Wednesday, October 17, 2012

More on the Planetarium camera system

The folks who make the camera that we'll use to film planetarium content down at the South Pole this season is RED, the same folks who make the cameras for filming The Hobbit. We'll have a big fisheye lens on it though for >180 degree views that will map onto the planetarium screen. Cool stuff.

So, will the ARA drilling join the other projects filmed with the RED camera system? Yes, it will! We're looking to get good footage of the ARA drilling, deployment, and Antarctic shots of the South Pole Station, IceCube Laboratory, and normal Pole operations.

Sunday, October 7, 2012

Education and outreach from the South Pole

Hello friends, family, and random assorted peoples...

Am putting together the start of a plan for my education and outreach activities while I'm at the South Pole this season working on ARA. Will be at Pole from about 5 December until about 10 January, and would love to work with any and all school programs or other outreach activities.

What I'm currently planning:

1. Will be one of the folks trained on the Milwaukee Planetarium's fisheye video camera, so we'll get some footage of ARA, and the general Antarctic program efforts for that medium.

2. Will be writing to this blog. In past years, have answered questions from my daughters' and other school classes. Hope to do that again, so if there is a science (or possibly other interested class, perhaps geography?) class that would like to interact via questions and answers (or possibly also via a voice or video conference), do let me know so we can work out the  details.

3. If anyone, or a class, or whatever, would like a postcard postmarked from the South Pole, let me know in email.

4. Is there something you'd like to have flown or worn at the South Pole? School flags, club t-shirts, or the like are easy enough. Send me an email and we can figure out the details.

Other ideas? Happy to hear about them and see if we can make it work out in some sensible way. Shipping deadlines and scheduling of conference call deadlines are coming up soon (in October or very early November at the latest).