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.