Welcome to South Pole Station

 After nearly a full week of traveling, we're here at the Admunsen/Scott South Pole Station.  There are a few minor differences from McMurdo.  The first is the weather.  As you can see from the weather info, it's significantly colder.   As long as I keep the majority of my face covered, the big red and overalls keep me pretty warm.  Everyone outside walks around with ice crystals frozen on the front of their fleece neck gaiters where their breath has frozen. 

 The other big difference is the access to the internet.  The South Pole only sees satellites for a fraction of their orbit, so there are big gaps in the internet availability.  We've been pretty lucky this year, there are two satellites that are up and cover most of the 'daytime' hours.  I put quotes around daytime because both here and at McMurdo the sun only sets once a year.  Right now, in summer, the sun just circles around the horizon everyday.  24 hours of daylight is pretty strange,

 but I'm getting used to it.  The window in my room is completely sealed off, so that when I go to bed it feels like night.  But last night I was working in the science lab and the sun was coming right in the windows.  It was about 11 pm, but my body thought it was about 3-4 pm.
One last thing about the South Pole, it's at an altitude of about 9306 ft.  But the atmosphere is more dense here at the South Pole (i.e. the pressure drops faster the higher up you are compared to being at the equator), so  the physiological altitude is about 1000 ft higher right now.    The first couple days, going up stairs in my ECW gear definitely left me a little winded, but I'm starting to acclimatize now.

Now that we're here, we've started working with the telescope.  The team of four of us that is here right now (plus our two intrepid winterovers) are working on making precise calibration measurements of our detectors.  Part of this includes going out and working at a site about 3km away from the station where we live, so we get to take a snow mobile.  We use it haul both equipment and people right now. 

At first glance, the South Pole telescope is an engineering masterpiece.  The primary dish (the circular part in the photo) is 10 meters across.  The entire telescope can spin around 360 degrees on its mount to access any portion of the sky. 

I'll try and write some about the telescope, the receiver, and our science in my next post.  I'm not the first person to take this trip, so if you'd like to find out more now, check out the blog of Jason Henning (an SPT grad student) at:  http://destination90south.blogspot.com/ .  He has some awesome pictures of the instrument guts.  The SPT collaboration also has a blog at: https://pole.uchicago.edu/blog/.

There is also an excellent video online that was made last year by the American Museum of Natural History featuring the South Pole telescope.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=3pu84BQVxK4