On a day off, some galley crew friends and I took a field trip out to "the Dark Sector." Sounds very Startrek. Basically, it's an area about a kilometer from the elevated station where radio use is extremely limited because it is where the space telescopes of the South Pole live. We hitched a snow mobile ride out there with some of the scientists (or "beakers" as they are fondly called here) who work there.
The station looked so tiny from out there.
The grantees working on the telescopes were really generous in showing us around and trying to explain to us non-astronomer idiots exactly what they are doing there and how the telescopes work. Most of them are looking for (among other things) information about the Cosmic Microwave Background and what that can tell us about the origins of the Big Bang. If I have that right. which I might not. Which would not be the fault of the kind beakers who tried to explain it.
We even got to go inside the inner workings of the SPT, the South Pole Telescope, which is the biggest of the telescopes here (though not the only one, as the name seems to suggest).
And then up to the dish of a second telescope, BICEP-3, that was in the process of being built while we were there. The dish protects from the telescope picking up stuff (they explained what stuff, but I can't remember what it is now) emanating from Earth rather than space.
The silver cylinder is BICEP-3 in its state when we were there, and the blue tube is where it goes when they finish building it. These scientists have already done about six test runs in building it and expected to be able to do it for real in about two weeks' worth of work.
The dish of the SPUD/Keck array telescope, a third one out in the Dark Sector, was even more impressive and fun to walk around in.
And then this is the actual SPT. Down in the inside area behind where the orange railing is is where we were standing when we were inside it, I think.
After our field trip, a nice afternoon walk back to the station.
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