Last week, some of the winterovers walked out to the End of the World—that’s what they call the area that extends beyond the storage berms out on the ice—to take some photographs of the setting moon. It was bitterly cold, so they couldn’t use their cameras for long, but they did get in a few decent images. Above, we see the expansive landscape at the End of the World with no structures interrupting the view. The pink light is due to the imminent sunrise, but that’s the moon, not the sun, sitting on the horizon. Below is IceCube winterover Josh with a colleague standing in shadow along an ice ridge. Besides the walk, the winterovers also participated along with the rest of the station crew in a satellite phone call with the North Pole, organized by Sven Lidstrom, a former IceCube winterover currently working in the Arctic Circle. This was not the first pole-to-pole call, which was documented in 1999, but the crew still found it a fun activity as the longest of long-distance calls. The bottom image shows a little bit of aurora activity above the ceremonial pole, still happening these days but harder to see with the increasing daylight.
