Less than a week after its inauguration on January 17, 2019, the prototype Schwarzschild-Couder telescope (pSCT), a telescope design proposed for the Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA), successfully detected its first Cherenkov light on January 23 at the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory in Arizona. A dual-mirrored medium-sized telescope, the SCT is proposed to cover the middle of CTA’s energy range (80 GeV–50 TeV).
The sun is getting lower and lower, and the folks at the South Pole station continue to get everything ready for winter. The winds were strong last week, on some days making it hard to distinguish ground from sky. Caption
This past weekend, the first members of the new Multimessenger Diversity Network (MDN) met at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, hosted by the Wisconsin IceCube Particle Astrophysics Center. The MDN foundational members are LIGO, VERITAS, and LSST observatories together with IceCube.
The sun is still out at the South Pole, but it’s getting low in the sky (they have one loooong sunset down there). And it’s cold as usual—a quick run around the block leaves one looking a little frosty.
Last week, with the IceCube detector behaving well, winterovers Benjamin and Kathrin had a bit more time for extracurriculars. They enjoyed a live webcast with a classroom in Italy and tried their hand at mastering the unicycle.
Tradition is strong at the South Pole, and last week was validation of that. After the final plane departed with the remaining summer personnel, the winterovering station crew all gathered in the gym for the traditional screening of all three versions of “The Thing.” They engage in this marathon viewing each year.
