Step 1

I've been thinking about the point of writing this blog.  Mostly it is for family and friends who want to keep in touch while I'm away, but also for anyone who may be curious about my trip.   I'll be writing about things that I find interesting about Antarctica, the South Pole Telescope, cosmology and astronomical instrumentation.  But I'd also like to encourage anyone that has a question that I'm not writing about  to post in the comments.  I can't guarantee that I'll answer them, but I'll try to use them as starting points for some of my posts.

You may be wondering, how does a person get to the South Pole?  It's not as if you can go to Expedia and buy a ticket.  The Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station is operated by the United States Antarctic Program (USAP).   The first step in getting to the Pole is getting "Physically Qualified".  The South Pole is a remote place with limited medical facilities and USAP wants to ensure that the people traveling and living there are healthy.  Just like a on a backpacking trip, if you need medical treatment that the station can't provide, you could be waiting a while until you're able to get back to a place with more infrastructure.   Getting PQ'd for the summer season requires medical and dental exams, all sorts of blood tests, and an EKG.   I'm still waiting on the results of one last blood test, and then I should be finished.   Once PQ'd, the USAP travel office will purchase a commercial plane ticket for me to Christchurch, New Zealand, the entry point to Antarctica.   From Christchurch, I'll be flying on US government planes to McMurdo Station on the coast of the Antarctic continent and then to the South Pole.   In total, the trip from Montreal to the pole will take about 4-5 days!

At the beginning

Two weeks ago I found out that I will be going to the South Pole to work part of the summer season for the South Pole Telescope.  Wow.

Let me back up and introduce myself.   I'm a postdoc (researcher) in the physics department at McGill University studying cosmology and the astrophysics of galaxy clusters.    I did my graduate work using data from the APEX-SZ experiment. APEX-SZ was mounted on the APEX telescope (shown in the blog background) in Northern Chile.  Working in the Atacama desert  at APEX was the highlight of my time in graduate school.  Eventually though, every experiment comes to the end of its life and we decommissioned APEX-SZ in the winter of 2010.

Now I'm working on several projects, but the one most relevant to this blog the analysis of data from the new polarization camera on the South Pole Telescope.    The South Pole Telescope observes millimeter-wavelength light (microwaves).   We're trying to measure the polarized signal from the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), the relic radiation left over from the Big Bang.  The telescope observes all winter long, but in the summer (November to February) we send a team to repair and upgrade the equipment.  I'm part of the team that will be doing the summer work, and will be in Antarctica for about a month beginning in November. 

So here I am at the the beginning of an amazing opportunity.