Halley’s Cometh

It’s easy to forget sometimes that I’m living an a giant iceberg. Sure the iceberg is 50 miles long and the ice is over 100 metres thick, but it’s still floating on sea. I’m reminded of this stupid iceberg when ever I’m thirsty…

You see, we have a slight problem with fresh water. You could argue that we’re surrounded by it, but unfortunately it’s all frozen. We do have liquid sea water below us, but that’s a good 130 metres down, and as we’re moving 2 metres a day towards the west we cant really drill into it and tap that ohh so lovely liquid water that we all take for granted.

One bright spark many moons ago suggested a tank, which snow is shovelled into and then melted, providing ample millilitres of water for everyone to drink, wash and spill over the kitchen floor with. I bet this bright spark has never had to dig a ‘melt tank’ as we call it, and any one that’s a semi-regular on here will have heard those dreaded words before…

A simple rota is made up each month by Rich, and three people take it in turns to ‘dig the sodding melt tank’ each week. It’s not that bad really, a dozer pushes snow and makes a funnel shape above the melt tank shaft entrance (around 40cm wide) and we then stand on this mound and shovel snow into the tank (which lives 30m under the surface) until a certain level is reached. This usually takes 20 minutes with three eager diggers, and less with more volunteers. The melt tank is dug everyday in winter, and twice in the summer - it provides all the water on base so it’s mucho important. Even in terrible blowy or cold weather, the unlucky suckers still get to go out and throw snow down the melt tank until the glorious Red Light illuminates our stupid frozen faces … ahhhh.

We had such a day in July, and even though we’ve had countless horrible melt tanks’ throughout the winter, I’ve only managed to film one. Here it is…

How many people get to celebrate Sun up with a lunar eclipse? We were lucky it’s been blowing 35 knots for the last 9 days, and apparently the sun finally rose for the first time in over a hundred days on the 10th of August, but we never even saw it. We patiently waited for a break in the weather, and on Saturday evening the wind stopped, letting 11 hardy folk to venture outside for a fantastic BBQ and fireworks display. The timing was perfect, as the moon was taking a stroll in the shadow of the Earth …

The moon starts its journey behind the Earth

Hard to keep a 400mm zoom lens steady enough for a sharp image, even with a solid tripod

This is the furthest the shadow reached, it gradually moved to the underside of the moon, before the moon become whole again

Sun up, a momentous occasion for all on base usually results in merry celebrations, and we at Halley love our celebrations. We eat our dinner on the platform (on plates … not literally on the platform), make fancy German drinks called Feuerzangenbowle (thanks Tom! - UAV pilot 07) and fire off a load of expired flares.

‘It’s like Iraq’ to quote a voice I heard on the platform. Yeah, just like Iraq… except for the… you know, SNOW.

An eerie red light descends upon the perimeter.

Standing a hundred metres away while your fellow winterers are shooting things into the sky, popping smoke and having fun while you’re standing there cursing that you’re not wearing your overalls and your hands are freezing and the stupid battery keeps running out is exactly how I want to spend the next BBQ!

I like nightwatch. You get to relax and get on with those little projects you’ve had planned for years. I was on nightwatch last week; I managed to read a few books, I watch most of Charlie Jade and I even got my camera out for some high speed messing around…

The subject - water
The equipment - Canon 20D with 100mm macro + 28-135 zoom (both canon lenses), a bowl, a syringe, 3 really bright lights and about a billion tripods and stands to hold everything in place…

The result? Water, which falls as snow, then thrown into a big tank 30m underground, then melted, then pumped into the base, poured into a bowl, sucked into a syringe and then ever so slowly dripped out as my camera goes click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click…

Drip…

A liquid crater with ejecta

0.23 seconds later

Each drop made a crater, then a drop would rise up like this. You can almost see my reflection in the droplet, which gave me an idea…

A quick change of position, and a backdrop of our mid-winter photo…

I tried a different angle with the 100mm macro using the lights as a backdrop

Oops, I dropped the syringe but I managed to catch the impact

The swell of chaos a fraction of a second later

I took around 900 photos in total, spread over 4 hours over two nights. The hardest part was getting the drop in focus and timing the shots as the drop hit the surface. For info, I was shooting a combination of ISO400/800/1600 at speeds of around 1600, 2300 and 3200, with the macro going down to f2.8 and the other zoom at 3.5. I tried opening up to f11+ for a bigger depth of field, but it was too dark with those shutter speeds.

There are many advantages of living thousands of miles from civilisation. We can watch our movies on full volume without worrying about the neighbours (I doubt the penguins would file any complaints with the local police). We can run outside totally naked when the temperatures reach -49.9, but the best part about living so far away, is the lack of pollution… Especially light pollution. The sky at night unveils a magnificent array of dots, blurs and shapes. You have to stay outside for 10 minutes for your eyes to get accustomed, during which you’ll almost freeze your bits off, but it’s definitely worth it.

I went outside a few nights ago to appreciate the cold air, which only Antarctica can provide. The way it stings your nose and makes you cough if you take a deep breath. The way your eyelids freeze over and develop blobs of ice, making it difficult to blink (I’m not exaggerating here, it really does happen). Knowing full well that the Sun is eagerly making it’s way back to us in a few weeks, I realised that the Antarctic night sky would soon disappear, leaving sunny blue skies and pale white moons. I figured I better get out and capture a sky I know I’d miss…

Unfortunately, The Man has yet to invent a decent affordable camera that can accurately portray what the human eye sees when he looks up at the stars. Despite this, I grabbed my faithful Canon 20D, attached my 10mm wide lens and pointed up, snapping photos with gusto.

The initial results were disappointing. Too dark or too grainy, but mostly out of focus. The main problem with stars is focus, as it’s virtually impossible to see a star through a 10mm lens let alone see enough of it to focus. This is exacerbated by the fact that it’s a really bad idea to stick a magnesium-alloy camera body next to your face in -40 air, so looking through the eye piece is very difficult. The auto-focus is no good as there’s not enough light for the censor to read. So, I stick the lens on infinity and I proceed with a series of trial and error photos and try to nail the focus…

I take a photo of the stars (ISO1600, f3.5, 30sec @10mm) and look at the screen for the results, I then carefully zoom in on a star to see if its in focus. The star has probably moved a little in that 30 seconds, so I have to take that into account also. It’s hard to do this in ideal conditions, but when you’re standing outside in total darkness with cold hands, a colder camera body and a screen that now updates itself over 5 seconds due to the crystals freezing in the display… you can imagine the hassle. Anyhoos, I repeat this process for a good 30 minutes, until I’m happy with the focus levels.

A bit grainy, but you can clearly see the Milky Way and pleeeeeenty of stars.

A bit grainy and over-exposed, and the stars have moved too much. Stupid stars bah

Here’s straight up.

The best shot I took was an angled shot of the Laws. It was my line up photo for a few more, but my battery died and I couldn’t get any more. The sky above doesn’t quite look as vivid as above, but it’s so much brighter than anything I have ever seen before.

Right, first up. Massive thanks to Jon at System X and Nicola Sherwin at GEM Distribution, without those two I never would’ve received my Wii and I probably would’ve killed myself with boredom. There’s nothing like phoning up one of your friends and asking him to search the planet for a console, just so you can shoot zombies from the comfort of your chair in Antarctica, with the rest of the base cheering you on (or laughing at Bryan trying to work the controller).

We liek bowling!

Dave’s technique … More camp than a row of tents

Wide sweeping actions from the Irish Pin Smasher

Praying wont help Hannah…

I’m off shopping, and Paddy tries to convince to me get some ‘fags and booze’

This is what happens when you leave your camera in the lounge…

The git.

A big shout out to past, present and future Antarctic Heroes this week. We’ve reached Midwinter and we’re still alive… yay! Its usually the time of year when I miss my friends the most, and especially one person in particular. Hope you’re all having fun and celebrating the equinox … you bunch of northern hemisphere softies.

Ohh, it’s a bit chilly outside…