The Compton Spectrometer and Imager
We have some very sad news to report: Ashraf’s is closing for two months 🙁
Ashraf’s is an Indian restaurant in Wanaka, and it’s definitely the best one. There are four Indian restaurants in town, and most of us have tried all of them. We liked Ashraf’s so much that one week we went there 5 times. As yesterday was their last night, we went there for the past three nights in a row. Continue reading
Waiting around for perfect weather, we spent the first few days working on our telemetry and analysis tools that we will use to monitor the instrument from the ground. Since then, however, the pressure has let up some and we’ve had a few chances to enjoy ourselves.
Yesterday, some of us took off the afternoon to go wine tasting in Bannockburn. Continue reading
The New Zealand Air Force parked on the apron directly outside the doors of our hangar.
The tiny Wanaka Airport has been buzzing recently. Over the Easter long weekend they hosted the Warbirds Over Wanaka Airshow, which, from the view of our hangar right on the airport apron, was awesome. There were so many amazing planes and skillful pilots, and for many of us, it was our first airshow. We had the hangar doors open to the sunshine and excitement all weekend long and even though we were working most of the time, it was a lot of fun. Continue reading
I meant to update this a few days ago, but haven’t had a chance yet. It’s been an exciting week: we got the cryostat on the gondola and we have an almost fully built instrument! Continue reading
We keep getting delayed due to shipping, which is pretty frustrating. First, we had to wait to get the card cages sent from Berkeley. As soon as we got those last week, we thought there was nothing preventing us from getting the cryostat on the gondola. But that was before we noticed that our stycast (thermal epoxy) had dried out. We need the stycast to attach heaters and temperature sensors to the cryostat, the electronics boxes, and the gondola. Continue reading
On our first day here, some of us took a pact to take a day off every week: Sunday funday! (If the weather is bad one Sunday we can do a Monday funday instead – it still rhymes). Yesterday most of us hiked near the Rob Roy glacier and got some great views. Here are some pictures from the day. Continue reading
Not too much has happened this week. We’re still waiting for some of our card cages (the electronics that read out the detector signals) to get here from Berkeley. They got shipped separately from the rest of the instrument because we wanted to work with them during the month it took the container to get here. Once we get the card cages, we’ll be able to turn on the rest of the detectors, and start putting them on the gondola. Continue reading
Alan, Alex, Brent, McBride and I arrived in Wanaka yesterday afternoon. This was basically the first thing we saw:
We had two full days in Christchurch, NZ. Before being able to explore, we had to get our extreme cold weather gear from the US Antarctic Program office.
Abby, myself, and Carolyn trying out our extreme cold weather gear
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