A triptet for Thirty

house-party

I'm having a party tonight and you're all invited. I hope you can make it – it would be cool to see some new faces for an evening, a novelty you could say. Not that we're bored of the faces that are here... it would just be a change.

Anyway, I'm having a house-party, at my home, and I'd love you to be there. You can take the number thirty-two bus and ask the driver to drop you off at the corner... he normally doesn't mind as it's fairly friendly in these parts. Not like in the big smoke. There's plenty of room to crash if you want to stay for the weekend too.

I think we'll have pizza and I'm hoping for a chocolate cake ... I've dropped enough hints ("what would you like for your birthday, Rhian?"- "Chocolate cake") but you never can be sure about these things. I'm pretty sure that Scorpio will be there, and the moon, but I've unfortunately been seeing less and less of Orion lately. I miss him but know he's out there still, keeping watch over me. It's funny – the light seems to have returned surprisingly fast and I already miss the midday stars. I loved the peace of permanent night. Others on base are reborn though since midwinter has passed – it's like you can visibly see them re-enthuse with every extra photon of light we receive, each lengthened hour.

I remember the first day when the sky was so red and clear that I could see the Rumples again. I'd forgotten there was a horizon you could focus on... odd to have my immediate surroundings expand so suddenly. But in another way they have shrunk, back down to an earthly proportion: now I see distant buildings and coastline features where previously I saw stars and other galaxies. Don't forget there are other days when you can't see beyond your outstretched arm, but that happens year-round. It is all magical.

We went outside at 2pm today (for melt-tank and photos) and were amazed how light it was – you wouldn't even think of taking a torch on this weather. There was a light dusky blue in every direction and faint hint of red to the north. Not a stunning National Geographic type day but a lovely day, a normal day, a day when I appreciate how much I like being here. It's 3:30pm now and thankfully dark again. This is the Halley I love the best.

What makes me smile is realising that eight weeks ago, in exactly the same light conditions, I was commenting on how short the days were. Now it's the nights that are getting shorter. Soon we'll be living in day and night and that ordinariness of diurnal variation will return. And after that, the midnight sun and sunglasses 24-7. It's all happening very quickly, but maybe I'm just entering that time of year again when the changes are most noticeable. We still have four or five months before the first plane arrives and about eight before we get home, so I needn't worry that it'll go by too quickly. I just don't want to miss anything along the way.

aurora (written at 4am, very sleepy)

There is an impression that down here we see auroras, haloes and sundogs the whole time. So much so that we become almost passé about them - yet another aurora lighting my way to the lab, the antarctic street lamps.

Not so. I have now seen two or three stunners and a couple of cloud-like wisps during my time here. They almost always happen at night and some years more vividly than others. This year has not been prolific in its atmospheric light shows. We have an 'aurora wake-up list' on the wall of the mess room but until last night it has only been used once before.

This morning the night watchman woke me at 3am: "Rhian, there's a bit of an aurora outside, it's not amazing but it's something". When I got outside I was glad to have got up but he was right – it was cool but not heavenly.

To start with.

There was a big streak to the north stretching horizontally across the sky, with patches above it, as though dabbed onto the night canvas afterwards with a dry, short-bristled brush. To the south were also a few patchy clouds of light. As my eyes began to adjust, so too did the light. The patches became swirls, the clouds, spirals, before dissolving back into the night sky or metamorphosing into a duller version of its former self. The whole sky had these patches of light on a dark background. To orient myself, I located Scorpio and the southern cross, unusually far to the west (to my work-day eye) which shone out bright on the pitch black background. For a while I gazed at the stars, forgetting the aurora completely. It was a beautiful night even without these light clouds.

As my nose was getting colder and I started thinking of going in, the light show began to kick off. Patches expanded and flickered in the brightness like a pulsating dance of light in the sky, and as they pulse, the seem to draw together to an apex above our heads, the top of a cone from which luminescent light then starts to pour. It's dazzling. The whole sky gets filled with this smoke, pouring in between me and Scorpio, forming a veil of light around the atmosphere of the Earth. This is an earthly dance, like clouds: you can feel how much closer it is than the stars. The bursts to the south that were formerly patches above the CASLab have formed an S-swirl now and the stripe to the north grown to fill the whole sky, not linear any more, organic.The intensity is always varying, flickering, moving around the hovering light patches, adding brightness here, dissolving the veil there. The movement makes me laugh out loud. Dynamic. Alive. But very much an atmospheric phenomenon. A dance of wispish light in the sky.

birthday

I celebrated my thirtieth birthday last week, it was great. Thirty in Antarctica!

Thankyou for the emails, the good wishes, the cards and letters that missed the post, the presents unwrapped when I was still 28,- a guitar, a watch, a big birthday hug. I've been looking forward to this so much it's amazing that any celebration would suffice. But it was brilliant. I went out to the caboose on Tuesday night and stayed until Thursday morning. Different people joined me at different times and for a few blissful hours I was alone as well, in a caboose, in antarctica on my birthday. Who could ask for more?! If I could, I think I would live in a caboose forever. Maybe I'll have to find a caravan or boat when I get back. Maybe these places are all an essence of the same place. And to have an impromptu party out there was even better. I haven't been able to have people 'pop by' for years now and I suddenly realised how much I missed that. "Would you like to pop by for dinner?" I asked over the radio and that night Vanessa, Steph, Frank, Craig and Jeff all appeared at different times to share different parts of the evening's celebrations. Steph, bless him, even brought a bottle of bubbly and some glasses out there. So all that is missing now from this week of celebrations is a chocolate cake.. and that, I think, might be my special treat tonight.

Hope to see you later!

Love Rhian.

Posted by Rhian at 0:12 EST

Comments

hey Rhian!!

Awesome birthday :-)...lots and lots of good wishes for all the years to come though how it'll beat this one (of course only in terms of celebratory style), i don't know :D

do you think you'll be able to capture the aurora on camera?? I know there are loads of them on the web, but somehow having read about your adventures, it feels more real.

keeping the faith
renuka

Posted by: renuka at 4:40 EST, July 28, 2004