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The last good picture my Olympus camera took. This is a tunnel leading out from the dome. Most of that ice is just the frozen breath of the thousands of passersby. |
12/10/02
Boomeranging at the Pole : movie
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The last good picture my Olympus camera took. This is a tunnel leading out from the dome. Most of that ice is just the frozen breath of the thousands of passersby. |
Today was Monday here. But what's funny is,
I've been doing journals every day, not skipping any days, and
somehow, I got a day ahead, even for me. This journal is for the
10th, but it's only the early morning of the 10th, so I'm really
writing about what happened yesterday the 9th. And what's worse
is, the South Pole Station runs on New Zealand time (because that's
the supply line), so we're a day AHEAD, three hours behind Pacific
Standard Time (I live in Seattle). So if you're wondering how
I could be writing about things that happened on days that haven't
even happened yet, well, so am I. I blame it all on the International
Date Line. When I am king, I will have that date line removed.
Here's another problem. If you're talking about kiting, you refer
to the wind: "OH, the wind was blowing out of the north today."
But if you're at the South Pole, the wind ALWAYS blows from the
north. Get it? So they use a "grid" system here for
direction, where 0 degrees is the prime meridian, the one that
goes through Greenwich, England. But which way is that? I don't
know. But the wind seems to always blow from the same direction,
mostly generated by cold air falling from the upper atmosphere,
spilling over the Antarctic plateau towards the ocean in every
direction. It's like when you pour the pancake batter out.
I came to Antarctica hoping to see sundogs and ice halos, and
everyone who's been here awhile has great pictures of these beautiful
atmospheric phenomena. They're sort of Antarctica's version of
rainbows, but made with ice crystals, not water droplets. Ice
crystals have more variety, so there's a whole zoo of these ice
halos. But I read that they tend to occur only when air is moving
upslope, which hasn't happened at all yet. In fact, it's been
the same weather, day after day. Very light downslope wind, hardly
a cloud in the sky, and NO HALOS! Today's forecast: sunny &
cold. Tonight's forecast: sunny & cold.
Bai & I did more troubleshooting on the PMTs, but are mostly
in the position of reporting out tests findings to Albrecht, who
designed them. Bai thinks he has the problem narrowed down to
a few diodes in the base of the PMT. But mainly, we're waiting
to hear from Albrecht. Next probable step: remove PMT from ice.
That should be fun.
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Your hero, preparing to throw a boomerang completely around the world. |
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A quick snap of the wrist... |
Tried kite flying and photographing over the astronomical installations
out at SPASE & the so-called "Dark Sector", but
not enough wind even high off the ground to keep the kites up.
The hit of the day was breaking out Ben Ruhe's boomerangs and
throwing them around the world. Several folks got involved, and
the boomerangs have now each been around the world 40 or 50 times.
And I got my quicktime streaming server to work, so I am ready
to do live streaming video into my physics classes and my son
Eleuterio's 3rd grade class sometime this week.
