all photos

[11/17(Sa) => South Pole]
9:30-11:30AM I'm now on a C-130 cargo aircraft with 5 others on our way to the South Pole (~3 hours). I spent most of the time looking down the window. 11:30AM Landed. -40°C. Not too cold!
My teammates Denis and Tomo were there to greet me. They and 2 more teammates have been here for 9 days now. This year, unfortunately, I got a (small) room with no window :( I thought it might be an interesting experiment to try living in a window-less room for a while, but I don't want to do that for 3 months!
Lunch: Saw our other teammate John and many other familiar faces. I couldn't wait to go see our telescope.
1PM Walked over to our telescope w/ Denis, John, and Tomo. We walked at a normal pace in the thin air, but I was feeling very good. The weather was great, and I found the Moon in the sky! :) When I mentioned that I wouldn't mind spending a whole year here, John said, "We would love to have you winter over for us; but we need to get you to graduate first :)"... that was kind of him to say that. I don't think I've proven myself to be a reliable person to take care of an important telescope for a whole year, but this December will be a good test! When I walked into our lab, Martin, my labmate from Berkeley, was there.
Since I'll be running the telescope by myself during December, Denis reminded me how to fill liquid helium and liquid nitrogen into our telescope, which I'll need to do every other day. The scariest part is having to close the cap as quickly as possible when the 4K (around -270°C) liquid helium is rushing out at you. I should keep singing out loud to know when i have inhaled too much helium.
4PM Headed to another building where we are setting up a tall mast for testing our telescope. Our final teammate Amy was there.
6PM With little sleep, Denis seemed pretty tired, but when he started talking about paragliding during dinner, his energy was back :)
8PM The station showed films from last year's Banff Film Festival -- many extreme adventure footages. I felt not as stupid about my last year's sledding adventure (when I hurt my ankle).
10PM The last film seemed like an amazing story of a couple bicycling across Asia, but I started falling asleep, and went to bed.
[11/18(Su) Energetic :]
5:30AM After 2 bathroom trips during the night and a funky dream, woke up. In previous years, I've had to go to the bathroom 3 or 4 times, so I slept better than expected.
I still didn't like spending time in a windowless room, so decided to ask the station support supervisor Beth very nicely if I can switch rooms. Some people told me they just keep their windows covered all the time to help them sleep... these people should get the windowless rooms!
I was too sleepy last night to take a shower, so took it this morning. We're supposed to use no more than 4 minutes of running water per week for shower, but that's not too different from what I do back home to conserve water. The shower head had a big flow, so I turned the knob to make the flow much lower :)
Others had been working very hard the past week so they were taking a break, but I had a lot of energy and headed to the telescope with some hardware that I made in Berkeley. Even carrying these pieces of metal, I didn't feel tired at all walking 1 km to the telescope in the snow. It's a little strange, because I remember this hike being harder...
Got to the telescope and ran some measurements.
2PM I walked back to the station for brunch and headed again to the telescope. I felt like I could run, but played it safe and just walked. I was thinking, if I was gonna pass out, I'd rather pass out back at the station and not at the lab by myself.
I worked on my calibrator parts that I brought from Berkeley (see the photo below). Then Tomo came and helped me. A metal reinforcement ring that I made didn't quite fit my cylindrical calibrator device... I was anticipating this and had planned to sand it off a little to fit, but Tomo came up with the idea of putting the cylinder outside for a while and it may shrink enough at -40°C for the ring to fit. Sure enough, after rounding the edges, we were able to fit the ring! :)
Can you see the Moon behind our telescope? For dinner, we had a banana that Denis had frozen for the past 3 years -- it was delicious :)
7PM During dinner, we talked about what to observe during December when i'll be in charge.
9:30PM After a science lecture by the principal investigator of another telescope, went to sleep.
[11/19(Mo) Busy day]
5:30AM Slept right through without any bathroom trips! Maybe I'm not drinking enough water, but I have a feeling that in previous years the altitude sickness medication had caused me to have to go to the bathroom more.
7:30AM We're supposed to have a daily breakfast meeting, but didn't happen til ~8am. I found myself slightly frustrated because I needed to get a lot of measurements done before 11am to stay on schedule -- I'm usually not like this... it must be the altitude :)
~9AM Finally got to the telescope and prepared my calibrator. Tomo helped me to set it up on the telescope.
11AM We found out that the telescope's coordinate system had slipped again, which has been a big and mysterious problem for a long time. We decided to try troubleshooting this while we recycle the telescope's refrigerator.
1PM With Denis' guidance, I refilled liquid nitrogen and helium pretty much on my own this time. I really need to get this right because I really can't risk messing up during December. John found out what was slipping and we fixed the major problem, hopefully once and for all!
6PM After John and Denis went back to the station for dinner, Tomo stuck around to help me with my calibrator measurements even though he also seemed very tired like the others. It was cold working outside, but we made successful measurements and started another set of tests to run over night.
8:30PM Tomo and I finally finished and walked back to the station cold, tired, and hungry. I was kind of dreading having to prepare tonight for Tuesday morning's teleconference meeting, but Tomo reminded me that Tuesday in California is Wednesday in our timezone! I must've been too tired to remember that, but was happy about this good news :) We had some leftover food, which happened to be really good, although we found out that we missed a fresh batch of fresh fruits ("freshies", which is often rare at the South Pole) for dinner :( Anyways, we talked past 10PM and went back to our rooms exhausted. Tomo just joined our group at Caltech as a post-doctoral fellow this past fall, and I had briefly met him once before when i was visiting Caltech (i introduced him to a nice small Japanese restaurant in Pasadena), but he's a great guy -- friendly, humble, respectful, patient. He also gives me the chance to talk about technical stuff in Japanese -- pretty much the first time I have that experience! He also pointed out that we are probably the only 2 Japanese persons in the world working on experimental cosmology through the cosmic microwave background radiation... -- had never thought that way.
11PM-midnight Station supervisor Beth allowed me to switch to a room with a window :) :), so I moved to my new room, rearranged, and cleaned it. I always clean the room when I move in to a new place, but in the previous room, I hadn't cleaned it arranged my stuff in it because somehow I didn't think i'd stay in a windowless room for 3 months.
[11/20(Tu) -42°C, windchill about -60°C -- frost bite!]
6:30AM After finding the blanket on the floor and feeling cold, and half an hour of snoozing my vibrating alarm, I got up. I was impressed that I again didn't have to go to the bathroom during the night, but felt less rested. The room was pretty bright with the sunlight through the window blind, but still, it was nice to be able to open the window blind for the morning sun. I felt somewhat dehydrated and had some blood when I blew my nose -- then i remembered that i very often had blood from the nose in previous years.
8AM After the breakfast meeting, we headed to the building with our mast and worked on it outside in the wind. Being tired, I felt especially cold and then Denis said "you have a frostbite on your nose" -- others can tell because the skin turns white from being frozen. I couldn't feel my nose; went inside. It didn't hurt or anything, so hopefully it's fine, and I went back outside to work, being more careful about my nose. After getting some minor frost bites last year, I wasn't too concerned about getting another minor ones, but don't want to lose a nose!
This morning I had brought a big can of mixed nuts from the station to our lab. I'm addicted to these especially when i felt tired and cold, so I think I overdosed on the nuts because I had little appetite for lunch and then felt super tired...
We put a mirror above our telescope to... ... look at a test object on top of this mast.
In the afternoon, I prepared for a discussion at tomorrow's meeting about December plans.
[11/21(We) Trauma Team]
8AM We had our weekly teleconference with team members back in California (a fellow student Cynthia was in Paris to work with collaborators there, and Ki Won, who just finished his PhD thesis on this project, was in Colorado for his new job).
The Moon had set below the horizon and I won't see it again for a while. Without the Moon, no point in being outside, so worked mostly on analyzing my calibration measurements :| Based on yesterday's experimentation, I'm discovering that I've been miscalculating something the past 2 years! I feel really unintelligent (to put it nicely) especially because John had questioned that particular possibility before. I thought i had quadruple checked this calculation, but learned an important lesson that I should really check by a simple experimentation when something even a little complicated is in doubt. John and Denis were nice enough to not make me feel too bad and stupid, even though i definitely deserve a humiliation!
6:30PM Had to go back to the station for my first trauma emergency response team meeting. One of last year's Trauma Team leaders, Katy, told me that she had already told this year's leader Ryan that I was arriving to the Pole and would probably want to join the team again -- it made me happy to hear that she knew I wanted to join based on last year :) I stayed with the telescope till the last minute, so I started running back, but after a minute or so of running it became painful so I had to stop and catch my breath. I got a long way to go before I can survive the Christmas Race Around the World!
Being part of this emergency response team especially at this relatively high-risk environment is a great opportunity. I'd like to become better able to rescue others and myself in any situation, especially because I'd like to do many adventurous things, including going to outer space. Many of the people in the trauma team were from previous years. Today, we went to the site for the Ice Cube project, which uses tons of near-boiling high-pressure water to drill ~2-km deep holes down the ice to bury detectors for neutrino observations. We checked out where their emergency caches are and familiarized ourselves with various buildings and their protocols. They showed us big tanks of hot water -- it looked tempting as a nice hot tub out in the cold open air.
9PM Took a shower and was happy to see that nobody had turned up the flow on the shower head :)
[11/22(Th) Couldn't fall asleep!]
7:30AM At breakfast, John offered me some of the Peet's coffee he made. I don't usually drink coffee, but tried it and it was actually good! It didn't seem to wake me up though.
9AM To figure out the distance from the telescope to our test object on the mast, John got a sextant and we tried measuring the angle between the top and the bottom of the mast. The first explorers to reach the South Pole must've used the sextants to measure the height of the Sun as it went around the horizon to find out where the actual pole was. I want to try this myself. If I can measure the Sun's height to within 100th of a degree around the clock, then I can tell that I'm really within 1 km of the pole! (By the way, I think that's how a "meter" was defined.)
Before lunch, a fellow astronomer Ben was going home to Australia, so we went to see him off. I didn't know he was leaving so soon... I felt bad because i never really properly met him even though we probably had couple chances to introduce each other. It's sometimes hard when everybody else seems to know each other, going about their business, and you're a new kid on the block. Anyways, I shouldn't stop myself from introducing myself in pretty much any situation. Today, too, I mostly worked on the analysis. Tomo really helped me to confirm a geometrical correction factor that I needed to apply. On the way back, Tomo wanted to take a picture at the Pole for his soccer team buddies, so I went along to set foot on the pole for the 1st time this trip. Actually, this pole marker was placed on January 1st, about a year ago, and the ice around here had drifted down the continent, so the current pole must be a little off from this marker. You can see in this photo how the markers relocated for at least the past 3 years. The ice is drifting toward the direction of this photo about 10 meters per year. It's strange that the pole markers seem to be zigzagging...
8:30PM After dinner, I thought I'd go to bed early because I've been having difficulty waking up, but for the first time could not fall asleep! Many thoughts were wading through my mind, and trying to meditate (which often ends unsuccessfully by putting me to sleep) didn't even work. Often i get sleepy when I try to recall something, so I started recalling what happened since I landed at the South Pole on Saturday. This didn't work either and I managed to roughly recall everything up to the present. When I saw the clock and was shocked that almost 3 hours had passed, I couldn't waste any more time and moved on to my next strategy, which was to read or write something to get sleepy, and since I was very behind with this journal and I just went through the exercise of recalling everything, I got up and started catching up on this journal. Since this is a journal, please don't worry about grammatical incorrectness (<= this is not a real word) or my run-on sentences, or even the boringness :) At least I think I'm putting a little more thoughts compared to previous years' even drier accounts. After catching up to Tuesday, i was able to fall asleep around 1AM.
[11/23(Fr) warmer: -38°C]
Woke up very sleepy. Today was ~2°C warmer than usual with weaker winds, and it made a pretty big difference -- I had to take off my big red parka. As I was crossing the skiway, the flat ground sprinkled with bits of snow blown by the wind reminded me of photos from Mars, so I took a picture of the ground.
After the 3 months here, I really want to learn paragliding, so I looked around for paragliding license courses in Australia for me to learn on my way back home in February. When i first searched on the internet, there seemed like endless number of paragliding schools in Australia, but it turned out that there were only about 10 or so certified schools!
Filled liquid helium and liquid nitrogen.
In the afternoon, I wore a lighter jacket.
4PM I had to return to the station for "House Mouse" -- cleaning the bathrooms. Then went to a station-wide all hands meeting -- the dining room was full with ~200 people! So many of the people here are regulars, coming back every year. That was officially the beginning of the 2-day holidays here.
5PM Went to the store and got some new postcards.
I again couldn't fall asleep. Even though I have the thermostat set low to 13° (55F), the room was 18°C (65F) and felt hot.
[11/24(Sa) Frost bite!]
What are you eating?
=)