's head. After the art gallery, we tried to hit the local Heavy Metal Bar, but were disappointed to find that they were closed on Sunday. In the picture notice the sign on the door that says "No Gang-patches or Swastikas", very metal indeed. We then went back to Dux de Lux and got a few drinks with some IceCube people, notably Justin from Berkeley, who is now a grad student there, but I also TA'ed while I was a grad student at Stanford and he was an undergrad.

The next morning, Joaquin and I went out shopping for a few last minute things (more socks, headphone earbuds, a belt, Joaquin wanted a bathrobe for the Pole, ...), and then in the afternoon we went to the clothing distribution

center to pick up our extreme weather gear. Most of your time is spent trying on different clothing, and trading in what doesnt fit you or you dont want. Last year I thought I was supposed to take everything they gave you (i.e. - find something that fits, but you have to take it). This year, I returned a few things, but I think I should have returned more. Since we are working inside most of the time, we really dont need almost half the stuff they give you. Additionally I also brought some warmer more practical clothing this year, so I hope not to really as much on the more uncomfortable clothing that they give us.

Tomorrow a shuttle will be picking us up at 530 am NZT, and if all goes well I should be in McMurdo Antarctica by ~1-2 pm NZT, wish me luck!

2007-11-20T10:12:00.001-08:00

My trip to the South Pole was delayed one week, so now I leave on Friday November 23rd for New Zealand, arrive in Christchurch, NZ on Sunday November 25th, fly to McMurdo (coastal base on Antarctica) on Tuesday November 27th, and then arrive at the South Pole on Wednesday November 28th. This means I will miss out on Thanksgiving at the South Pole, an event I was somewhat looking forward to. However, it also means I have an extra week to pack and finish up things in Berkeley. It was already pretty crazy at work, without the extra week, so overall I'm pretty happy to have it. After all, I'll be at the South Pole until February 15th, so I'll have plenty of time down there.

2007-11-07T14:30:00.000-08:00

The Icewife Cometh Again! On friday I received my official itinerary for my yearly trip to the South Pole. I leave for New Zealand on Friday November 16th, and arrive at the South Pole on Wednesday November 21st, just in time for Thanksgiving. Then I am scheduled to be at the South Pole until February 15th, allowing me one last romantic night at the bottom of the Earth, and probably arriving back in the United States around February 28th. By the way, the above picture is sunrise at the South Pole this year with the South Pole Telescope (SPT) in the foreground.Since I will be spending Thanksgiving, Xmas, and New Years at the South Pole, several people have asked me if they can send me packages or postcards. While it would be wise not to send me anything too big or heavy, you can send mail to me at:

Bradford Benson, A-379

South Pole Station

PSC 468 Box 400

APO AP 96598

2007-02-19T19:50:00.000-08:00

Farewell South Pole!!! About a day and a half ago the Air Force National Guard decided there was a cooling trend at the Pole (heading towards -50 degrees Celsius) and it was time to pull us out of the South Pole. Currently I'm in much warmer Christchurch, New Zealand trying to plan my last minute New Zealand two week vacation. For those in the States, I'm flying back into SFO on March 6th.

On the bottom left is a picture of our two winter-overers Steve Padin, and Zak Stanisewski (i never know if I spell it right), and on the right John Carlstrom (our PI, who is going back to nearly equally as frigid Chicago and his loving family). Just looking at this picture makes me a little nostalgic about the place. Even though I worked basically non-stop while at the Pole, it was overall a very rewarding experience and I'll definitely miss my days with Zak, Tom P., Martin, Joaquin, and the rest of the Chicago crew. I also wish I was there a little longer to see the receiver/camera that I built do it's first science observations, although I was very happy by the end knowing that we had seen first light on Jupiter, made a map of it, had several hundred pixels working at multiple observing frequencies, and the cryogenics on the receiver were working great and holding over 24 hours. Zak and Steve Padin are both great people, and it would have been fun and educational wintering with them, I'm a little sad I'll be missing it. Steve Padin is literally the man who knows everything (at least about SPT, we sometimes jokingly call SPT "The Steve Padin Telescope"), and Zak is a great, nice, fun guy, who is extremely well rounded, has great mechanical practical intution, and I'm glad I'm leaving the receiver in his hands.

Thanks to everyone who read and commented on the blog! I had fun doing it and was glad people read it. By the end, there was plenty more that I wanted to blog about, but it wasnt meant to be. See you all back in the States!

2007-02-17T03:54:00.000-08:00

Last week we held a 2nd SPT metal night, but this time on a much harder heavy metal scale. Basically one of the grad students (Joaquin) from Chicago was particularly anxious to throw a metal themed party for whomever wanted to come on station. This party was to be held at the smoker bar, with beer paid for by the professors on the project, and so that he could play in a faux metal band called "Metal Janjaweed". It turned out to be a pretty awesome party, and was definitely one of the highlights of the summer.

The smoker bar is the unofficial bar of the South Pole. Its in a building/trailer that was the gym in the old station, and is now located in one of the old tunnels leading from it. It has a lot of character and is a pretty fun place to go, however it gets its name smoker bar for a reason and smells profusely of smoke. To further set the mood for Metal Night in the smoker bar, someone had set up a half pound of flour and arranged it to look like lines of cocaine that spelled out "SPT" so that faux cocaine snorting pictures could be arranged, especially trying to coax the higher ups on the project to particpate (see upper right photo).

The grad student in charge also quickly put together a metal band called "Metal Janjaweed" to perform on Metal Night. They had a jam session the day before where they came up with enough new material to write a three song set, which consisted of the songs "Head in a Bag", the self-titled "Metal Janjaweed", and the classic "Kick you in the Head Motherf#$ker". He also managed to coax the PI of the project to perform with the band, and who turned out to be quite the guitar player. They ended up performing three sets of songs. I have videos of their performance, which I will try to post somewhere, and I have to say they were a pretty tightly knit unit for having just formed the day before.

The smoker bar ended up getting trashed by the party, although the worst damage happenned well after everyone related to SPT had moved on or went to bed. The flour at some point became something fun to throw at other people, and near the end of my time at the party one out of control grad student managed to cover another more in control grad student with flour. The real tragedy was that it was her shower day, which she had taken earlier that day, and with only two two-minute showers per week, it took her several days to get the flour out of her hair.

2007-02-13T08:29:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I finally ventured over to the geographic South Pole and got a few pictures of me in front of it. The geographic South Pole is literally only 100 feet from the main station (I can see it out the window of the galley everyday while eating cereal), but I only walked over there once the first week and never got a picture of me in front of it. There is a "ceremonial South Pole" 6 feet away from the geographic one that looks like a barbershop pole (who knows how that tradition was started), and then a second pole that marks the geographic location, which is defined as the place at which the sun doesnt change sky elevation as it rotates around you during the day. The geographic South Pole moves about 10 meters per year because the ice under the Pole is moving, and each January 1st they have a ceremony to mark the location of the South Pole on that date. There are also about 12 nations' flags encircling the Pole to mark the international spirit of Antarctica, although they've managed to put the US flag in a slightly more prominent position (I guess the US, via the NSF and the Navy, did pay for most everything down here). On the bottom right is also a quick impromptu panoramic picture that I took of Martin, a grad student in my lab, infront of the old South Pole station (aka - the Dome). You can see that the old entrance is basically buried underground, and considerable effort is taken to keep access to it. Snow accumulates at several inches per year, so structures slowly get buried by the snow. The Dome was built sometime in the early 1970s, and next year they are going to tear it down, I think because its a hassle to keep it unburied every year and the new station is now completely operational so there is no longer a need for it.

2007-02-12T07:15:00.001-08:00

Last night we put the receiver on the telescope for the first, and hopefully last, time. It was a major operation that took about 6 professors, 1 postdoc, and 3 graduate students 10 hours to do. It involved hoisting up the 2500 pound optics cryostat plus receiver assembly 25 feet into the cabin of the telescope, while keeping the receiver at 4 K. This involved detaching four 66 foot long Helium lines that ran to both cryostats and reattaching them to 200 foot long Helium lines in the cable wrap of the telescope, while the cryostats were hoisted 20 feet in the air, and while doing it fast enough so that they wouldnt warm enough to have the gas inside their coolers to expand and blow a pressure relief valve. Overall, it ended up being a particularly long work day, I was at the telescope from 8pm to 5pm the next day, only leaving once to get breakfast around 8am.

The operation basically involved four people manning the hoists, lifting up the cryostats on each of its four corners, while three people were climbing around near the roof of the cabin, checking clearance issues on top plus switching the Helium lines and cables around, and then a couple people shuttling tools back and forth and guiding the overall lift. On the bottom right is a picture of one of the grad students, Zak (who is also wintering over), climbing up to the The crazy part is that this operation might have to be done at some point during the winter with only two people. However, with as many people as we had, there were some down times as cables and lines were switched around above, to the middle left is a picture of a few professors standing around enjoying some mint Oreo cookies as work went on above.

After it was all over there was some excitement, because the receiver wasnt getting cold enough to condense Helium, but after several hours of panicing and trying things we discovered some of our lines were getting so cold that they it was seriously effecting the cooling efficency of our fridge. Now all appears to be well, the detectors are at their nominal temperature of 0.250 K, and in the next few days we should be starting to look at objects on the sky. The fact that the detectors are getting to 0.250 K is what really relieves me the most, as it was basically my job to design the cryostat to cool the detectors down this far, so its a relief that it all works (especially after a few hours of panic when it seemed like it wasn't working).

2007-02-12T04:13:00.000-08:00

A few days ago the station manager came into the galley with a blue fluffy vest, and went around from table to table asking people to put it on and take their picture. I first saw my friend Cynthia do it on the table behind me (see the picture on the top right), and it looked like she was having fun, so I decided to give it a go. When I put it on he became very specific about what pose he wanted me to strike and he said something to the effect of "Ok, turn perpindicular to me, now look towards me cocking your head over shoulder. Ok good, now show me 'Blue Steel'!" (For those who don't know 'Blue Steel' is the pose from Zoolander, that is supposed to be some uber pose that is so beautiful that it can stop time and bullets). Anyway up above is my best attempt to replicate Blue Steel without the aid of practicing in a mirror. Another funny thing about this whole event was as the station manager was going around some dude was like "Oh my god I have that same vest!" and went to his room and brought it out. The picture below is the station manager on the left and the dude who happened to have the same coat posing together for the picture of the vests. It's amazing that two people happenned to pack the same outrageous vest to take to the South Pole.

2007-02-09T07:35:00.000-08:00

The main point of this post is to just post some nice pictures online of the assembled focal plane, for a few select people to download, but I'll go on a little bit about various things. The temperature hit -45 Celsisus today (or -49 Farenheit), and the wind chill hit -58 C (-72.4 F). You wouldnt think there would be much difference between -30 C and -45 C, but you can really feel it. All the standard gear we were wearing isn't quite sufficent outside, and now the extreme winter gear is almost required to make the 1 km walk comfortably/safely between the station and the telescope. For instance we were given these sort of standard winter gloves, but about a week ago I noticed that by the end of the 1 km walk, the tips of my fingers all had sharp stabbing pains and took a while to warm-up after getting inside. At some point I decided to wear glove liners as well, but they didnt help at all. I finally settled on wearing glove liners, and then holding my hand in a fist and shoving my fisted hand in the standard winter glove as the only way to make the walk without having sharp stabbing pains in the tips of my fingers (and presumably risk frostbite).

The cold weather is making people nervous for another reason, as we are supposed to get kicked out of here if it hits -50 C and we still have alot of work to do. What we were told is that we are guaranteed to stay until the 17th, and possibly until the 22nd if the temperature stays above -50 C, but if the weather takes a particularly bad turn my impression is they will kick us out regardless. This weekend is big because tomorrow we are supposed to hoist the receiver onto the telescope, and on late Sunday - early Monday, the receiver will have cooled down enough for us to operate the detectors at about 0.3 K (0.3 degrees above absolute zero), and we should start looking at the sky, which should really quickly tell us alot about where we stand. This will also signal the return of the 14-16 hour work day, so my blogging might be put on hold. Anyway, wish us luck!

2007-02-07T07:55:00.000-08:00

I woke up this morning (which was actually about 9pm, because I'm on night shift) and walked into the galley/cafeteria to get coffee and cereal only to find about 30 people sitting around watching a Prince concert on the 10 foot wide projection screen TV in the galley. I quickly realized that this was no ordinary Prince concert, but the halftime show of the Super Bowl. Being at the South Pole, there is no live TV, only lots of DVDs and VHS tapes. Since the Super Bowl is such a huge event, the yearly tradition is that someone in McMurdo videotapes the game (McMurdo gets "The Pentagon Channel", which does broadcasts the game), and a couple of days later the tape flies into the South Pole, where there is an official Super Bowl party/viewing. The cafeteria workers put out chips, salsa, guacamole, and roasted pig (they also decided to leave the head of the pig out near all the food, which was a sight to behold). I ended up watching the rest of the Prince performance, and most of the 2nd half, up until about 4 minutes left into the 4th quarter, when it was clear that the Colts were just running out the clock. It was actually nice to see something "normal" not Pole related going on, you feel pretty isolated from the outside world down here, I have no idea what current events are going on in the world right now (except I did see that bizarre love triangle story about the astronauts.

On a side note, the Pentagon channel has some crazy commercials. The commercials are mostly self-help themed and seem to imply that military personnel are dysfunctional and on the verge of some sort of self-inflicted catastrophe. There was this one three commercial sequence, where the first commercial was about a military person driving a motorcycle and almost getting in an accident with the commercial warning to wear a helmet, and take the appropriate driving lessons, a second commercial about not doing "Club Drugs" showing a military person being taking to the emergency room after doing meth, and a third commercial where a military couple receives a credit card offer in the mail, the wife promptly grabbing the card and declaring that she's going to go out "shopping" and then the commercial warns not to go overspend beyond your means and go into credit card debt.

2007-02-01T06:42:00.000-08:00

This is the "official" group photo of all the people at the Pole on SPT. It was taken during a pretty overcast day, so the telescope barely stands out in the whiteness behind it. It's a nice photo because it includes everyone on the project who is here at the Pole (there are a few big misses, as Erik Shirokoff and Sherry Cho, the detector makers and SQUID readout specialists are missing, and Clarence Chang from Chicago, who helped alot with the receiver integration, are all missing, and probably other people I've forgotten from Chicago and Case Western).

There has been alot of effort from the PI on the project to try and extend our stay at the Pole past the official station closing, and now it looks like it will happen. The Pole was supposed to "close" on February 16th, at which point all the scientists (including myself) would have to leave and only the winter-overers (the people that stay year round) allowed to stay. Now 20 lucky people, 9 of which will be from our project, can stay until February 24th. Apparently this exception is fairly unprecedented for the Pole, and comes with some caveats. First, all our luggage has to leave on the 17th, meaning we are allowed to keep only one carry on bag at the Pole that has to be able to contain all our cold weather gear (which is quite bulky). Second, if the temperature drops below 50 degrees Celsius we will be kicked out, and have to be ready to leave on three hours notice. However, there has been talk of getting around this by arranging a twin-otter plane (instead of the C-130 air force cargo plane that we usually fly in), which can fly in weather below this temperature. Regardless, it now seems very likely that I will be at the Pole until February 24th, meaning either I will shorten my vacation in New Zealand or get back to the States a little later (probably the latter will happen).

2007-01-30T09:38:00.000-08:00

Another big mainstay of my social life at the Pole (besides Sauna night, and mustache growing competitions) is the foosball table in the Summer Camp lounge. Summer Camp is the collection of tents that people sleep in where you pee in a bucket and sleep in near freezing conditions. Well why that might suck, they do have a better lounge than us suckers in the main station that sleep in warm beds. The lounge in Summer Camp is awesome not only for having a foosball table, but it has a disco ball, a pole in its center for people to dance around (aka - a stripper pole), having an awesome stereo system, and being isolated, so that you can play said stereo system really loud. My foosball skills have dramatically increased already in my short time at the Pole.

All of these pictures were taken at the final "Safety Meeting" for two of our collaborators from the University of Chicago (post-mustache photo). The "Safety Meeting" is some sort of ruse that the workers on SPT have to satisfy some higher up people somewhere to have a weekly safety meeting but instead just drink, dance, and occasionally play foosball. I've only been to two, and they have both been a lot of fun. They are usually pretty well DJ'ed by various people's ipods, and the PI on the project has showed up to both the ones that I've been to and done some serious dancing. Even though the picture on the right is dark, its one of my favorites, in that here I'm paying foosball with three beakers, while a raging party with the disco ball in full effect is going on in the background. While one might think these parties are ideal for finding future icewifes, there are usually only a handful of the opposite sex there. The last party one of the grad students twice verbally assailed one of the dancing workers to "quit hogging 'the' girl". Below are a couple of pictures that show the heavy dancing going on at these parties (including an example of sharing 'the' girl when dancing), and use of the pole in the center of the room.

2007-01-28T04:40:00.000-08:00

Ever since SPT metal night in Berkeley (where we got together and watched "Some Kind of Monster", the Metallica documentary, at my place), talk started of everyone growing mustaches at the Pole for a SPT group photo. Being at the Pole, a place that limits you to two two-minute showers a week, hygiene is at a fairly low standard, so unshaven-ness is the norm, and the dream of facial hair is an easy reality with almost no risk for social ostrasization. Most of our Chicago collaborators got to the Pole in late Novemeber, so most of them had a head start on facial hair over the folks from Berkeley. And it isnt an easy task for all men to grow respectable facial hair in just 4 weeks. Personally, I stopped shaving sometime around December 30th, and let my facial hair grow out until now, and that seems to have done me pretty well. This week a few of the Chicago collaborators are leaving so it was arranged to have a group mustache photo on Saturday morning before they left. On the bottom watch my progression from happy unshaven hippie, to angry goatee guy, to an"I'm too cool for you" handle-bar mustache. The group photo above is the culimnation of several weeks of unshaven-ness for several men (and one woman), although I'm slightly disappointed I didn't strike a Shackelton like pose soon enough in the photo.

2007-01-27T08:39:00.000-08:00

Whew, its been a busy week and a half at the Pole. First of all, we finished up the cold testing of our camera last Monday. The shifts were pretty brutal towards the end, lasting 13 or so hours each shift, and were made all the more difficult because we had no breaks for meals (which is hard to do several days in a row). Luckily, the tests went well, we learned alot, and felt confident enough to open up the camera, and re-fit it to begin optical tests of our detectors. To the right is a picture of the Principal Investigator (PI, basically the lead professor), peering into the camera (the first time he's seen this view) right before we were about to close it up again for the next cooldown. Underneath the copper colored triangles he's looking at are the detectors, which will be cooled to about 0.3 Kelvin (0.3 degrees above absolute zero). The opening up and modifying of the cryostat for the optical tests, was a brutal couple of days. I think I worked from noon-6am the first day and then maybe 2-10pm the next (that day was actually pretty tough too because I woke up, went straight to the telescope, and didnt eat anything until after 10pm).

The next cooldown is a big one because it will be the first where we actually test the optical properties of the detectors (before they were always masked off so that they couldnt see any light), and also the first time we mate the cryostat that I'm working on (the "camera" or "receiver", as I usually call it) to the cryostat that holds the secondary mirror, which itself is cooled to 10 Kelvin (the secondary mirror is the next mirror that light hits after reflecting off the 10 meter wide primary mirror). My cryostat, which holds the detectors, weighs about 400 pounds, while the secondary cryostat weighs over 2000 pounds, so as you can imagine it's a fairly delicate operation to link them together. Here is a picture of use hoisting up the 400 pound receiver cryostat (the red one) and to begin mating it to the secondary cryostat (the white one). The mating went pretty smoothly, so we proceeding to hoist both cryostats, now mated together, up 30 feet or so into the telescope cabin. This required two of the graduate students on the project to climb up to the ceiling of the cabin to monitor our lifting of the cryostats, and bolt them to a frame attached to the telescope. I'm including a picture of the grad students, in their lifting harnesses (the one on the left got alot of "Mario Brothers" jokes from my boss), and then a shot of the cryostats from below to give you a sense of their size and just how far we had to lift them. Mounting the cryostats in the cabin allowed the telescope engineers to perform tests on the motors that drive the telescope, watching to make sure that the telescope was well balanced with all the extra weight from our cryostats mounted on it.

I will have more posts sooner this time, there are definitely a few significant events that I want to write about, and the next few days should be slower at work as we wait for the cryostats to cool.

2007-01-19T06:39:00.000-08:00

This is the view from the top of the Dark Sector Laboratory (the control room/lab attached to the telescope) on 3am Friday night (Saturday morning). Its been mostly work again today, I've basically fallen into the routine of getting up around 5-6pm to eat, go out to the telescope to work, get back to the station about 10am-noon, have dinner and fall asleep. In a couple days we will be forced to warm up our camera, conclude our tests, and then go into overtime attaching our camera, to another cryostat that contains a very large cooled mirror. However, once that happens (maybe a week from now) there should be more free time to actually engage in some of the local color, like "the Smoker Bar", or "Costumed Dodgeball", or the weekly Toga party.

One of our three winter overers (the person who has to stay at the South Pole for the whole year), didnt physically qualify for wintering over. So the PI of the project has been working overtime the last few days putting out feelers about if anyone wanted to winter over. He really kept asking me about doing it, partially because I was the lead postdoc on the camera, and partially because as one of the single unattached males on the project, I presumably have nothing tieing me down. I was also a little dodgey with my responses to him, so he kept on asking me. Wintering over does kind of intrigue me, especially on a project I'm so closely involved with, but I'm so burnt out from work over the last few months, I think I would be unfathomably depressed by the end of it.

2007-01-18T11:45:00.000-08:00

We had near "white-out" conditions here a couple days ago, where you couldnt see more than 20 or so feet in front of you. It was actually so bad that one of my professors tried to walk the 1 km out to the telescope (this 60 foot tall object that usually dominates the landscape of the completely flat featureless South Pole), and got lost. It wasnt so bad that his life was in danger, but once he walked out and couldnt find the telescope, he turned around, managed to walk about 1 km off course down the runway (where planes land, not the project), and ended up in summer camp (the tent/tarp camp, where people pee in a bucket), which is a 1 km away from the base in the opposite direction from the telescope. The South Pole station designers know that conditions like this happen, so they put colored flags everywhere to guide the major walkways. Unfortunately my professor mistook the black flags that mark the runway as the walkway back to camp.

Work has picked up significantly here, and I'm now working nights, from about 6pm-10am (a 16 hour workday). Its fairly exhausting, particularly because my sleep schedule had to change to nights very suddenly. This weekend I'll probably switch back to days, which should be fun. Anyway, I'm about to go to sleep, so I should sign off.

2007-01-14T05:01:00.000-08:00

Believe it or not, the South Pole station has a sauna. One of the famous traditions here is something called the 300 club. The 300 club can only be joined during winter at the South Pole, and involves going into the sauna, waiting for it to get to over 200 degrees Farenheit, building up a sweat, and then running outside when it is -100 degrees. The hardcore members usually also require you to run the 100 feet or so to the South Pole and back to the station. (I've also heard rumors that you're supposed to roll around in the snow, but I don't think I believe them).

Today, I joined the 230 degree club, thermalizing myself in the sauna when it was at 220 degrees, and then running outside, when it was -10 degrees (actually this is quite warm for the South Pole). Its surprisingly easier than you would think. By the time you get out of the sauna, you've built up so much heat that you can stand outside comfortably for several minutes. It also helps your sauna session last longer because it gives you a chance to cool off before returning to the sauna. The biggest problem on this day was when we walked down to snowy ground below the station. The walkway that this picture was taken on is elevated off the ground by about 20 feet, and protected us from the almost -40 degree wind chill. Once we got down to ground level and were exposed to the wind, things felt much colder. My swimtrunks froze almost instantly, I could feel all the hairs on my body begin to turn stiff and white as what moisture on them froze. Still it was a fun experience, and I hope to do it again while at the Pole.

2007-01-13T12:03:00.000-08:00

We had a live webcast from the South Pole this morning, coordinated with the Exploratorium, a science museum in San Francisco. About half way through the satellite feed went out, so Im not sure what ended up happenning for the last 15 minutes. (Apparently software on the satellite was getting upgraded today, so they might have shut it down early unexpectedly). Nominally, there would have been a few pictures of me assembliing the camera for the telescope, and I might have said a few things, but its likely the webcast continued and the MC at the Exploratorium did an impromptu talk through of the pictures. The website for the Exploratorium has this webcast and the previous ones (of which I did not attend archived), and some info about the telescope + people at:

http://www.exploratorium.edu/poles/telescope.php

There might be a future webcast to make up for this one cutting out midway through, so Ill let you know if that happens.

2007-01-12T05:11:00.000-08:00

My 2nd full day at the South Pole was extremely busy. We made a big push to assemble the camera/receiver that I built to do some initial tests of the detectors and camera. However, it took a full days work to make it happen, we got to the telescope at 8am and I left at 6 am the next day. The mad push to make this happen may have likely gained us roughly a half days worth of tests on the camera. Time is really crucial at the Pole because we have only about 5 weeks to assemble and test everything, before being kicked out on February 16th for 9 months. The picture on the top is of me and one of the professors I work for, Adrian Lee, assembling the "focal plane" which is the assembly that holds the detectors, the devices actually measuring the incoming light/microwaves, and can basically be thought of as the CCD of the camera.

On the left is a picture of the focal plane fully assembled. Underneath the copper colored triangles live the detectors, which measure the incoming microwave light. Before anyone asks, no the gold colored metal in the picture is not pure gold. Most of the support structure is aluminum that is gold plated to make the metal surfaces more reflective, and reduce how much power the metal absorbs from other light, which is essential to keep our detectors cold, but also makes the focal plane more striking visually. Because our detectors have to get to about 0.25 K above absolute zero to see the microwave light from the creation of our universe, great care has to be taken to keep the detectors cold, and isolated from the other hotter objects around them. My job was to bascially to design and build something to get the detectors this cold, and then integrate them with the rest of the focal plane into the cryostat, and test to make sure everything works. On the bottom left is a picture of the focal plane (this time turned upside down from the above photo), installed in the cryostat. Again, the gold plating makes everything look that much cooler inside the cryostat.

2007-01-12T04:35:00.000-08:00

From the main South Pole station (where most everyone eats and sleeps) to the telescope I'm working on is about a 1 kilometer walk. That doesnt sound like a lot, but it is when the wind chill is about 50 below zero. At this temperature, basically any exposed skin that you have will start to sting quite a bit by the end of the walk. There is usually a constant battle trying to cover your face completely, but not have your goggles or sunglasses fog up on the way. I took the above two pictures about half way back to the base from the telescope. In the distance on the picture on the left you can see the telescope I work on (its the white telescope, immediately to the right of the massive crane), and in the picture on the right the large building in the distance is the station itself. Also note how flat and featureless the landscape is, no matter which direction you look the view is flat and featureless, its very easy to loose your sense of direction, if not for the few buildings that are down here.

2007-01-09T02:35:00.000-08:00

I'm finally at the South Pole!!! I arrived Monday morning (most of yours' Sunday) South Pole time (which is the same as New Zealand time). From McMurdo we caught a ride on an Air Force C-130, a propeller cargo plane with some cargo netting on the side for people to sit in. These planes are very loud on the inside, which I knew ahead of time, and it makes it very difficult to talk or listen to music (i did finish a book however). To allow music listening, while in Christchurch, I went to a military surplace store and bought some old school military ear/covers/plugs for $6 that I could slide my ear-buds underneath (there are some cool pictures of me wearing them, ill post when i get a chance). The flight takes about 3.5 hours from McMurdo to the Pole. We landed about noon time (the picture is of Martin, a grad student in my lab, coming off the plane at the Pole). Its actually about -20 degrees Farenheit at the Pole right now, with only a light wind, so its not so bad going outside.

Once we landed we had a brief orientation, where we also found out our room assignments. I was very pleased to be put in the main station and not "Summer Camp", which are basically tents they throw up during the summer in which the floor is freezing and you have to pee in a bucket that is kept under your bed. After orientation, we had lunch and caught up with our collaborators and set up our basic plan for the day. Our first priority was to check that our cargo had arrived, and prioritize to the cargo people which crates needed to be sent to our telescope. Once that was arranged, we went over to the telescope to get a quick tour (its about a one kilometer walk to the telescope from the base) and start clearing the area in which we planned to set up the camera. By 6pm, I was starting to feel pretty exhausted. They warn you about altitude sickness (we are at an equivalent alitude of about 11,000 feet), and to especially watch out your first day, so all of us called it a day at that point. To the right, is a picture of our telescope, note the people standing right under it on top of the wooden/plywood structure, the mirror has a 10-meter diameter.

Right now at the Pole, internet and phone access is only available between 11pm-10am, so my postings might become more infrequent, especially with my busy work schedule (today, my 2nd day, I worked about 13 hours, and between eating and sleep that doesnt leave much time). However, I should be able to keep pretty good about it soon. Tomorrow should be really busy at work, but based the current schedule the next couple days after shouldnt be so bad. Anyway, time to get to bed (alone tonight, but maybe not for long).

2007-01-06T19:10:00.000-08:00

Going on a walk today about a half a mile away from McMurdo base we saw about 100 penguins right next to the coast. Apparently the penguins dont usually get this close, but because of the unusually warm winter here the ice line has been pushed further back towards the coast and the penguins have been traveling/walking right next to the base (go global warming!!!). We were able to get within about 15 feet of them pretty easily, so I have some fantastic pictures (btw, the rule is that you can approach them as close as you can as long as they arent reacting to you). For some reason I couldnt post any pictures on the blog this morning, so instead I put them on my flickr account, which you should be able to see here

http://flickr.com/photos/60184324@N00/

2007-01-06T15:27:00.000-08:00

I'm finally in Antarctica, woohoo!!! We landed yesterday (Saturday) after having been delayed a couple days in Christchurch. Even our flight on Saturday was postponed a couple of times due to snowy weather in McMurdo (the coastal base), so that we only got in to McMurdo around 1030 pm local time in the last possible landing window for the day (by the way, Anarctica runs on New Zealand time, which is 21 hours ahead of PST, 19 hours ahead of CST).

The way it works when you fly in is this. You take a C-17 air force cargo plane from Christchurch to McMurdo. This flight takes about 5 hours, and while the plane is louder than your average plane, you also have fairly normal airline like seats, except with more leg room, so its actually fairly comfortable. There were also about 140 people on our flight, only about 20 of whom will continue onto the Pole. You land on the ice shelf, on a place where the ice is thicker (about 15 feet), thick enough for planes to land on. Then they load you onto these all terrain buses that take about a half hour to drive you to McMurdo, where you sit through a half hour debriefing about the station, rules, and safety on Antarctica, and then another debriefing on your accomodations before finally getting your room key. By the time that was said and done, they have a midnight dinner (for the night shift workers) at which we also got dinner, having only had a bag meal on the plane. After dinner, I quickly checked my room, which seemed to contain 2-3 bunk beds. I couldnt actually tell how many beds were in the room however because I had to keep the lights off (I later found out there were 3 bunks), because my randomly assigned roomate was already sleeping, and threw my stuff on one of the unoccupied beds, and went back to the galley to meet up with people from my group. Its a little disorienting when you first get here, because the sun is up 24 hours/day in Antarctica (and bright), plus we had been travelling all day having just finished dinner, so many of us werent very tired. Me and the two grad students I was hanging out with, ended up bumping into a friend of one of theirs on a previous trip here, and we ended up splitting a 6-pack in the lounge and talking until 3am. After that I quietly went back to my room, cleared off my bed, threw a blanket over me and feel asleep.

We are scheduled to fly out tomorrow (Monday) at 7am for the South Pole. Today we'll probably explore around McMurdo during the day, and then at 7pm we're supposed to do the "bag drag" where we literally drag our luggage to a weighing station so they can re-weigh our luggage for the flight to the Pole. If all goes well we should be at the South Pole around 11am Monday morning.

2007-01-04T13:54:00.000-08:00

We are stuck in Christchurch another day. However we just learned we are flying out to McMurdo tomorrow (our Saturday), and will probably arrive at the Pole Monday. They were having mechanical problems with the plane, and this morning they though we would be delayed two more days, but something happenned in the interm(we were originally supposed to fly to the Pole on Friday, three days earlier).

The delay has kind of been un-nerving in how you find out your flight schedule to the Pole. Basically you yourself hear nothing from the United States Antarctic Program (USAP), but they call your hotel at about 5pm the night before and only leave a message with the front desk guy if youre leaving the next day and what time you have to be at the airfield (which can be as early as 6am, but is usually around 8am). So if youre flying out you need to go to bed early and wake up at the butt crack of dawn, and should probably be getting to bed a few hours after the phone call comes in. And also our only official point of contact to the USAP is through this message from the guy at the front desk at the B&B we're staying in, im surprised there arent more official channels.

So now it has become an effort to find things to do in Christchurch, and yesterday we rented a 10 person bus and went to Arthur's Pass. We settled on doing a 7 km hike to the top of Avanlanche Peak, which included a 1 km incline. It was a pretty exhausting hike due mainly to the incline and also the fact that it was a much sunnier hotter day then expected, so many of us were lacking enough water and proper sunware (there was a lot of heavy clothing in preparation for blustery winds and possible snow). However, it was a pretty gorgeous hike, and at the top we had a great panoramic view of all the surrounding peaks and the valley/pass below. It was well worth the pain of the incline. In many ways the hike was comparable to a hike in Yosemite (start from a valley floor, surrounded by waterfalls and snow capped peaks, ending up on the top of a peak overlooking the whole thing). We are all pretty beaten down because of it, so I'm expecting a quieter day in Christchurch today.

2007-01-02T16:41:00.000-08:00

We had most of yesterday to walk around Christchurch. Its a very pretty town, but also fairly touristy. The weather here has been very mild, even though its the middle of their summer, there was maybe a high in the high 50's yesterday and very blustery. We are staying near the center of town, Cathedral Square, and its remarkable the density of small shops that they have in the four block radius around it, and some strange ones at that. There's a "Lolly Shop", two "Party Pill" stores, several adult stores, and an army surplus store, that had these "Tactical Assault Beach Sandals!" that I was implored to buy because they were "An Absolute Bargain While Stocks Last!"

2007-01-02T16:25:00.000-08:00

Today in Chrsistchurch we went to the US Anarctic Progam center to get fitted for our cold weather gear. They give you everything that you would potentially need to survive at the Pole, long underwear, heavy boots, snow pants, 2x different fleeces, a winter parka, 4x different sets of gloves, 3x different hats, goggles, ... And then you spend about an hour trying everything on (there were a couple picks of me in the gear taken by other people's cameras that I will post soon).

During this whole process, we also found out that our departure from Christchurch will be delayed another
day, due to a mechanical issue with the plane. There have also been weather problems at McMurdo, the coastal base, that has caused the last two flights there to "boomerang", or take off and then turnaround at some point on the flight (the record number of "boomerang"s for a passenger is seven). Anyway, all this means there is a huge backlog of people trying to get to the Pole, and we might have a few more days here, but the bosses are trying to exert as much pressure as possible to get us on the next plane out.

2007-01-01T15:00:00.000-08:00

I've arrived in Christchurch, New Zealand! The whole trip up to this point has went pretty effortlessly, so far it just seems like one really long day, but not too exhausting. The worst part so far was the lack of quality movies on the 12 hour flight from Los Angeles to Auckland. The best movie to watch was "Scoop", the 2nd best was "Beerfest", and after that not much else (and its not like those 2 movies were on my cant miss movies of 2006 list). They also brought out some champagne just before midnight PST, and announced when New Years hit (no countdown unfortunately). However, I cant say that there was any sort of frenzied excitement over this announcement, and in fact they dimmed the lights about 5 minutes later for people to sleep and immediately told me, and the grad student next to me that I was talking with, to keep our voices down.

Im somewhat ashamed that Im the only one in my group to pack 2 bags worth of stuff, but I also dont understand how everyone can get by with only one bag. We are at the South Pole for 6 frickin weeks after all, those warm clothes have to take up some space. Along with my personal stuff, I did also pack several folders worth of data/printouts/papers, and my 3 lab notebooks from my last 2 years of work, so once thats in the mix two bags seems that much more reasonable.

Im posting the best picture of my trip so far, my advisor with the penguin that greets you in baggage claim in Christschurch. Have I mentioned that my advisor is kid friendly?

2006-12-31T14:12:00.000-08:00

I leave for the South Pole today (new years eve!). My trip begins taking flight from SFO to LAX at 450 pm, then around 9pm I take a flight from LAX to Auckland, New Zealand, landing in New Zealand at 6 am January 2nd (yes, technically i miss new years), then i take a flight from Auckland to Christschurch (on the South Island of NZ), spending 2 days there, and then on January 4th taking a flight to McMurdo (the US coastal base on Antarctica), spend a night in McMurdo, and if all goes well take the final 5 hour flight into the South Pole on January 5th (yes, thats all it takes to get to the South Pole).

Im also posting a picture of me with the camera I built hanging ominously above me getting ready to be put into its shipping crate.

2006-11-11T01:48:00.000-08:00

This January I'm getting to go to the South Pole as part of my research/work. If I was ever to start a blog, this is clearly my best opportunity to do one. I might never again do something so worth chronicling, perhaps not everyone's reason for blogging, but this is the way I'll rationalize doing one.

Why would one go to the South Pole? Basically I'm going there to deploy a camera, which I helped build, for a telescope being built there trying to study the Big Bang (more to come on that later). When will you be going? I arrive at the South Pole January 5th. How long are you going there? Just under 6 weeks, I expect to be ridiculed by most of the people there for the brevity of my stay and my general inexperience of living at the South Pole. What will you do while youre there? I expect to work very hard, and religously write to this blog.