South Pole Video Clips

Since I have a camera with the capability of taking large numbers of frames automatically and have had access to a heated camera box, I've been making time-lapse clips over the past year.  The idea is simple- take a still frame every minute or so and link all the frames together to make a movie.  Here's some of the results of these experiments.  All clips are Windows Media (apologies to the non-Windows crowd out there!), just click on the links next to the pictures for the size you want.  Mac users, try this for a player: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/software/Macintosh/osx/default.aspx

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Dobson window, 29 January 2004.

The first one (also can be seen as an animated GIF within my site), taken through the window of the dobson instrument room looking out at the station.

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New station galley, 31 January 2004.

This covers roughly from 6am through 9pm, breakfast, lunch, dinner, and bingo at the very end.  But also note that this is NOT meant to be a surveillance-type of video, so all you authority figures out there who might be looking at this should not be looking at this to see if your employees are being good workers- this is ART!!!!

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View of new station from ARO, 09 March 2004.

One day of looking back at the new station from the front porch of ARO- this was also seen previously seen elsewhere within the site.

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Solar tracking instruments on ARO roof, 10 March 2004.

Camera set up low next to the "penthouse" (an extension of the roof built to house more instrumentation), watching the solar instrumentation.

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View of ARO from the top of NOAA 20 meter sampling tower, 12 March 2004.

I took the camera box up to the top of the tower and lashed it to the railing.  I was a little worried that the whole thing might break loose in the wind but everything turned out alright.  All the visitors you see moving back and forth to ARO are people coming over for Friday Slushies, a long standing ARO tradition for the weekend.

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Camera box bolted to solar tracking mount to follow sun, 23 March 2004.

At the end of summer with sunset, we bring in most of the solar instrumentation- not much data to take and not much point in beating up the equipment leaving them out in the intense cold.  When we took this instrument offline, I used the mount to follow the sun around through the day.  This was one of my attempts at trying to catch the fabled "green flash", which is supposed to occur here, just like when you're at the beach.  But don't look for that though- this was a little too early and the actual day of sunset turned out to be cloudy.

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View of new station from ARO, 25 May 2004.

Ever wonder what aurorae do if you sat down and watched them all day?  This is a long exposure series strung together as a movie so you can see how the night sky gets over here.  This was a more average night, on a very active night there would be a lot more.  I always seemed to miss those too!  This clip was also seen elsewhere within the site.

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View of the sky from ARO second floor balcony, 29 May 2004.

This is something I did for one of the astronomers who was giving a talk on the night sky above South Pole.  To view it properly, you need to turn your monitor 90 degrees clockwise.  I shot the frames in portrait, thinking that I could make a portrait-style video clip in order to maximize the view of the sky.  But it turned out to be a little harder than I expected, so I just left it sideways for now until I can figure out a way to do a sideways letterboxed movie, which is something I've never seen done before.  So anyway, those of you in the northern hemisphere should NOT recognize any of the constellations seen here!  It's still new to me over here.

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View of full moon from ARO, 02 June 2004.

Even though winter is dark, there are plenty of things in the sky lighting up the outside, especially on a full moon.  This is another long exposure series that makes it look bright as day out there- but I assure you, you don't get blue sky days like this out there even on the brightest full moon with lots of aurorae at the same time.

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View of MARISAT 9 meter dish, 11 June 2004.

When I went out to visit Eyvind at RF (see the field trip section on the front page), I left my camera out viewing the dish all night to try and catch some aurorae on it.  I think Eyvind was happy with the results since he hardly gets any visitors all the way out there!

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View of station from the Balloon Inflation Facility, 15 June 2004.

Most of my views of the station are from ARO, but we launch our balloons from the other side of the station from the BIF.  The BIF has a nice platform on top with a good view of the backside of the station (or maybe we're in the back from ARO), and you can see the entrances, as well as the two garage arches and the new power plant (the third arch towards the station).

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View of station from ARO, 10 September 2004.

Although the sun is coming up, there really isn't too much to see because the weather has been pretty cloudy- this is a typical of what we have been seeing for the past couple weeks.  There have been a couple exceptions, but the clouds quickly close in and it goes back to this.  But it's still getting brighter, so the view is improving regardless of how thick the clouds are.  But you can also think of this as a better version of NOAA cam, which looks out this way as well.

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Digging out the Dome entrance, 13 September 2004.

You know, even though I'm a beaker over here at South Pole, but I still fantasize about getting to drive some of the heavy equipment around here.  Here's a little clip that I made of my friend and heavy equipment operator Rob Shaw digging out the Dome entrance.  ARO is off in the distance- the first person walking out there is me, the next is Jason Seifert (my boss!) heading out after lunch.

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Moving to Summer Camp, 21 October 2004.

Today was the day most everyone got kicked out of their winter quarters and had to make their way out to either summer camp (seen here) or the hypertats (far to the right, you can't see them from here).  But it was a beautiful day out, so I put my camera out on top of the BIF to try and catch people moving their stuff out to the jamesways.

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First REAL flights,  22 October 2004.

I set my camera up too late to catch the first flight landing (and yes, I did know some people getting off the plane- pretty excitng!), but you can see it idling on the ground.  This is followed by a second flight.  Although this doesn't go long enough, the second flight spent a couple hours on the ground going back and forth.  They were having some engine trouble and were trying hard to get going enough to make it out of here.  This was also the first flight to have passengers leaving.  Some of them wanted to go on first flight, others were the "trouble makers" among the station and traditionally they're the first ones to go.  Funny though, out of those people, I considered those to be some of my best friends here.  I guess that shows what kind of judge of character I am, but I thought they added the most positive morale boosts in the station when things were getting pretty low at times during the winter.  But I'll see them again in Christchurch in a little while!

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