There are privileges that come with winterovering at the South Pole. Being able to step outside and gaze up at spectacular aurora displays is one of them. Working in the dish pit? Well, maybe that’s on the other side of that coin.
If you find yourself at the South Pole, and the sky above you is sparkling with stars and shimmering with auroras, you might just want to lie down and stare straight up for best effect. That’s what winterover Martin did recently, seen here in front of the flags at the ceremonial South Pole.
The Wisconsin IceCube Particle Astrophysics Center (WIPAC) was excited to recently host two meetings on the UW–Madison campus. The IceCube Collaboration spring meeting was held from May 2–6 at Union South, and the 2017 IceCube Particle Astrophysics Symposium: Multimessenger Astronomy (IPA 2017) followed, from May 8–10, at Discovery and Union South.
It surely is a staircase to the stars. That’s the ICL’s staircase, set against a backdrop of bright auroras low in the sky with a wide swath of the Milky Way above. Last week at the Pole was very much like the previous one—a well-behaved, quiet detector and an active night sky.
Arms up—let’s hear it for auroras! With an extremely stable IceCube detector that needed little attention last week, IceCube winterover Martin was able to train his focus on the glorious skies.
Last week’s photos from the Pole were full of blue and green. The first visible auroras were out, and they appeared as bright green swaths and swirls against a blue sky. A bright full moon and Jupiter as a tiny speck also made appearances.
Another amazing week at the Pole—not only was the detector performing well but the twilight photographs continued to be stunning. IceCube winterover Martin captured another great time-lapse shot of a NOAA weather balloon launch along with some striking images of the station and the IceCube Lab.
The sun has set, they’ve held their traditional sunset dinner, and yet … it’s still light outside. Well, that’s twilight. Even after the sun falls below the horizon, the scattering of light in the upper atmosphere illuminates the lower atmosphere and the Earth’s surface.
This photo at sunset is a picture that paints a thousand words, reminding us that the South Pole is technically a desert. The windswept snow forms into sastrugi, or sharp, irregular grooves and ridges on the hard snow surface. They can create interesting shapes and take on strange appearances, sometimes looking a bit like waves crashing to shore.
Pull up a chair—sunset at the South Pole takes weeks, not hours. And why is that? Because the Earth’s rotational axis is tilted, the poles gradually proceed from full exposure to full shadow (and back again) as the Earth travels around the sun.