Group shots

It's getting close to the end of the summer season here. The temperature is going down every day, and the station population is falling even faster. Most of the SPT team is still here, but some people have left already, including the "reflector assembly team" from Chicago - Tom, Jeff, Ryan, and Joaquin.

The last few weeks have been the first and only time that all of us on the project have been together in the same place, working together. It's remarkable what can be accomplished with everyone working around the clock like this. But even more remarkable is just how much work has already been put into building the telescope, by huge teams of people here at the station and back in the U.S. It's just something you can't comprehend until you see it: the teams of iron workers, carpenters, electricians, insulation workers, and myriad other specialists who have contributed their time and dedication to this project. It's a wonderful thing to feel like the whole station is pushing for us to succeed, and it's also awesome to see these teams working long shifts outside in the cold day after day. I am especially awed by the iron workers, whom I watch out the windows of the lab all through the night shift. Some of them participated in the test-build of the telescope that took place in Texas, so they've been working hard on this project for months and months. They're fantastic at their job, and just great people. If you read Tom's blog, you also know they throw great parties! I've been having the time of my life.

We've had a few chances to take some group photos, of several different sets of telescope contributors. Below is a group shot of all of the SPT scientists who were here this season. Naturally the only day we could all get together at the same time (not always easy with people on every sleeping schedule) was a day with terrible weather. We're standing on the roof of the Dark Sector Lab, with the telescope dish behind us. It may not strike you the same way, but that telescope is absolutely gorgeous to us. It also looks gorgeous to the cosmic microwave photons we will be collecting - at those wavelengths, the aluminum surface is a close-to-perfect mirror, even though it looks rough when viewed in the optical.


Just a couple of days ago, before people started to "redeploy" back to the real world, I took some pictures of the iron workers along with the telescope specialists and University of Chicago team that worked on assembling the telescope and the main mirror. Again, it was crummy weather (it's not like that most of the time, I promise!). Think about those people, who look so tiny in the pictures, collaborating to design and assemble that insanely huge telescope in one of the harshest places on earth. I love it. I love being a part of this and being able to celebrate the accomplishments of such a genuinely wonderful group of people.


And finally, you may have noticed if you've been following some of our webcasts and online materials that the Chicago boys tend to get a little scruffy when working on location - growing beards and shaggy hair and wearing holes in all their Carharts. As the end of their stay grew near, they started a moustache trend that culminated in the group shot below. Joaquin had the idea that everyone should have moustaches and we should take what he called and "old-timey" photograph, acting like serious antarctic explorers. As far as Joaquin is concerned, the stereotypical photograph of the early polar explorers involves a handful of grave-looking men staring off into the distance, set against a start and opressive landscape. Yet, he claims, they always have perfectly trimmed moustaches. (I have to admit I have not seen such a picture yet, but I tried to play along).


Well, anyway, we might have pulled it off if it weren't for the back row mucking things up with their sunglasses and t-shirts. Humph. (And yes, that's me in the lower left, with a moustache. It's just blonde so you can't see it so well). The back row: Berkeley postdoc Brad Benson, Berkeley grad student Martin Lueker, Jeff, Erik Nichols (the leader of the fearless ironworkers), Case Western grad student Zak Staniszewski. Front row: yours truly, Joaquin, Tom Crawford, and Berkeley grad student Tom Plagge.

This thing happens...

The very first time that I sat down in the Galley with the boys from Chicago (Tom, Jeff, Ryan, and Joaquin, who've all been here since November), I asked them about the weather here at the pole. Was there even weather? It's too cold for the snowfalls I'm used to back home. Plus, this time of year, the sun never sets, but just goes around in circles around the sky. So there aren't morning or evening changes in temperature or wind. Stability and dryness of the atmosphere are the reason why this is such a great site for our telescope. But when I first arrived, what I really wanted to know was whether I would see exactly the same thing every day as I walked back and forth from the station to the telescope.

I think it was Ryan who replied to my question about the weather, saying "Well, no, there's not really weather exactly. But this thing happens sometimes....where for some reason there's a lot of ice in the air". I laughed at this, but when I went out the next day I could understand what he meant.

One of the things I most wish that I could photograph and convey to the rest of the world is what it's like to be outside when that thing is happening. The snow here is not like the snow in Chicago, or in my home town of Athens, Ohio. It's not wet at all. It crunches when you step in it, and it sparkles in the sun. And when there's a light wind, the air is filled with tiny ice crystals that glitter everywhere. If you just stand and look in any direction, tiny flashes of light seem fill the air and rush by in a constant flow with the wind.

As it turns out, there are a lot of changes in the daily conditions, even if they are very different from the weather back home. The temperature has been steadily around -15 to -25 degrees F with windchills making it feel typically 15 degrees colder. But the clouds and the wind change a lot. Some days the sky is completely clear, and some days a front appears on the horizon and over the course of a work shift you see it sweep across the landscape and cover everything you can see.



The laboratory where I spend most of my time is called the Dark Sector Laboratory, or DSL. It's called that because it's out in the "Dark Sector", where restrictions are placed on any lights or equipment that might interrupt the operation of the South Pole's telescopes. The DSL is on stilts (like all the buildings here), and I work on the top floor. I've posted a picture of it that was taken by Berkeley Professor Adrian Lee. When I stand on the outside staircase, it feels like I can see forever, and it's a wonderful place to observe the south pole weather. For the first week we were here, it was sunny and glittery and beautiful, with just enough ice in the air to create beautiful sundogs that framed the telescope from that vantage point. Jeff in particular has been pursuing the perfect sundog photograph, and he has a spectacular collection.

Personally, I've enjoyed the cloudier days more. One of the more impressive things I've seen here is what happens when the sun peeks through on a mostly cloudy day. Once, in particular, there were a series of sharp parallel lines of bright light on the snow that extended from horizon to horizon, passing through the landscape of the South Pole Station and creating glowing stripes like massive neon lights had been embedded in the snow. This photograph shows a quickly-captured view from the steps of the DSL. The foreground is cluttered with the machinery being used to drill deep holes into the ice for the IceCube neutrino experiment, and just beyond that is the MAPO lab, which houses and has housed other telescopes observing the Cosmic Microwave Background. In the far distance you can see the elevated station. And in the middle, crossing the skiway, is a strip of bright light reflecting off the snow.
So far my attempts to take photographs outside have been less than wonderfully successful, due entirely to the fact that I haven't sat down to figure out how my camera really works yet. It's so bright that point-and-click doesn't really do the trick, but here are some pictures anyway. The first one shows Jeff, Ryan, and Tom as we're about to head out to the lab on a gorgeous day. The second is a shot of the ubiquitous bamboo flags that are the only thing interrupting the absolute flatness of the ice in most directions that you can see. These particular flags mark the edges of the road that goes out to the DSL, but the flags are everywhere. They are in all different colors, and they extend far out into the distance. Marking what, I don't have the slightest idea.

The flags are so numerous and seem so random in places that they're almost comical, but I learned to appreciate them the second week that we were here. The winds increased and clouds rolled in and we had dramatic weather for a few days. No planes came or went, and the trek out to the lab became much more challenging. There was so much ice in the air that it was impossible to see more than a ten feet ahead at times, and snowdrifts disrupted the roads and footpaths. I understood the flags then. Without them, it would have been very hard to have any sense of direction walking around outside.



And finally, one morning as we were coming back from our night shift, John Carlstrom took this photo of a bunch of us disappearing into the white (that's me with the backpack).

Seeing the telescope for the first time

I slept through my alarm clock on the morning that we were leaving from McMurdo to Pole, waking up with only about 10 minutes before I was supposed to be getting on a shuttle to the airfield. I managed to throw on all of my gear, pack, strip my bed, and meet up with my colleagues, who had begun to worry that I might miss the flight. I had enough time to grab a tiny bit of coffee, but not enough to feel very aware of what was going on. We had a bouncy, scenic ride out to Willy field, in "Ivan the Terrabus", where we boarded a small C-130 plane bound for the South Pole Station. All of this within about half an hour of waking up.



The C-130 is a small propeller plane equipped with skis for landing on the ice runways. Passengers strap themselves into seats along the inside walls, and luggage is strapped into the middle between everyone's knees. It's noisy, like the C-17, but the windows were a little bit more prominent. Without my usual several cups of morning coffee, I was very groggy, and I curled into my down parka and slept for a good part of the trip. But when I woke up and went to look at the window, the thrill of seeing the Antarctic landscape below was a powerful jolt. We passed over vast mountain ranges, where only the tips of the mountains could be seen above the ice. The ground, where it was visible, was rough and totally untouched by plants or animals or rain for many millenia. Just rock and ice, as far as we could see. The windows of the plane were dirty, but I took a lot of pictures and stared out at the view as much as I could. How many people get to see these mountains, these tiny tips of mountains peeking out over a sea of mile-deep ice? The scales were also disorienting. Without trees or roads or other recognizable details in the landscape, how do you judge the sizes of the peaks? How can you even take in those expanses of ice and make any sense of it?




Finally we arrived at the pole. It does feel different to land in a plane on skis compared to wheels. Snow flew around the windows. I had butterflies in my stomach. Before I realized it, the door was open and we pushed out way out. I was afraid, having been warned many times about the effects of the high polar altitude, that I would immediately feel dizzy or have trouble walking or feel incredibly cold. But I held my camera up as I stepped out, and recorded the first thing that I could see as I stepped onto the ice. I barely realized it at the time, but the very first thing I saw as I left the plane was the telescope, in the distance. I looked around at the plane, and then I scanned the ice until I saw a crowd of my friends and colleagues waiting to meet us. Everyone laughed and grinned and gasped at the beautiful telescope sitting across the ice, and then we went inside to begin our work.

No really, Penguins!

Ok, so I've already been at the South Pole Station (where there are no penguins) for a week. I should probably write about what's going on here, but I still haven't gotten to writing about the best part of the trip down here. I'll catch up eventually.

We had a full day to spend in McMurdo, and almost all of it was spent collecting rumors about penguins, walking back and forth to find penguins, taking pictures of penguins, and talking about penguins. Penguins are not uncommon at McMurdo, but they are still special enough that it's an event when they come to visit. At least, it was definitely a major event for all of us who were visiting for the first time or just passing through. Many people who work at South Pole Station can return to Antarctica again and again and never see any penguins or other Antarctic wildlife. Nothing lives at the pole except people, and so it all depends on whether you get lucky in Mactown while you're passing through.

Penguins are just awesome. There's not much more you can say than that. Everyone gets excited about them, and everyone grins like crazy watching them waddle around, slide on their bellies, and otherwise express their uniquely avian cuteness. The ones that visited us were the most common kind, Adelie penguins. There was a large group of them, and they came right up to Hut point and wandered around snooping into things. The people kept a respectful distance and everyone kept a hush. At the quietest moments, though, you could still hear the snapping of camera shutters and the rustle-crunch of many penguin feet on the snowy McMurdo shore.

Because penguins are often the first thing people think of when they think of Antarctica, I'd been prepared for the fact that after you've been here, that's usually the first thing people ask about. I was sure that I'd have to say "no no, no penguins at the South Pole, didn't see any, sorry". But I did! And took lots of pictures, as did the rest of the SPT team.



Later in the day, we explored McMurdo some more, taking a hike up Observation Hill, visiting the store, and spending some time in the evening at the Coffee House. The views from the top of Obs hill were spectacular, and we could see a tiny poof from the tip of Mount Erebus, the volcano that sits just behind the station. It was also possible to see how much work the icebreaker had actually done. As we'd watched it from the shore the night before, its task looked so insurmountable and its efforts so slow and futile. But from the height of the hill, we could see the long channel it had created an open space large enough for the cargo ships to
turn around and return to sea.


Below are just a couple more photographs of McMurdo from that day. And in the next entry I'll
finally get to the South Pole, promise!

Midnight Penguins

The sense of anticipation as the C17 prepared for landing near McMurdo base was palpable. It wasn't possible to see outside the plane, or to tell exactly how close we were to the ice. For those of us visiting Antarctica for the first time, our descent to the ice was illustrated purely in imagination. I had no idea what the ice landscape would be like. Would there be rocks? Buildings? Animals? What would the weather be like? Would the cold be immediately overwhelming?

We landed after a long descent at the Pegasus ice runway, a good ways from McMurdo base. Stepping out of the C17, I barely noticed the cold. But I was almost paralyzed by how beautiful it was. The weather was cloudy, and there were mountains in the distance that were covered in snow. Everything glowed with soft blue light, and the vast expanses of ice stretching into the distance were otherworldly and awesome.




The McMurdo team meeting our arrival barked to us to get into a vehicle to be transported to the base. I needed the reminder, or I would have stood there, awe-struck, until the cold
started to sink in. We crowded into an array of transport vehicles with huge wheels and took off for the station. The ride was at least a half of an hour, and I could barely see where we were going for all the fog and ice on the windows. Finally, we arrived at McMurdo station.

The local time was close to Midnight, although it was still bright outside. Because our flight was delayed so late, the McMurdo crew greeted us in the galley with a specially prepared meal ("Midrats" - the midnight meal for a station operating on 24 hours), which was very welcome. By the time we had eaten and settled into our rooms, it was past 1 in the morning. I felt exhausted and disoriented by the bright sun outside. But sometime during the meal, we'd caught a rumor that there might be some penguins close to Hut Point, which is where the original hut used by Antarctic Explorer Robert Scott still stands. Curiosity easily won over exhaustion,and I was giddy to go explore. John Carlstrom agreed to show me where to go, so we set out to walk to the point to visit the penguins. It was extremely quiet, except for the hum of the McMurdo generators and the sound of the icebreaker out in the bay, steadily crushing the ice to prepare a passageway for two large cargo ships that arrive every Summer. And it was stunningly gorgeous.

When we got to hut point and walked over to the other side, facing out in the direction of the open sea, we were indeed rewarded with penguins. There was just a small group of them, resting on the ice in the distance, joined by a few fat seals not far away. Even though they were tiny (barely visible as black dots in the photo), they were unmistakeable. In the far distance, wecould see a second icebreaker also working through the night. I felt profoundly fortunate to
be there. Penguins, within my first few hours on the ice!
Before heading back to the station, John and I and our colleagues Erik Leitch and Martin Leuker stood on the point for a long time and watched the icebreaker Odin performing its slow labors in the bay. First it would back up, then it would ram itself up and onto a patch of ice, lubricating its way with a spray of water. Then the weight of the ship would crush the ice with a muted but sustained chorus of crunches. It was windy and cold and bright, and in the far distance we could just make out the shape of the C17 on the Pegasus runway across the ice. John was especially fascinated, and I think he could have stood there the entire night just watching the icebreaker make its way. I felt exhilerated but also humbled somehow.

No matter where you're going, Dux de Lux is always on the way

So, our flight to Antarctica was delayed another day. On the day that it was supposed to leave, we all reported in the morning with our luggage and our cold weather gear. For flights to and within Antarctica, passengers are required to be wearing most of their cold-weather gear. So we changed into our long underwear, overalls, and parkas, just to find out that our flight would be delayed another few hours. This obviously meant that we had to catch a bus back into town to go kill the time at the Dux de Lux, the bar/cafe that serves as the locus of leisure for "polies" spending time in Christchurch. Nobody really complained. It was a beautiful day and there was a street fair right outside the bar.

Because of the delays in flights to Antarctica for the past few days, our flight was completely full, with over 130 passengers. When we arrived back at the Antarctic Center and put all our gear back on again, it was a chaotic scene with parkas, "bunny boots", and orange bags everywhere. Most of the passengers on the flight were part of the USAP program, with a handful of New Zealanders bound for Scott Station, near McMurdo. You can tell the Kiwis from the Americans by the colors of their parkas, boots, and gear bags, which are in a palette of tropical blues and greens to contrast with our bright reds and oranges. It takes some skill to figure out how to move around while wearing all of your ECW gear, especially the enormous boots. Plus, you take up about twice the amount of space that you're used to.

The airplane bound for McMurdo from Christchurch was a C-17: an enormous cargo plane carrying many crates full of scientific gear as well as all of the passengers. All of the guts of the plane -- cables, controls, switches, and so forth -- are visible on the inside. Naturally, all of the physicists spent half of the flight staring at all of the parts and talking about how they were put together or what they were for. Some details were familiar: on the optics cryostat for the SPT, we use "military connectors" to connect the wiring inside the cryostat to the cables outside the cryostat. It was especially funny to see these in their natural habitat, so to speak. It is impressive to look around such a vast vessel as a C17 and think about all of the time and effort it must take to put something like that together.
There are no windows in the C17, except for a few little ones on the doors to the front and rear. It was a cloudy day anyway, so it wasn't possible to tell that the landscape below was anything unusual. The plane is also very loud. You have to wear earplugs or good headphones, and it's not easy to hold a conversation. Several of my Berkeley colleagues had visited a military surplus store in Christchurch and picked up some very goofy french military ear protection gear, modeled below by Berkeley postdoc Brad Benson.



Late in the flight, we all had a chance to step into the cockpit for a view out the front windows. Professor Bill Holzapfel from Berkeley has been carrying around a "Flat Stanley" for a young friend of his, so I took it with me to the cockpit. The pilots got a kick out of it and made sure that I got my picture taken holding the little guy.


For me, excitement really kicked in when I took some time to walk back to the back of the plane and look around the cargo area. To my surprise, we were flying along with a bunch of the crates that I had personally packed back in Chicago, and I immediately found myself inspecting them and counting them and wondering where they'd been since I last saw them. Somehow at that point it sunk in how much I cared about seeing this project succeed, and how exciting it was to be headed to the South Pole to put the last parts of the telescope together and make it work.

New Zealand, Chapter 2, in which Kathryn wears herself out and feels humiliated

In this photograph, there is a mountain. There are also at least 5 SPT scientists. Two of them are little slivers above the edge of the mountain, in the very center of the shot. A few more are lower down. Those two at the top - they're professors Bill Holzapfel and Adrian Lee from University of California, Berkeley. In the middle are some other postdocs and graduate students on the project. You can see from where the camera is taken that I'm a lot further down. The straggler. What a day.

The night before our scheduled flight to McMurdo, we found out that we were delayed for at least a day, probably two, due to a mechanical problem. Great, I thought. A chance to catch up on a little bit of work on my laptop while sitting out at the Dux de Lux bar or in the Botanic Garden. I'm very behind in my software development and I've been worried about not having enough solid blocks of time to just sit and program. I was looking forward to it. But over breakfast, I heard news that Bill had rented a van and all of the Berkeley SPT folks were going out for a hike. At the last minute, I decided, sure, I'd tag along.

In a couple of important ways I had no idea what I was getting into. First, I had no idea of the geography around Christchurch, so I didn't realize we were close to the Southern Alps. In my head, I pictured a hike being a walk through some wooded hills, maybe a field of sheep, maybe a rocky streambed or something. Second, I had very much the wrong idea of what was indicated by "day hike". This being my first time in New Zealand, I was excited to spend some time looking at the plants and birds and landscapes, and having lots of time to try out my new camera. But that notion was way off. No, the idea apparently was to climb a mountain.

In my naivete, I had not only left on my city boots (which I know I can wear forever without any pain, but they still aren't for hiking), and I had also ducked into the restroom at the ranger station while Bill & Co. picked the trail. And what did they pick? A trail that involved nearly three hours of scrambling up the steepest, rockiest terrain you could reasonably handle without extra gear. And then it involved scrambling back down another way that was just as steep but filled with loose, irregular rocks and roots. And the hike was launched at an aggressive pace, far beyond anything that was comfortable for someone who's had a fairly sedentary few months. I immediately regretted that, in the flat landscape of Chicago, I've lost my hill legs. It hurt. And each time the rest of the group stopped for a break, there I was huffing and puffing my way up, tripping on my stupid boots, and being grinned at by 8 faces I'll have to look at every day for the next six weeks. Sheesh.

But there were some pretty awesome things about the hike, despite the fact that I could barely walk afterwards. The views were spectacular. And since I was spending most of my time concentrating on my next steps rather than on the mountain vistas, I also had an unexpected opportunity to appreciate the dozens of bizarre lichens and mosses that grow in the New Zealand mountains. They're like nothing I've ever seen before, and a single rock can be covered with what looks like a miniaturized garden, complete with tiny flowering plants, succulents, shrubbery, and grasses. I wish I had good pictures! Foo on those silly SPT boys and their long legs and demonstrations of athletic prowess. But next time, at least I'll know what I'm getting into.
My favorite photograph from the day is this weird one of a kea. These are mischevious birds known for eating parts off of cars. They're a dark and muddy green color, but with shiny orange feathers you can only see when they fly. I love this photograph, which was an accident, just because it's so strange. The kea, at this moment, has realized that there's a cracker he might be able to snatch, just outside the frame. So I've captured his eager hop, and it makes me laugh.

Follow the Leader

I had no idea what to expect from the time that we spent in New Zealand, and had barely thought about it at all before arriving there. A trip to the pole typically begins with a day or two in the lush city of Christchurch, which is summery and cheerful this time of year. The USAP (U.S. Antarctic Program)operates flights from Christchurch to McMurdo Station, Antactica, and passengers stop over for a time to get equipped with their Extreme Cold Weather (ECW) gear and wait for the next available flight south. Normally, the clothing issue process takes place a day after you have arrived in Christchurch, giving you time to adjust to the time zone changes and the disorienting seasonal sunniness and warmth before thinking about the next step. Then after you are issued your clothing, you have a day to wander around and enjoy the city before leaving and heading south in the morning.

For some reason, I ended up on a flight into Christchurch that arrived the morning of my scheduled ECW gear issue rather than the day before. So that meant walking straight from the airport (after nearly 20 hours of travel) directly to the Antarctic Center to try on all of the heavy clothing that I will be wearing for my time in Antarctica. I had been feeling pretty good after all of that travel, all things considered. I slept a bit, and I wasn't even feeling all that icky. But there is no way that you can try on 20-30 pounds of heavy Antarctic protective gear without getting sweaty and sticky and rumpled all around.

All of the cold-weather clothing that you need is issued by the USAP. There's a lot of it, and when you pick it up it loosely fills two orange duffel bags. The clothing includes two sets of long underwear, heavy wool socks, fleece pants and tops, coveralls, a windbreaker, a bunch of hats and gloves, a pair of heavy mittens called bear-claws or gauntlets, and most importantly, a giant puffy red parka with your name on it. I noticed immediately that the tags on my bag and on my parka read "Dr. Kathryn Miknaitis". I'm not used to thinking of myself as Dr. Kathryn, so that feels funny and formal, and was one of the first things that made me chuckle. It was one of many little details that sometimes make this whole experience unreal, like a science fiction movie instead of my actual life.





After I was done trying on all our gear, and had settled into my hotel, I went downtown with some of the other members of the SPT team. I'd arrived on the same flight as fellow Chicagoans John Carlstrom (the PI for the project) and Steve Meyer. Driven as if by a motor, John led us on who-knows-exactly-what errands in the city. I knew we were trying to track down some of our colleagues from Berkeley, but he also kept mumbling about banjo strings and metric size-8 screw-hole taps. Sometimes the best thing to do is just to follow the leader. So my first hour or so in Christchurch was spent mostly just watching for the back of John's head, hoping I wouldn't get too lost.


However, after a while of this we managed to accumulate a handful of other SPT members, and eventually a destination appeared.


Not a bad start, after all!

First and last words on 2006

Happy New Year!

So, it's a few days into 2007 by now. I'm actually a little bit confused exactly how many days it's been, since we just traveled over the international date line on a flight to New Zealand. I flew out of Chicago on January 1st, and arrived in Christchurch NZ on January 3rd, after some 17 or 18 hours in the air. I'm still here with a group of South Pole Telescope collaborators, waiting to take a flight to Antarctica. Exciting way to start out 2007, eh?

It's only a few days into my trip, but already I have lots of stories. Before that, though, a few reflections on the last year are in order. 2006 was a big year for me, as well as for the SPT project! It was my first year working in the research field of observational cosmology, which turned out to be very different from the solar neutrino physics that I did during graduate school at the University of Washington. Professors and teachers often advertise that one of the best reasons for studying physics is how it trains you to approach new problems and teach yourself new skills on the fly. This year my work has relied almost entirely on those aspects of my training, since just about everything I've been doing has been new to me. I've been catching up on cosmology (the study of the contents, history, and evolution of the Universe), learning how to write software to interact with parts of the telescope hardware, becoming familiar with the bolometers that the SPT will use to detect light from the early Universe, learning how to cool these detectors down to temperatures less than half a degree above absolute zero, and planning how we will analyze and interpret the data from the finished telescope.

The month of December, 2006 was an especially intense period for the whole SPT team, and one that pushed my on-the-fly-physics skills about as hard as any time I can remember. A group of SPT scientists from the University of Chicago had already deployed to the South Pole Station to build the telescope itself (go look at the main SPT blog for some great stories about their work). Meanwhile, some large parts of the telescope remained in Chicago. At the very last minute, we decided to perform an extra set of tests on the equipment that we had in Chicago before shipping it to the pole. These tests involved cooling down the SPT optics cryostat with a test receiver cryostat attached, and studying how the whole system performed together. At the time, all of the local experts on the optics and test receiver cryostats had already departed for the pole. Several team members from other institutions flew in to Chicago to help out, and we had a lot of help from local graduate students Lindsey Bleem, Megan Roscioli, and Jonathan Stricker. But even with all the support, I still had a lot that I had to figure out on my own about how all of these different telescope parts worked. It was quite a challenge, but a great experience! Since I often spend most of my time doing computer programming, I sometimes forget just how fun it is to work with real things. The graduate students took lots of pictures and I'll find a good one to post here sometime soon.

While were working extremely hard to finish the tests in Chicago, we were following the progress of the telescope building effort at the pole. I was following things especially carefully, anticipating my own deployment to the telescope site this January. I'd heard lots of things about how challenging it is to work in Antarctica, so when I saw Tom's movie about the South Pole Station, I was surprised to see just how comfortable life seemed to be! One Saturday evening when I was working in the lab (when I was obviously tired and not thinking all that well), I borrowed a camera from Ken Aird and made a little movie in response. Showing that I have no shame whatsoever, this ill-thought bit of reporting is available for your amusement here.