Pegasus

Well, I just passed the six month mark in my season. Two more months to go! It has been rapidly getting lighter out-- the first sunrise will be in nine days. The activity level has really been ramping up, too. Have to get all the radios and wireless data networks up for the massive influx of people. Our population is going to go from 153, to over 500 over a couple of days. There is a lot of anticipation of the freshies that are coming down, but a considerable amount of dread, too. Lots of tanned and talkative tourists about to descend on us poor, pale, trembling wretches.

A lot of my work over the last few days has been getting the Pegasus airfield up and running. Several of the buildings there have wireless internet, which is all removed over the winter when the runway is disassembled and stored. This picture of me was taken by coworker Dave Benson who was helping me fix an antenna mast that had snapped off when the building was moved from the storage berm to be repositioned.

We've been having killer nacreous clouds lately. They are irridescent, pearly stratospheric ice clouds that are only seen near the poles. I haven't been able to get any good pics yet, but I'll try. To me, the PSCs are quite a bit more spectacular than the auroras. On a good day, the whole sky looks like it's on fire. It looks a lot like mother of pearl, or abalone shell, except the colors are bright orange, pink, blue and white. The picture of Mac Town was taken about 11 AM from the Pegasus shortcut road, about a mile out. The huge hulk you see behind the town is Mt Erebus, a 12,000 foot active volcano. It's hard to spot in that pic, but there is a plume of smoking coming out of the top.