The winds kept at it last week. The blowing snow not only obstructs the view when trying to take photos, but it makes it tricky to see the flags that mark your way in this dangerously cold landscape. The weather did clear at one point, though, long enough to capture some amazing shots of the Milky Way. […]
A quiet week at the Pole for the detector, but he photos were just striking! Here we have a nice shot of the ceremonial pole marker, with a bright moon situated just behind the sphere and flags flapping in the wind. […]
Even in winter, you can get an impressive halo—here it’s the moon. Halos are caused by light interacting with ice crystals suspended in the atmosphere, and these circular halos, which can form around the sun or the moon, are called 22-degree halos. They’re fairly common, seen more frequently than rainbows. […]
Hosted by Georgia Tech, the spring IceCube Collaboration meeting starts today in Atlanta. Two hundred IceCube collaborators from 49 institutions will meet to discuss about a variety of topics, including the future expansion of IceCube. […]
Last week was fairly relaxed at the Pole. Some testing and troubleshooting with the detector, but all went rather smoothly. As for the skies? They were glowing. And swirling, and shimmering. The auroras sometimes swirl into shapes suggesting all kinds of things. […]
Although the sky is not yet dark, auroras appeared for the first time this austral winter. It was a good thing the detector ran well this week, because the winterovers were excited to experiment photographing the colorful night sky. […]
Each winter, once it gets dark enough, the station covers up all of its windows to prevent light from interfering with light-sensitive projects at the South Pole. This year they decided to have a contest for the window cover art entries. […]
Didn’t we say the sun had set already? We did. But that doesn’t mean the sky goes absolutely dark right away. It’s a slow sunset, with light lingering even after the sun has dipped below the horizon. This image shows a great twilight shot of a clear sky with some color along the horizon and the IceCube Lab in the distance. […]
The IceCube Collaboration has tested a few models of heavy dark matter and found no evidence that the high-energy neutrinos can be attributed to the decay of dark matter particles. This nondetection resulted in a new lower limit for the lifetime of dark matter particles with a mass of 10 TeV or above. The paper summarizing these results has just been submitted to the European Physical Journal C. […]
Who needs the sun when you have a moon like this! This image shows the moon hanging low above the Dark Sector, home to the South Pole Telescope, shown here, in addition to the IceCube Lab, BICEP, and MAPO. […]