Sundays at Dome C begin with croissants. It is the day of rest for the construction crew and most other folk, who work 8am – 7pm for the other six days of the week. However, as with the wicked, there is no rest for the astronomers.

With SUMMIT happily installed on the roof of the AASTINO and taking data that we hope might appear in "Nature" some time, we turned our attentions to Nigel. Nigel is the aurora-measuring instrument, and receives light via six rather delicate optical fibres. Each fibre is just 1/10 millimetre in diameter (about the same as a human hair) and, although we are very cunning in the way we attempt to protect them, fibres like these are very easily broken.

A large part of the day – for me at least - therefore disappeared in doing small jobs that had to be done in the area where the fibres would eventually go, so we wouldn’t have to do the jobs once the fragile fibres were in place. Such jobs included installing the Iridium data phone in a permanent position on the wall (rather than sitting on top of the tool box, where it always falls off when you want something out of the top drawer where, for some unknown reason, all the really useful stuff is), tightening all the bolts that hold the AASTINO together, and fixing the wakey-wakey board. This last task actually took hours.

The wakey-wakey board is a "watchdog" which shuts down the Supervisor computer should, for any reason, the Supervisor stop working. In order to prevent a premature death, the Supervisor constantly reminds the wakey-wakey of its good health by sending two pulses, once per minute. Should no such pulses arrive, after 17 minutes the wakey-wakey pulls the plug. At this point, the only thing alive in the AASTINO (apart from, hopefully, one or more engines) is the wakey-wakey board itself. Its responsibility is then to restart the Supervisor computer after 2 minutes if the engines are running, or after 4 hours if they are not (and we are therefore trying to save power).

Fixing the wakey-wakey board was complicated by the fact that it's buried in the electronics rack, permanently wired in with a zillion wires because for some bizarre reason we put it on the same piece of circuit board as our weather station electronics. Not only that, but the tip broke off our soldering iron, leaving a stub that is shaped like a pencil eraser. Add to this the fact that my no-longer-youthful eyesight requires me to wear the dreaded "head magnifier" (which makes you feel sea-sick after a few minutes because everything viewed through it is either out of focus or terrifyingly close), and what should have taken a few minutes seemed to take forever. Anyway, the job is now done.

Our first visitor for the morning was Marolla Liana, the Italian ambassador to New Zealand. She is spending a day or two at Dome C, and was keen to understand what we were doing and particularly the international aspects of it.

Later in the day, various other members of the Station wandered through. While we try to be as hospitable as we can, it turns out that the visitors' gallery of the AASTINO is spatially coincident with the computer room, which occupies the same space as the electronics lab, the mechanical workshop and the cold-weather clothing storage rack. As I was wearing the head magnifier when most of our visitors arrived they looked to me like space aliens, with noses the size of pumpkins and eyes like dinner plates, so my warm and friendly greetings were not as spontaneous as they might have been.

In proper Dome C Sunday tradition, lunch was a major feast. This time it included smoked salmon, kangaroo, escargots and "Ille Flottante", one of Jean-Louis trade-mark desserts. The photos I have sent back cannot do the meal justice.

Today was partly cloudy, ending nearly a week of perfect, crystal blue skies. The weather was vile when we arrived, but since then this place has looked like the ideal location for a telescope, with little or no wind, daytime temperatures in the mid minus thirties, dropping to -45 C at night. ("Night" being when the sun is at its lowest, still many degrees above the horizon.)

Suze and Jon installed Nigel, and made the first ever spectroscopic observations in the visible at Dome C. To be fair, they were of the inside of the AASTINO, but it'’s a start.

As feared, the ice shelf at Terra Nova Bay is breaking up early this year, and the Hercules can no longer land there. I therefore need to leave a day early, to fly by Twin Otter first to Terra Nova Bay, then to the US coastal station of McMurdo. As McMurdo is a few hundred kilometers further south than Terra Nova, we can still take off from there in the Herc.

The day finished with the Sunday science briefing, which included reports from each of the teams, and a birthday cake to celebrate the birthday of the wife of Giacomo, one of the Italian guys. This was washed down with home-made grappa which Giacomo's wife's uncle had made. It is wonderful so see a "family" atmosphere being recreated, when family are far away.
- John