Tuesday, October 16, 2007

First science work, albeit brief

Things are kind of backing up here at McMurdo. We've just had the flights on our venerable Basler (DC-3 with turbo engines) delayed yet another day. I'm on the second flight, and now will be leaving on Friday if the weather at McMurdo and at Pole will cooperate.

I got to make the daily science round with the McMurdo Research Associate yesterday. We went out to the CosRay shack, which houses the oldest on-going science project here. The workspace still had the teletype that they would enter their manually collected data with, and still had a big trashcan full of the paper "bits" that had been punched out during data entry. So, that was pretty neat. Things have been upgraded since then, and the whole facility will be removed in the next couple years. We also went up to Arrival Heights, where a lot of instruments are located, including the UV project that I got trained on in San Diego and will be working on at Pole. It was a bit intimidating seeing all the equipment, but I'm sure I'll be fine once I get up to speed during our handover period at Pole.

The Polies had a Hut 10 party last night, which wasn't too rowdy since people still thought they might be flying today. There were plenty of snacks, and it was a good chance to get to talk to some of the people I'll be living in such close proximity with over the next summer and winter.

Sorry about not getting any pictures up in the last couple days, but computers are in high demand here and finding the right time of day when there aren't loads of people lining up behind you is a bit difficult. I'll get around to it eventually, but it may have to wait until I hit 90 south.

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