SPT is a fun instrument to work on as an engineer because there's a wide variety of hardware and software elements that need attention on any given day. That said, greasing hard to reach bearings to give the telescope a smooth ride can sometimes be a painful activity in itself. On the bright side, 

Today was the day! After weeks of logistics challenges and inbound planes being turned around for weather and medevac reasons, a cargo carrying LC-130 finally arrived carrying stacks of packages for Polies! It's a true Christmas miracle and yes, you better believe this plane had eggs.

It's been weeks since a cargo of fresh food ("freshies") has made it to Pole. One of the most obvious and heartbreaking signs of this long stretch has been the disappearance of fresh eggs from the breakfast line. Rumor has it there should be some much needed food cargo coming in this week though. Send thoughts and prayers for the eggs 🙏

The community here at South Pole finds all sorts of creative ways to have fun. And I'll just leave it at that.

This week marked the 112th anniversary of Norwegian Roald Amundsen's expedition reaching the South Pole and to mark the occasion we organized a bunch of events like a flag raising and cross country skiing near the station. We also assembled some old school polar tents and constructed an igloo in our "front yard". A few of us have even slept overnight in the igloo! To be honest it wasn't that bad with enough sleeping pads and cold weather bags inside. Yesterday we woke up and it was a toasty 17 deg F inside (compared to about -30 F outside).

This week our station Emergency Response Teams (ERT) met to review litter packaging for patients with potential spinal injuries. During the winter the station doctor and PA are the only formally trained medical staff onsite and there's no easy way for outside responders to get to us so every winterover joins either the Fire or Trauma response ERT teams. Over the course of the year we conduct trainings like this along with emergency drills to make sure everyone knows how to respond efficiently to an emergency.

Today was a busy transportation day here at South Pole Station with arrivals and departures of a KBA Twin Otter (seen above gliding down the skiway in front of the Dark Sector) and a White Desert Basler BT-67. We also welcomed the South Pole Overland Traverse convoy which has spent the past 34 days towing diesel fuel bladders all the way from McMurdo Station on the coast. 

This evening we spotted a pretty impressive sun dog in the sky. Sun dogs are an atmospheric phenomena that occurs when light refracts through ice crystals in the atmosphere, often creating a large halo and bright spots or "mock suns" on either side of the real one. 

Cameras, detectors, and optics get a lot of attention in the cosmology game but the real core of a telescope are the many computers, backup computers, and backup backup computers which keep data flowing. Most of the time when there is a computer hardware failure on SPT the alerts are detailed enough to tell you what needs attention. Most of the time...

It's the holiday season at the South Pole and the community is going all out to make the galley feel a bit more festive. 

Some days are so nice you just have to chill on top of a snow pile.

When someone fetches a full pie from the leftovers fridge at 10:30pm, there really is no choice but to finish it.

Hanukkah traditionally begins at sunset, so how do you know when to start in a place where the sun never sets? There's no real consensus, but the usual advice is to start when it's sunset "where you come from". Is that your home? Your last flight departure city? Do you adjust for the time zone changes? Or just use local time? Lots of great questions with no solid answers. Here at South Pole we decided to start at 7pm.

Staring at monitors and hoping computers boot up without errors is a favorite past time of telescope operators here at the South Pole.

There are many things you can predict with confidence in this world but flight availability in Antarctica is not one of them. Because of this, today we had to say goodbye to a few fellow SPT scientists on very short notice and several days before they had been planning to leave the continent. Though we have reasonably good satellite Internet coverage to keep in touch, we'll still miss having them as part of the station community.

There are many things you can predict with confidence in this world but flight availability in Antarctica is not one of them. Because of this, today we had to say goodbye to a few fellow SPT scientists on very short notice and several days before they had been planning to leave the continent. Though we have reasonably good satellite Internet coverage to keep in touch, we'll still miss having them as part of the station community.

The other night we were combing through the movie lounge's extensive DVD library and came across this Australian film called "The Dish". It tells the mostly true story of a remote Australian radio observatory that was tasked with relaying TV footage from the Apollo 11 moon landing. I had somehow never heard of it before and it was absolutely adorable! Very much the "October Sky" of radio astronomy. Highly recommend you check it out.

Buried underneath South Pole Station is a network of dark tunnels cut into the ice where the temperature hovers around 55 degrees below zero year round. Sound sinister? Not so much in reality. It's actually where all the freshwater from an underground reservoir flows into the station and where our sewage flows out. After a meltwater reservoir is tapped out (it takes a while as they hold MILLIONS of gallons of water) that volume is then refilled with sewage. And while we are bound by the Antarctic Treaty to ship out the vast majority of waste products generated at the South Pole there fortunately is an exception for waste that is "permanently encased in ice". 

Though we don't quite have the internet coverage most of us are used to in the north, we're fortunate that the entertainment options on station have grown significantly over the years. That said, it's still fun to see things like old Betamax tapes stacked in the movie lounge. Rumor has it that the player might actually still work! 

We have an incredible galley staff who make great food for the station every day but sometimes they need a break, especially after they go above and beyond the call of duty during their insane holiday meals. Today was one of those days where the galley took the day off and other members of the station community worked the kitchen. Over lunch, science grantees and IT teamed up to sling grilled cheeses and tomato soup. I think we did a decent job but don't get me wrong, the galley cooks won't have to worry about their job security any time soon 

You might think that Antarctica is some "restricted area" for scientists and support staff but it really isn't. It's just kinda hard to get to. That being the case we still have the occasional tourist charter plane arrive carrying a handful of people who have paid tens of thousands of dollars to spend an hour or so at the Pole. The funny part is that they aren't allowed to enter the station and folks who work at the station aren't allowed to interact with them at all. This leads to moments like last night - watching from the windows of the warm galley while the new visitors waddle back and forth to the south pole marker for selfies before boarding their plane back to civilization.

Typically when ski-equipped LC-130 aircraft arrive at South Pole with passengers and cargo they leave their engines running until they take off again to prevent cold weather problems from cropping up. This Herc unfortunately needed some TLC after landing and was on the deck for a few days until another arrived with parts. Thankfully it took off again today. Since there's a limited number of planes circulating the continent and a *very* tight logistics schedule it's always good to see them up in the air.

The community board this week is a good mix of typical nerd fare, sports, knitting, etc. There are two main stairwells in the station so they're perfect places to put up event notices.

Yesterday we said goodbye to Alex and Kyle, our two winterovers who have kept the telescope up and running for the past year. We only overlapped with them for a week and a half but the knowledge they passed along to Josh and I will be invaluable during our time here. And of course we couldn't send them off without one last team photo at the telescope.

This week we're spending a lot of time practicing setup of the Event Horizon Telescope, a secondary instrument which uses the same dish as SPT. The secondary and tertiary mirrors in the bottom of this picture redirect light into the EHT receiver. EHT is a really neat detector that synchronizes with about a dozen radio telescopes in other countries to create a simulated single telescope which is the size of the earth! This allows the EHT network to gather data on very far away objects like black holes. Remember that famous first image of a black hole from a few years back? That was made by EHT.

Thanksgiving meals are great, don't get me wrong, but they pale in comparison to the greatness of the day-after leftovers sandwich. Fortunately at Pole all meal leftovers are placed in an open community fridge for anyone to take. Needless to say today's lunch was fantastic.

This year I'm very thankful for our galley staff who pulled out all the stops to make a fantastic Thanksgiving dinner, complete with cocktail hour and hors d'oeuvres. On days like this we all sign up for shifts to help with things like table setup and dish washing. Being away from family out here can be hard, but you can particularly feel the community when everyone chips in to make holidays special.

When bouldering on telescopes, always wear the appropriate footwear.

After a few days of debugging and prep it feels really good to be collecting science data again! The process of cooling down SPT's detectors to a fraction of a degree above absolute zero takes a long time but it's absolutely necessary in order to collect some of the faintest light in the universe.

A pretty neat aspect of the South Pole is that there's just a single sunrise and a single sunset during the entire year. It makes smartwatch apps a little less useful though.

Some days telescoping comes easy. Other days you're troubleshooting cryocoolers until 3:30am.

We had another LC-130 land at Pole today carrying a few more scientists from the South Pole Telescope team so we were sure to welcome them in style! Hawaiian shirts were a must since it was a toasty -25F outside (-45F with windchill).

Most people on station have 6 day work weeks with Sunday being their day off. As such, the Sunday brunch spread in the galley is taken *extremely* seriously. Once winter comes around though and resupply flights stop arriving, fresh food will start to run out.

You get a great view of the Dark Sector lab from the South Pole Telescope roof. From here you can see BICEP3 in the attached building and BICEP Array a bit further out. These instruments, like SPT, study the Cosmic Microwave Background to help us better understand the physics of how the universe first formed. The main station building can also be seen off in the distance.

The South Pole Telescope is the very awesome program I will be supporting for the next year down here. Since it is extremely sensitive to interference the telescope was built along with other cosmology instruments in the "Dark Sector", which is about a kilometer away from the main station. Sadly not all of my commutes out to the telescope will be on days that look as good as this...

After over a week of waiting for a flight out of McMurdo station, we finally touched down at Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station aboard a ski-equipped LC-130 Hercules. We were welcomed by instantly frozen nose hairs and a group of winterovers excited to be ending their own year-long tour of duty on station.