My preferred personal websites are as follows. I do not use my Blogger account anymore. Thank you!
Zak Staniszewski at Caltech
http://www.flickr.com/photos/zakatthepole
Tuesday, September 25, 2012
Tuesday, March 20, 2007
Lets move to Flickr
http://www.flickr.com/photos/zakatthepole/
Hey,
So updating blogs is hard especially when you use blogger and it rearranges your pictures and messes up the text that you've written. I think I will be using flickr for now and we'll see how that goes. It may be more of a photo album than a blog, but anything is better than what Ive been doing the last month(nothng.)
So go chec out http://www.flickr.com/photos/zakatthepole/
Hey,
So updating blogs is hard especially when you use blogger and it rearranges your pictures and messes up the text that you've written. I think I will be using flickr for now and we'll see how that goes. It may be more of a photo album than a blog, but anything is better than what Ive been doing the last month(nothng.)
So go chec out http://www.flickr.com/photos/zakatthepole/
Thursday, February 22, 2007
Winter is here...or The rest are gone

So it has been a very long time since I have posted, but I figured I would get going again now that I have had an evening off.
Since I last blogged we have had sort of going away party, finished handing off information to the witer crew and begun winterizing the telescope!

Here are some pictures of the last plane leaving.
Thursday, January 25, 2007
How the telescope works

The picture of the telescope to the left shows the big mirror and a large white "boom" jutting off to the side. This boom is what contains the secondary mirror and the camera. It is a warm room that actually docks onto the rest of the building so that we can work on the camera in a warm space. Light coming in from the sky will hit the big primary mirror and focus onto a spot on top of the boom where there is a window. The light enters the boom or receiver cabin through this window and then bounces off another mirror called the secondary. After hitting the secondary the light finally gets to the camera, or receiver.



We thought we would be at this point a yesterday instead of today, but after working from noon to six a.m. we decided to call it quits. Then today we got any remaining issues taken care of and we got all of this stuff put together. We decided to reward ourselves with our two favorite past times, foosball and a sauna. Here we are tonight relaxing and celebrating.
Note that Joaquin's beard turned into one great mustache. And, just in case you forgot what I look like I included a piture of me working on the camera part of the cryostat.


Tuesday, January 16, 2007
Here we call it the 10 meter

I have been at work for over a week here at the Pole. Mostly I have been in our lab space figuring out some issues with the compute stuff that I brought down with me. Soon I get to play with the big cryostat that I worked on all last year.
Here is a picture of when we first got off the plane and started walking toward the station.

Here is a group of us walking back to the station on a windy day. The temperature was only -10F, but the windchill has been up to -50 which really burns your cheeks. Especially if you are on a snow machine (south pole for snowmobile.)
The sun is still up all of the time here and it is quite bright. It has been very hard trying to take pictures when everything is completely white, but I finally got some pretty cool lighting by the telescope and snapped a few pictures. These pictures were actually taken at 10 p.m.
The part of the telescope that I helped design and build go in the "receiver cabin" which is the long white part of the telescope that juts out toward you and is below the mirror. The blue building to the right of the telescope is our lab which we share with the BICEP telescope people. Their telescope is on the far right of that building.
In three days I should have finished setting up my part of the telescope and will switch to working with the Berkeley guys again on the camera. The camera is the most technically difficult part of the telescope and I am supposed to be the guy who runs it after the big team leaves in a month.
Tuesday, January 9, 2007
Penguins on the coast

After arriving at the McMurdo, we were pretty tired, so we basically just ate and went to sleep. It is fairly unusual to have a full day off there, but we did because there are no planes to the South Pole on Sundays. So we got to go hiking and penguin watching on our day off.
Even though the base is located on the coast it is unusual for people to get to see as many penguins as we did. It is such a great experience seeing such a cool animal in their natural environment. The were just coming back from a swim and they decided to hang out by one of the stations best lookout spots.
Me and a few friends basically just sat down and watched them for the better part of an hour. The are so funny to watch, especially when they try to run fast or when they scoot on their bellies.
I hope you enjoy the pictures.


At the South Pole

The picture here is of me boarding a C17 on the way to the coast of Antarctica. It was quite an amazing plane ride because it is such a huge plane and it is way faster than the C130 that I flew on last time. A short 5 hours and we were already in McMurdo, the U.S. coastal station.

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