all photos
[1/1(Su) Crashed plane]
12:00 Woke up. Had a relaxing brunch. It looked windy outside and the weather was not looking so good, but we decided to proceed with our plan of going to see the crashed airplane. I heard that an LC-130 aircraft (the kind that I took to get here) had crashed many years ago just before landing and that it's still buried in snow. It's supposed to be 5 km away. Denis last year skied there but said it was probably not easier than walking. I thought about skiing but I wanted to walk around more freely, so decided not to ski. Jamie wanted to ski.
3pm I went with Denis, Jamie, and Brian to the Dome to check out a big flashlight, the radio (to keep the station informed), and skis for Jamie. I tried on a pair of skis that strap on to regular boots, but it didn't feel good.
3:40pm Finally we started our trip. It was very hazy and we couldn't see very far. We walked down the skiway (no airplanes on Sundays). The skiway was nice and packed hard, but when we reached the end of the skiway after about 2 km walk, the snow became loose and much harder to walk on. When I asked Jamie how deep his ski pole can penetrate the snow, it went down almost a meter deep easily.
4:15pm We ran into what looked like a road -- Denis said it must be the path that the Traverse vehicles took on its way to the South Pole station from McMurdo station.
The halo around the Sun is very pretty. Denis told me that it makes a 22-degree radius circle, which is coincidentally very close to the tilt of Earth's axis, making the halo just barely touch the horizon looking from the Pole.
4:40pm We finally reached the site of the crashed plane, marked by some flags. The plane was completely burried, but we found a plywood cover under the snow so we uncovered it.
We opened it up to find a hole.
We took out another wooden cover about 2 meteres below, and I went down first... It led to the cockpit of the aircraft with shattered windshield! My breath obscured the view.
I didn't notice at first, but there was a small hole that led to the cabin.
 I crawled all over inside the cabin, but toward the end it felt like the oxygen was getting low in this confined space. My camera started not working and my hands started getting very cold, so I got out after about 10 minutes.
I was the last one to unboard the plane. It must've been about 4 meters deep.
 5:15pm We walked back to the station. My legs got tired, so had to use my hands too.
6:30pm Finally reached the station.
7pm There was a little ceremony for moving the South Pole Marker to the new 2006 location, because the marker keeps drifting away from the actual pole with the general movement of the ice around here. I quickly ate dinner and went out to see the ceremony with ice cream in my hand. The soft serve ice cream got harder outside. When the new pole was erected, everyone was taking photos with the "Happy New Year" sign, so i just had to be different and hold the sign up side down. The new pole marker has the model of the new station (that i'm living in).
8pm Our team member Brian gave this week's Sunday Science Lecture, about our telescope. It was very technical, even for me! I think Brian may not have known that there are many non-scientists in this station, but anyways it was nice to inform them more about what we're doing.
9pm Played happy new year's ping pong and went to sleep ~1:30.
[1/2(Mo) 3 more days]
8am Woke up. Wrote John about my optical telescope progress. I decided to extend my stay here by 3 days to leave on Saturday January 14th, instead of the 11th. This means 3 less days in New Zealand, but I know I have a lot to do here and I'm also hoping to be stuck at McMurdo station for 2 nights (there're no flights on Sundays) so that I can see the wildlife there and explore the area! I hope my plan works. When I went to lunch i realized that Brian flew out already! He brought 70 lbs of kosher food here, and left a lot of it in our lab.
8pm Ki Won and I set up a telescope motion program to run for the night.
4am Took a nap on a big sheet of foam in the lab.
[1/3(Tu) Spoon]
6am Woke up for the 6:30 teleconference.
8am When it was over, we went back to the station, Ki Won for breakfast, I for sleep. The Forbes adventurer writer offered to give me a tour of his building when I hopefully go to New York in February :) I asked Denis to wake me up for our meeting.
1:20pm Denis had Jamie wake me up... later than i had expected, but i appreciated the extra sleep especially since they hadn't started the 1am meeting. Apricot has been super good :) Ki Won was asleep in the lab, so we took a lunch to him.
2pm The plastic window cover for the telescope was completely clear of snow even though it's been snowing a lot lately -- good :) I made another window cover with 0.7-mil polypropylene film, instead of mylar.
5pm To help align my star pointing telescope, Ki Won and I mounted the spoon from Ki Won's lunch at the top of our mast as a shiny thing that I can point my telescope at.
0:00 Ki Won and I were busy trying to troubleshoot a strange behavior of one of the telescope's axes, but then Alison came to film us dance and lip sing the song "Particle Man" -- I was the Universe Man. I was tired, but it was fun -- it's gonna be shown at the South Pole Film Festival later this month!
4am Went back to the station to sleep, super tired.
[1/4(We) Productive last day w/ Bill!]
10am Woke up and wrote Nacchan about last night's phone call. When i went to lunch, i realized that our team member Darren was arriving this morning -- I was going to join others in welcoming him, but was too sleepy to remember! I called him (his room is in the old dome!) to invite him to our lunch meeting.
2pm I took off the star pointing telescope from the main telescope to improve its collimation, but things didn't seem to improve....
4-7:30pm My advisor Bill is scheduled to leave tomorrow morning! He came and we reglued the foam cover over my black groundshield. It became a big mess, but I think we'll make it work well in the end. Because we wanted to finish this work, Bill missed his chance of getting his girlfriend a gift, because the store closed at 7pm. Sorry!
9pm After dinner, I kept working on the pointing telescope. I briefly mentioned to Bill what I'm working on, and he offered to take a look. We kept measuring a bigger collimation error than I had expected. So we decided to take down the telescope again to look at the optics inside. I had thought about measuring the mirror angles with a protractor, but had been afraid of scratching the mirrors. But Bill proposed that we try it anyways, so we put a thin sheet of tissue on the mirror and measured the angles. It worked fine and we were able to adjust the mirrors to get a much nicer image quality than before -- we saw the ski hut many km away :) We tried to find the collimation error, but the spoon was no longer shiny because the Sun was behind it. So after some more try, we called it a night around 5am.
6am I went back to the station to sleep.
[1/5(Th) Found a star! Another day w/ Bill!]
12:00 Woke up. Turns out Bill and Evan's flight got delayed at least til the evening due to poor weather at McMurdo station. I had a very spicy tofu dish.
2pm After Bill and I fixed the telescope last night I felt confident about detecting a star now, so pointed the telescope at where a bright star should be. The moment Bill walked into the lab I saw a star on the CCD image!! After a high five w/ Bill I was so relieved I rolled on the floor. I had been a little afraid I might not have enough time to detect a star before I had to leave the South Pole, so it felt nice to finally see the star. Using this star, we measured our collimation error and tried to correct for it. After making the adjustments we looked at the star again and the collimation seemed very good, then we heard a strange noise and a big jump in the star's image... turned out a metal piece got jammed to our optical telescope while rotating the telescope! We fixed things to make sure this doesn't happen again. This collision seemed to have stressed our telescope enough that the collimation went bad again :( Then it started getting too cloudy to see the star, so we had to stop and went to dinner.
After dinner I finished my groundshield gluing work. Talked to Okasan and Nacchan.
2:30 Back to the station to sleep around 3am.
[1/6(Fr) Bye Bill! Diablo]
8am Woke up and went to the lab even though I was pretty tired, because I wanted to see how the gluing job turned out before Bill left. Darren was already there -- back in California he usually comes to work ~5am, so he seems to be on early schedule even here where the Sun is always up :)
12:00 Went to lunch to say good bye to Bill and Evan. Bill is going back straight to Chile from New Zealand. He said his team will go to Chile again in March -- man, I want to go too!! Evan just got married in the fall, and is meeting his wife in New Zealand for 3 weeks of honeymoon!
1:30pm Went to the lab, but was super sleepy and had to take a nap on the foam -- slept for 2 hours and felt much better :) I later found out that Denis took a photo of me taking the nap and sent it to my boss Bill.
7pm Jamie was also able to leave on today's flight, so we said good bye at dinner.
After dinner, played ping pong w/ Denis and Ki Won while others played a pirate card game Loot. Then Denis and i went to go fly his kite. The wind turned out to be way too weak, but he also took along a Chinese yoyo toy "Diablo" -- Denis could do many cool tricks and he tried to teach me. I got as far as being able to get it spinning and toss it up. It was very fun! I'd imagine if I had it when i was little, I would've played with it a lot. The clouds looked very cool today.
10:30pm We got cold and went back inside. I went to my room and wrote emails.
5am Went to sleep after talking to Nacchan and writing her.
[1/7(Sa) Congressional Delegation visit; Kite!]
7:30 Got a phone call from Nobu-san about Nacchan's letter from Homeland Security. The satellite communication was poor, but he spoke very clearly for me. After a few emails, went back to sleep.
2pm When I woke up I couldn't believe it was already so late!! Today, 29 congressmen are visiting the South Pole station for ~4 hours (short enough to not get altitude sick) to help them decide about funding the science programs. I had heard they'd only have ~10 minutes to visit our telescope, so I wasn't excited enough to be sure to wake up... but I ran out to the telescope in hopes to catch them. The wind was very strong and felt the coldest like the first days that I was here. I thought the congress people chose the right weather for their visit. I also felt bad that I missed welcoming our team members John, Erik, and Chao Lin... :( When I finally reached the lab, some visitors were on their way out, but i was happy to learn that there'll be another group coming. I saw the 3 new arrivals and also Dr. Sarah Church (Stanford), the principal investigator of the QUaD telescope that's next door to ours. A group of ~10 congressmen came and we gave them a tour. At the end, one of them came to shake my hand saying "Thank you"... his name tag said "MC CAIN" -- it was the senator John McCain who ran for the US President in 2000.
One of the 3 new arrivals is the same John that came to the South Pole with me. He went home to be with his family for Christmas and New Years and came back. I was a bit anxious about his return because I haven't had time to do all the things he wanted me to do while he was away. He's feeling a little sick today, so maybe he didn't notice all the unfinished jobs :]
5pm Denis said he's gonna try his kite again, so I went with him. I had only flown kites with 1 string, so I didn't know how much more fun it is to fly kites with 2 strings! The wind was strong, and when I tried it, I managed to crash the kite within several seconds, as Denis predicted. By pulling on either of the strings, we could turn the kite right or left and do flips and move it close to the ground. Because I was only wearing glove liners, my fingers froze after a minute. The 2nd time I tried it, I was able to do flips and also scare Denis by flying the kite right by him. As a revenge, he decided to try to scare me too, but when I was passing the strings to him, we let go of one of the strings and it got tangled.... that was the end of our kiting for the day :( Because Denis is going to spend the whole year here, he brought a lot of toys. At first many of his toys didn't seem interesting enough for me to get in to, but when i do try them they challenge me in ways that make me want to go deeper into these toys. It reminds me that I should never dismiss things without trying them.
7pm Came back in for dinner, but my fingers were so cold that I couldn't even start eating -- I had to rub my hands together for like 5 minutes before I felt comfortable enough to eat... it's amazing how long it takes for fingers to warm back up!
8-10pm Tonight was the 2nd bingo night. I didn't play the 1st time because it's not my thing, but Cynthia won a ticket to a cruise in New Zealand and Dehlia won like $150, so I decided to give it a try, especially since Cynthia said it lasts only about an hour. It was fun, but bingo is not mentally challenging so I quickly got pretty tired. Nobody in our table was lucky tonight, and Denis concluded that he'll never play bingo again in his life. Was very tired and went to sleep.
2am Woke up and talked to Nacchan and wrote her. Called Otosan -- My kiwi friend Dan offered us to stay at his home when we're in Auckland! :) I thought about Virgil my Romainian flatmate from Glasgow and signed on to Skype for the 1st time -- he was there and we were able to talk for the 1st time since we last met at the World Space Congress in 2002. Though the voice over internet connection wasn't great, it was so nice to hear his voice again and to get back in touch!
6:30am Went to sleep.
Q(Kathleen). What are the biggest challenges?
=)
[1/8(Su) Paragliding!]
12:30 When I woke up, my neck was in so much pain that I had to keep lying on my bed for a while. I don't think I was sleeping with a bad posture, so it may be because I was typing long emails on my bed last night... I finally got up for lunch, but it hurt to turn my head or even to just sit and eat. This is one of the worst that I've experienced! I was hoping to do some fun things today as this is my last weekend at the Pole, but now this pain is really limiting me :(
2pm Anyhow, a friend said he's gonna try paragliding, so I went along because I really want to learn paragliding. There's a big snow pile about 10 meters tall just outside the station, so we went there hoping to get some lift from the wind. Since my hands froze yesterday, I made sure to take warmer gloves this time. He rolled out his parachute (~5 meter wide with ~24 strings) on the ground and put on the harness. At first it looked just like flying a big kite. Then he climbed up the little hill and tried jumping down. It was windy enough, but the air seems to be thin here (high altitude) so he didn't get enough lift -- still he was in the air for couple seconds. When I go anywhere high, I always want to jump down and glide if I could. It looked very hard with the wind blowing in unpredictable directions around the little hill, but I wanted to try it just on the flat ground. So he let me try :) For each hand, you can basically control the "riser" attached to the front of the parachute, and the "brake" attached to the back of the paraschute. First, facing the wind, he told me to lean forward and pull on the risers to get the parachute up -- it pulled me very hard. I couldn't see the parachute behind me, but then he told me to let go of the risers. A moment later the parachute went back down. It seems that we let go of the risers too early and I probably accidentally pulled on the brakes. We tried again, and the parachute seemed to have gone up, but not for long. By this time, my fingers were frozen -- my thinsulate gloves are not warm enough in the wind! Still I wanted to keep going. My fingers were so cold I could barely hold the risers and brakes with no sensation. He had me face the parachute this time so that I can see it. Then it was similar to flying the kite like yesterday -- I managed to get the parachute up. I tried to keep the parachute under control by pulling on either of the brakes when the wind steered the parachute sideways. In less than half a minute, the wind steered me too much to the left and I crashed the parachute. This was just the beginning, but it was really neat :) I wanted to try again, but I couldn't feel anything with my fingers so I stopped. I took off the useless thinsulate gloves and put my hands inside my jacket, under my carhart pants, between my legs. My thighs felt cold from my frozen hands, but my hands didn't seem to get much warmer. My fingers eventually thawed and we packed up the paraglider. It took a while for the strange feelings on my fingers to go away.
4pm Back in the station, but my neck/shoulder hurt too much to even sit and type, so for the 1st time I decided to watch a film that I had rented almost a month ago. As long as I'm in Antarctica, I rented a film "Ernest Shackleton", based on his actual Antarctic expedition. It was very long (200 minutes), but an impressive story.
5am Went to sleep.
[1/9(Mo)]