Recovery

With ANITA down for over a week we still haven't got out to recover the gondola.  At the moment the plan is for myself & Brian from ANITA to go with Corey (a CSBF rigger) out to Siple Dome, about 100 miles from the crash site, for 3 days.  From there we'll take daily trips out to the payload to break it down for sending back to McMurdo.  But with bad weather out at Siple Dome we've just been getting postponed!

Yesterday with the trip to Siple Dome cancelled we managed to get a different flight arranged to Taylor Dome to recover pulsing equipment that was used to send RF signals during flight.  This turned out to be a great boondoggle, the skies were pretty clear and Taylor Dome is the other side of the Royal Society Range, so our little twin otter aircraft, flying pretty low, gave us fantastic views of the mountain range, some of the islands and views over the ice shelf.  I'll post these in good time.... 

Meanwhile, on the ground the views were getting pretty spectacular.  I didn't get any photos of it, but yesterday on the way out to the airfield we saw some amazing shaped clouds over the horizon.  The wavelike shapes we saw are apparently Kelvin-Helmholtz clouds, caused by shear between two layers of fluids.  They didn't look quite as impressive as the one below, but were still pretty weird.

Then, today, we saw a mirage over towards the ice shelf horizon and White Island that stretches the horizon vertically.  I've seen a few of these during my stay, when there is very little wind and the Sun heats the air except for a band close to ground level creating thermal inversion layers.  The pictures below, taken by Peter, shows the effect, the one today stretched 90 degrees around the horizon and was pretty spectacular.

Still no penguins though.  Boo.