The sun continues its downward spiral below the horizon and it gets a little bit darker every day. For the last week we were blessed with good weather, which was great for CMB observations and taking pictures. Clear skies come with cold temperatures and it got pretty chilly on this week’s cryogenics runs.

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On my way home from BICEP to the Station I noticed a really cool light behind the abandoned SPASE-II shack. I used to take care of the South Pole Air Shower Experiment when it was still operating. The shack now looks lost in that big wide open.

I had to fight with some technical difficulties to crank this one out. The general lack of features in the South Pole landscape makes it next to impossible for any panoramic software to find enough control points to automatically stitch the images together. Manual intervention takes time and thus this panorama didn’t make it into the sunset post.

You’ll be able to take a 360° look around from a spot close to the Geographical Pole.

Please click on the image below to view the panorama:
Temperature: -60.7°C / -77.3°F, Windchill: -82.0°C / -115.5°F, Wind: E (80.0°) at 11.0 knt Date: 2008-03-19 13:27:17 NZDT

Sunset at the South Pole has come and gone. We had some nice patches of weather leading up to the sunset, which is a moving target down here.

Click on an image to launch the gallery (7 pictures)

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On my way out to DSL I noticed an interesting cloud formation. We don’t see clouds very often. So, this is always something nice to look at. The sun is already at a low elevation of 5.5°, which added a spectacular light effect. I decided to go back inside and get my tripod and digital SLR camera. I spent half an hour to take a number of shots, which I processed into high dynamic range images.

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Well, there is not much to see here. The weather has been pretty nasty around sunset. So there wasn’t much of a chance for good pictures. Every now and then I could catch a glimpse of the sun on its way down. Of course only when I didn’t carry my camera.