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. […]
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 a tiny speck of Jupiter 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. […]
A tree grows at the South Pole. Well, not really. It’s not an actual tree (rather, a sculpture made of copper), and it’s definitely not growing. But it looks like a tree—great photo! […]
Up until almost the last minute, the summer activities at the Pole kept the IceCube crew busy. This summer, a dozen IceCube researchers and staff, from eight institutions and six countries, spent some time at the Admundsen-Scott South Pole Station to perform maintenance and operations for IceCube and help prepare for a future deployment of the Askaryan Radio Array (ARA) detector. A PolarTREC teacher, Kate Miller, also traveled to the Pole to join the team, contributing to an extensive educational and outreach program that is still in progress. […]