| Ostrich eggs in the Galley (regular egg shown for scale). |
| Breakfast. |
| You know there's not enough to do when vacuuming becomes interesting. |
| Sarah checks the status of the mirror on the end of the telescope. |
| The Keck Array from above. As you can see, only one of the three telescopes has been installed. The small porthole on the right is for the star tracker. |
| Closing up K1. |
| Sarah takes noise data. |
| Grant lowers the cap over the waveplate. |
| Chris inspects some heat straps. |
| Looking down the hall towards the receiver room (which is under the telescope). We were doing a relay to quickly get messages between the people in the receiver cabinet and the computers in the lab. I happened to be positioned in the jog. |
| Looking the other way. |
| A DC-3 picking up some tourists. |
| A downed IceCube flag. |
| Waiting for ALCI's DC-3 to taxi across the Dark Sector road. |
| Pre-launch checks. |
| Pre-launch checks. |
| Take-off. |
| Take-off. |
| Screamin' Eagle (a Pisten Bully) |
| An IceCube detector at Destination Alpha. |
| Fuelies are the people who handle refuelling planes and anything else that needs it. They, naturally, exude fuel so they've put up a helpful sign in their area of one of the coat rooms. |
| Robert and Phil lift the hatch off. |
| Lowering the crane. |
| Two firemen watch our operation. |
| Phil teeters on the edge. |
| Hoisting the forebaffle. |
| Operation complete. |
| One last glimpse of natural light as the hatch is replaced. |
| This is what clouds look like. |
| Darren swaps power supplies up in the receiver cabinet. |
| Chris winds back up a roll of tape. |
| Light entertainment in the lab. |
| K1 closeout continues. |
| Destination Alpha, with the US flag at half mast. |
| |
| (10573x2502, 34201.60 kb) A view of the outbuildings Grid South of the Elevated Station from the top of the snow pile near Destination Alpha. The edge of the Elevation Station is at extreme left. The next building on left, with all the garage doors is the cryogenics facility, one of the few out buildings kept open in winter. Behind it is the waste facility. Most of the Jamesways (the long, semi-circular tents) form Summer Camp, overflow housing in use during the summer. A lot of the rest of the stuff you can see are storage berms. The white radar domes can just be discerned against the whiteout conditions. To the right is the aircraft refuelling yard, and the passenger (PAX) terminal. At extreme right, on the other side of the fuel line, is the IceCube drill camp. | |
| A stack of Macs. |
| Wiring cables. |
| Wiring cables. |
| Wiring cables. |
| Final closeout. |
| Old-school electronics in MAPO. |
| Grant, John and Sarah attach the MCE crate to K1 for continuity testing. |
| Our first official data acquisition. More clouds. |
| Oscar the half waveplate analog control box. |
| Zak gives us the thumbs-up. |
| Heading back home after a long day of work. |