all photos

[11/27(Mo) Bye Darren]

11AM Darren flew away. Now our senior graduate student Kiwon is our leader! Now that we're just students, we were joking that we can take it easy (not knowing all the mishaps that are about to happen the next 3 days :).

As a Trauma Team member, went to the safety tour of the Ice Cube facility -- I heard one guy there last week cut his hand and had to be evacuated to New Zealand for treatment! I could see the faint crescent Moon :)

5PM Fishined filling liquid nitrogen into the telescope to cool it to 77K and kept pumping out the air out of the telescope to insulate it.

6PM After House Mouse cleaning, stopped by the green house and saw the lettus that we eat.

[11/28(Tu) Power outage!]

5:40 An alarm woke me up and I heard something about the power, so I checked the webcam to see if the vacuum pump for the telescope is ok, and was slightly horrified when I saw the pump's pressure display was off. I thought the pump was hooked up to an "uninterrupted power supply" (that uses a battery in case of power failure), but apparently not.

5:50 I rushed out to the telescope and closed the valve so that no more air leaks into the telescope.

6:18 Power returned and we started pumping again, this time with the pump on the uninterrupted power supply. Fortunately, the telescope didn't seem to have lost too much vacuum.

2PM After lunch, I got stopped by the skiway beacon, so I lied down and looked up to find a clear reversed arc of rainbow straight up in the sky. It was the fist time I saw it... very pretty. I also took the background photo.

PM With the telescope at liquid nitrogen temperature, Evan and I checked for leaks and didn't find any.

10PM Especially since the power outage alarm woke me up early this morning, I took Denis' alarm clock as a backup and set it behind the window cover, so that I will need to let the bright light in to turn off the alarm.

[11/29(We) Leak in the leak detector]

7:00 I slept through my regular cell phone alarms, but fortunately, Denis' alarm clock woke me up in time for the teleconference.

AM We discovered that our leak detector itself has a leak! After a few hours, we finally found a leak and covered it w/ the standard silicone vacuum grease. We missed lunch...

PM We got another leak detetor from the building next door, and most of the afternoon was spent w/ Evan and Kiwon arguing about how much helium gas to spray to detect leaks :)

7:30PM Had a Trauma Team meeting.

[11/30(Th) Missed lunch again! and dinner!]

AM This morning, Bob Pernic w/ years of leak checking experience came by and explained to us what's happening w/ our leak detector, and told us never to use silicone "vacuum" grease because helium atoms are small enough to pass through this type of grease.

The Moon is supposed to have set this morning... for another half a month.

After missing many meals ever since Kiwon became our leader, he was determined to get us lunch on time today. In the process of blowing out liquid nitrogen from the telescope's liquid helium tank (so that we can start filling it w/ colder liquid helium), we must've pulled a fiber optics cable that sends all our data to our computers, and we could not get our telescope control system to work! Trying to debug this, we missed lunch again.

PM Inspected the damages on the green telescope cover at the top that moves like an acordion w/ the telescope.

8PM Finally finished filling liquid helium into the telescope... and late for dinner!

[12/1(Fr) Jamie arrives]

6am Woke up early for change and headed to the lab. Can't believe it's already been a month!

Noon: Returned to the station to meet Jamie for lunch. His flight must have brought some fresh vegetables -- I really enjoyed the fresh cucumber and tomatoes. The fresh food comes from New Zealand.

3PM Tried reprogramming chips in some of our electronics boards. I've alwaays wondered how to do this.

Tonight, I tried to find out the Iridium phone schedule in case I need to make an emergency call when the regular satellites are down. The South Pole station uses the Iridium satellites for 24-hr emergency phones and small email deliveries. Iridium are the satellites who solar panels flash brightly once in a while in the sky!

0:30 Wrote Nacchan about her fellowship application and went to bed.

[12/2(Sa) Something strange...]

5:00 Woke up and dragged Jamie's big black box on a slead to the lab. The telescope's refrigerator was successfully cold, but the liquid helium in the refrigerator had ran out already, much earlier than it should have... :( Also, the data from our detectors shows strange disturbances...

PM Measured how much the telescope mount is tilted -- one of the structural pillars of the building was removed last month for some reason, and this tilted the whole building!

8PM After dinner, others stayed for bingo, but I went to think about Nacchan's fellowship application.

9:30PM Nacchan was unfortunately was feeling sick tonight, so I also went to bed.

[12/3(Su) Nacchan's fellowship application]

5:00 Woke up and worked on Nacchan's essays. She found out about this fellowship (that does not require US citizenship!) only recently and the deadline is Monday!

8PM John Carlstrom, the principal investigator of the 10-meter South Pole Telescope, gave probably the best presentation on the comic microwave background that I've heard. He is one of the most famous researchers in this field, and is also a very nice guy that I can look up to.

Midnight: Helped her type her application forms and went to sleep.

[12/4(Mo) helping Nacchan]