Just greasin' the gears

It is Sunday, January 17, 9:41pm. I was trying to work, but Ken is moving the data around because he is messing with the raid arrays, and my programs can't find anything that they need. I give up. But fortunately for you, my dear reader, this gives me time to write a blog posting, which will go up tomorrow when the internet comes back.

Speaking of internet, on the information screens in the dining hall there is a daily quote posted. The other day the quote said something like, "The saddest thing I can think of is getting accustomed to luxury" - Charlie Chaplain. Well, apparently I had grown accustomed to the luxury of internet whenever I wanted it, served up on the silver platter of high bandwidth. Here at pole, on a good day we get internet in two 4 hour chunks during the day, which corresponds to when two satellites go overhead. Sometimes the blocks are broken up with small breaks in service. One satellite is slow, the other is glacial. Gmail works, but barely. Uploading pictures to this blog is VERY slow. And whenever the internet is up, I feel obligated to do work that requires the internet, so I don't take much recreational internet time.

Friday saw me climbing up onto the telescope deck to grease the elevation gears, the ones that lets the telescope look up and down. After the azimuth bearing started vomiting small pieces of metal last summer, we switched from azimuth scans to elevation scans. By "elevation scans" I mean that the telescope stays at a constant azimuth (points at the same place on the horizon) and scans up and down in elevation until the patch of sky that we are interested in rotates out of view due to earth's rotation. The reason for scanning back and forth is that we want to look at the same patch of sky for a very long time and it should always look the same, while the atmosphere and other foregrounds should change. This way we can get rid of foregrounds, leaving only the signal we are interested in - the CMB.

Greasing the elevation gears required two steps. First we had to scrape off most of the old grease with paint spatulas. The grease is very heavy, cold temperature grease. It is apparently really expensive, and it gets everywhere! It was very cold up on the deck scraping grease in the wind, and we had to go back into the observing cabin every 10 min or so to thaw our hands. We would scrape the visible gears, then rotate the telescope and scrape more gears that had become reachable. After the gears were mostly clear, we painted more grease right back on, using paint brushes. Man, that job is going to suck in the winter when it is -80 C!

We rushed back to the station to catch dinner, then headed out to take a picture with everyone at the station of the old dome. The new station that I have been staying in was completed in 2007 (CHECK). Before that, there was a large metal dome that had smaller heated sections inside of it, which served as the main station. By the time I got here, there were only a few pieces of the dome left. Now the dome is completely gone, and some people are sad. The new station is certainly much plusher than the old dome.

There are a number of people who come here to work every summer season. I get the impression that it is similar to seasonal workers for the Forest Service in MT. This leads to an interesting mixing of cultures: seasonal blue-collar workers and scientists. At the pole, these cultures seem to mix nicely without much conflict. I got the sense that at McMurdo it is not always as congenial, but that was just an impression. Some people have been coming here for years and years. I cleaned the bathroom with a guy who was not in that category - he looked like he had stepped straight out of Sturgis to the South Pole and was wearing a Harley Davidson tee-shirt, jeans, sunglasses (inside - we were cleaning the bathroom) and a black leather du-rag to compliment his grey hair and beard. He said, "Some people come down here because they just like it. Other people come here for reasons you will find out. I don't want to get caught up in all of that. It is nice to have a woman back home, you know?" He was a heavy machinery contractor from Colorado, around Durango. But indeed some people just like it. Dana is one of our two winter-overs, and this will be his fifth season. He said, "I like the dark. When the sun starts to come back up in early October, I say, 'Oh man!' " Stephan is the winter-over for BICEP2, and I know he wintered last year - he may have wintered over even before that. John Carlstrom is on his 15th season this year, and John Kovac, the de-facto lead on BICEP2, said that this is his 18th season.

Do you know what friday night at the pole is? Volleyball night! At 7:30pm after the picture, a crowd gathered in the gymnasium, and we put up the net. The gymnasium is almost exactly the size of a volleyball court. The games were mostly 6 on 6, with some subs at the beginning. It is a very congenial atmosphere, where you play hard without being too competitive. I was amused by a big german? guy who works on Ice Cube, the neutrino detector. He is a classic alpha-male character type - he liked to hit the ball really hard and always kept score, but wasn't actually very good. Fortunately kept himself under control and it was all just fun and games. After each game, we would say, "one more?" and ended up playing until after 10pm.