Welcome to the 2004/05 Antarctic summer diaries! These diaries follow the progress of the Australian astronomers on the ice as they prepare their experiments for the next winter season.

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• Jessica's Winterover diaries
  UNSW's Jessica Dempsey has accepted a position as winterover scientist for the ACBAR instrument on the VIPER telescope at Admundsen-Scott Base, South Pole Station. She will be stationed there till November 2005.
  
• Doug Caldwell's Antarctic blog
  Doug is part of the South Pole Planet Search - a collaborative project between UNSW and NASA AMes Research Centre.

Australian scientists will be working in two locations in Antarctica this summer. The first is at Dome C, the site of the new Concordia station under construction by the French and Italian national Antarctic programs. Concordia is nearly complete and it is hoped that the first winter-over will take place in 2005. Three Australian scientists are spending two weeks at Dome C in November 2004: John Storey (leader of the UNSW Antarctic astronomy group), Jon Lawrence (a postdoctoral fellow in the group) and Suze Kenyon (a postgraduate student at UNSW). It will be Suze's first trip to the ice!

Their first task is to prepare the observatory, the AASTINO (or Automated Astrophysical Site Testing International Observatory) for the new season, undertaking some routine maintenance. Then there are three principal experiments to set-up. The first is to measure the turbulence that creates the seeing that causes stars to twinkle, making use of an instrument called the MASS or Multi Aperture Scintillation Spectrometer. This turbulence is remarkably low at Dome C, and the object of the MASS is to measure how much it is and where it comes from. The MASS worked for 6 weeks during the 2004 winter, recording the lowest level of "seeing" ever measured, and this year we hope to run the experiment through the full winter.

A second experiment will re-vamp the SUMMIT instrument (the Sub Millimetre Tipper) in order to measure the sky brightness at a wavelength of 200 microns. This part of the spectrum is normally completely opaque from the ground due to water vapour in the atmosphere. However, because it is so dry on top of the Antarctic plateau, new windows open up that otherwise couldn't be seen through. Our objective this year is to find out how well the window at 200 microns opens - a window which will allow a future telescope to peer into the heart of cold clouds of gas where stars are born.

The third experiment is designed to measure how bright the sky is in the optical, in particular to determine what the influence of aurorae is? At Dome C the auroral circle is generally below the horizon, so the impact of aurorae is thought to be much less than at the South Pole, but no-one has actually measured them at Dome C so far. This winter we hope to do so for the first time, and so work out how dark the sky reaches there.

Another expedition will be heading to the South Pole in January. On it will be PhD student Jessie Christiansen and undergraduate physics student Colin Bonner. Like Suze, this will be Jessie's first trip to the ice, with Colin having visited Dome C last summer. They are heading to the university's observatory at the Pole, the AASTO (Automated Astrophysical Site Testing Observatory). There they will work with some colleagues from the NASA Ames Research Centre on an experiment to search for evidence of planets around other stars. SPETS, or the South Pole Exo-planet Transit Search, looks for the tiny dips in brightness of a star when a planet moves across its face. Our team will be re-furbishing the telescope after the first year of effort and installing new instrumentation.

Back on the mainland the remaining team members will be working hard to solve any problems the explorers on the ice come up with. Just like with Mission Control for a space mission, solutions to many problems often need to be worked out back home and the fix relayed to the scientists to fix. Michael Ashley and Jon Everett back at UNSW will be Mission Control for this Antarctic season!

Read all about the adventures of our Antarctic astronomers in the web pages here!

Michael Burton

- John