Monday 18th
January
From
Michael Burton.....
Well
now John has departed this fair and beloved icescape (and
become marooned in Mactown) it falls to me to attempt to carry
on the tradition of the daily South Pole diary. So what happended
today? Got up at lunch time, wandered out to AASTO, wandered
back again, did a little exercise, had a shower, took a few
piccies. Yes, all in all a busy day now that John has left.
But
getting serious for a minute, a few things did happen. Al
Fowler decided that Abu wasn't pumping down properly, did
a few checks with the leak detector, and discovered a leak
near where the pump connected in. So pumping needed to be
restarted. So far it looks as though its going better, but
there is a couple of days to wait before we know whether our
dewar really can hold a vacuum.
Matt
has been busy resoldering wires for the SPIREX secondary mirror
and sorting out and packing all the gear we're sending back
to UNSW. Daniel continues to monitor the SODAR in all types
of conditions, in particular trying to determine whether its
the US flag or the Aussie one which is contributing to the
turbulence measured. He's also started correlating the data
with that of the Met balloons, which are launched twice daily.
I expect him to be writing a paper soon on the inadequacies
of meteorlogical data gathering methods! Actually the disagreement
in our data sets on wind speeds and directions isn't that
bad, but there is certainly NOT a one-to-one correlation between
the two! The wind has, however, been pretty miniscule of late,
when the swaying of the balloon payload dominates its readings.
We're waiting for some strong winds to develop so we can make
a better comparison.
Talking
of weather, we're experiencing a heatwave. Temp around -25C.
Its hard to cope. Clothing is being discarded, people wander
around in T shirts and shorts, and curse the heat. We had
a glorious 12 hours when the wind was absent and the Sun shining.
Then the clouds came in for a few hours but now they've cleared
again. Having been trained in the delicate art of taking movies
with the webcam by Melinda (a very tricky unix command needs
to be typed in on our local computer, pharlap) I've started
the filming for the epic movie, `A Week in the Life of
an AASTO', a picture every 4 mins. But there has already
been a 8 hour gap when I decided to stop filming for some
poor weather, only to miss the reappearance of the Sun. I'll
probably get the tecqhnique right just about by the time I'm
ready to leave!
If
people have been wondering what I've been up to at Pole, while
all this hectic activity goes on around me, I've been stuck
in front of a keyboard trying to get to grips with reducing
the SPIREX/Abu data from last year. One thing became immediatley
apparant - how good our computer system is back at UNSW (our
friendly decstation `roen'), compared to the Sun workstations
I have available here! 1024**2 arrays really do generate a
lot of data and when you are trying to process 100 images
at once you need a computer with some real grunt, not to mention
ample disk space. I've ended up shuffling files between 3
computers, parallel processing as I go, in an attempt to make
progress. It must be about 10 times slower working than on
roen, but since I have about 20 times as much time available
to actually work as I do back in Sydney, I am making progress,
just. I have, for instance finally worked out the sensitivities
we reached through all the different filters we used last
year. Any Abuists reading this diatribe - I will post the
results shortly!
I
also gave the weekly Sunday Science lecture tonight, a task
neatly transferred to me by John when he decided to do a runner
and hit Mactown for the weekend. Still, the galley seemed
pretty packed (I guess there isn't a great deal else to do?)
as I wizzed through a slide show on why study the Galaxy and
used John's viewgraphs to talk about why come to Antarctica
and where we really want to go.
So
that will have to be it from me for tonight - its time to
crunch some more data!
Michael
 
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