The South Pole Telescope Blog

It has been a while since we last posted but that doesn't mean we haven't been busy. We just finished observing for this season and it was a success! Since deployment lots of exciting things have taken place. The SPT winter-overs, Zak Staniszewski and Steve Padin, have been living at the South Pole running the telescope. Since the SPT detectors operate at very low temperatures, the winter-overs spent part of each day cooling the detectors and setting them. Then, when the telescope is ready to observe, they use a computer to command the telescope to point at the regions of the sky that the collaboration decided to observe this Austral Winter. Each day the data is sent back to the SPT collaboration via satellite and the analysis team sets to work processing the raw data. One of the main goals of the analysis at this stage is to understand how each element of the instrument is working. The telescope is a very complicated instrument and before we are ready to use this data for science, we want to be really sure we understand how everything is working, especially the hundreds of individual detectors making up the camera. The next step in the analysis is to write a complicated set of computer programs that take raw data and process it into maps of the sky. We will be working hard over the coming months to prepare these maps and study them. Besides the analysis, there is a flurry of activity as we work to create an updated receiver to install on the telescope during the coming Austral Summer. Already, the first few members of the collaboration are headed back down to the pole to begin this season's work on the telescope


Below are some great pictures of the telescope during the Austral Winter taken by Zak Staniszewski and Steve Padin.



The telescope after a storm.




The aurora, a phenomenon seen most commonly at the poles of the earth caused by the interaction of the solar winds and the particles in the earth's magnetosphere.




The moon shining brightly behind the telescope.



The sunrise after a long dark winter. Since the earth's axis of rotation is tilted with respect to the light coming from the sun it is always dark for part of the year at South Pole and always light the other part of the year. For this reason, the sunrise is a very special event.




The white snow and telescope looking beautiful as the rising sun reflects off them.