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This is a 360 degree Panorama of the Aumndsen-Scott South Pole Station, South Pole Antarctica.
This was taken on 7-28 during the afternoon at a temperature of around -90F with a windchill of -130F. The moon in the shot was only a slight crescent but is incredibly bright. When the moon is not around we are surrounded by total darkness, unless we happen to be graced by a beautiful aurora! I was lucky enough to catch this nice aurora along with the moon. The moon is so bright down here that it mutes out the sky, making shots of stars quite difficult. I have to move very fast while taking photos down here as my batteries freeze quite quickly and even my tripod freezes and no longer will rotate... Normally I keep a headlamp with me, but this time I had forgotten it while in a rush to capture the dissipating aurora, so had to shoot with whatever I had last set the camera at, and had to hope i didn't bump the rings since i wouldn't be able to see to change anything. Unfortunately while walking out to this point to take the photos I bumped the focal ring on the lens and ever so slightly causing the pictures to bit out of focus, but the pano was so beautiful I couldn't just toss it. These images were taken with a Canon EOS-1D Mark II at 16mm, f-stop 2.8 for 30 second exposures. *edit: You can see each of the constellations drawn in over the skyline here: http://www.gigapan.org/viewGigapan.php?id=31101 |
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http://GigapanMagazine.org vol 1 issue 2
Here you see Gavin Booth and Adam Wilton of the British South Pole Expedition 2008 as they arrive at the South Pole on December 27. Their 700 mile, unsupported ski journey from Hercules Inlet to the South Pole raised funds for the UK Antarctic Heritage Trust. As they cross the skiway they are greeted by Leah Street, one of our summer crew members who is also a volunteer tour guide. She will show them to the Geographic South Pole marker, the Ceremonial Pole and to the spot where they can pitch their tents. They will get a brief tour of the station and then wait in their camp for the plane that will take them back to the coast. As a benefit of the shooting and stitching process that created this panorama, you see them again, farther to the right, as they are escorted to the tourist area in front of the station. This panorama shows a wide view of the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station from the support buildings in the back (grid south) to the science buildings and Ice Cube project toward grid west and grid north. Please enjoy your tour as you explore the snapshots. The 61 images of this panorama were photographed with a Nikon D 80 and stitched with Autopano Pro. |
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Amundsen Scott Station is a cold, isolated community of scientists and support personel at the bottom of the world, the South Pole.
This is a peculiar place. Anywhere you look, you really are looking north. The station has an alpha entrance on one end and a zulu entrance on the other end. Both of them are, in reality, north entrances. Each year has only one sunrise and one sunset. From the Spring Equinox to the Fall Equinox, the sun never sets. The rest of the year the sun is below the horizon. It is cold here. Actually it is the highest, driest, coldest place that I have visited. You can see some of the research buildings in this panorama. There is also evidence of people at play. You can have fun looking around this photograph without worrying about frostbite. Believe it or not, this is the view from the window of my new office. Of course, it faces north. The 21 images of this panorama were photographed with a Nikon D80 and stitched with Autopano Pro. |
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http://GigapanMagazine.org vol 1 issue 2
Here is a panorama of the Amundsen Scott South Pole Station on the evening of December 31, 2008. The snowy landscape around the Pole is fairly quiet, as almost everyone is getting ready for the New Year’s Eve party in the gymnasium of the elevated station. We have not yet taken apart our Christmas tree, and the 2008 Pole marker remains in the snow where it was placed on January 1 of last year. Tomorrow during a 1pm ceremony, the Geographic Pole marker will change to its 2009 version, which was designed and made by the 2008 overwinter crew. The new marker will be set onto a post in a new hole in the ice that is located about 30 feet closer to the Dome. The American Flag and the sign with its brief written accounts of Amundsen's and Scott's arrival at the Pole will move along with it. The South Pole Station is situated on top of the largest sheet of ice on Planet Earth. The elevated station, the Dome, and everything else that you see here drift a little bit toward grid northwest each day. Once each year the location of the Geographic Pole is officially corrected to place it once again over the axis of rotation of the planet. In 2008, we use GPS to confirm the location of the Pole. All of this constant, predictable glacial motion and the annual marker movement create an interesting pastime for the crew and visitors to the station, especially for the folks who brought their own GPS’s to the Pole. In the summer of 1911-12, Roald Amundsen and Robert Falcon Scott had a much more difficult time confirming that they and their parties had in fact arrived at 90 degrees south latitude. On the left of the image you see the ice-carving efforts of some of the station crew. They have been working on these giant blocks for several weeks, and their art will be judged on January 4. The ambient temperature, which has now risen to approach 0 degrees Fahrenheit, makes ice carving a comfortable exercise, as long as the wind is fairly calm. It looks like they had some great ideas and that they have been busy at their task. Which carving would earn your vote? The 30 images of this panorama were photographed with a Nikon D 80 and stitched with Autopano Pro. Please enjoy The South Pole on New Year's Eve 2008. |
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http://GigapanMagazine.org vol 1 issue 2
Here we see a nice collection of vehicles that you could find at the South Pole on a typical summer day. I captured this panorama on the walk back to the elevated station from the Twin Otter that is sitting in the fuel pit. They had just completed the end-of-summer aerial photo survey of the area. On that mission, three photographers recorded the snow drift patterns around the station. The image contains quite a few of the vehicles that we use here. Soon the extreme cold of the South Pole winter will put most of these machines safely out of service until the sun reappears and warms everything up next summer. Sleds, cranes, LMC's, snowmobiles, pistenbullies and the like are all resident vehicles under the care of the Vehicle Maintenance Shop. The guys who work in the VMF are experts in what extreme cold does to metal, rubber and batteries. The VMF crew does a great job keeping us mobile despite the cold weather and the supply difficulties that are inherent to working in an outpost at the bottom of the planet. The last plane of the summer of 2008-09, which was an LC-130 like the one in this image, tipped its wings into the low afternoon sun on February 16. The first plane to fly to Pole in mid-October will likely be one of Kenn Borek’s Baslers which will come from Canada, cross North and South America, stop over at Rothera Research Station on the Antarctic Peninsula and then continue on to the Pole. Kenn Borek's Twin Otters and other Baslers will follow soon afterward. In early November, when the temperature rises above -50 degrees Fahrenheit, the LC-130's flown by the 109th Airlift Wing of the New York Air National Guard will also return to the Pole. Admiral Richard E. Byrd flew the first plane over the South Pole on November 29, 1929. Rear Admiral George Dufek landed the first plane here on October 31, 1956, and the construction of Old Pole began soon afterward. Planes have been flying supplies here since 1956, and air transportation has made research at this remote outpost possible. In the future, the planes will continue, but we will also be using overland traverses to move some of the cargo. This will be very nice when scientific payloads are too large to fit into the hold of an LC-130. Instead of hours needed for a plane to fly from the coast, the traverses take a month or more to get here and another month to return to McMurdo, but land travel will be much less expensive. This image also shows the summer housing and summer work shops. It gives a nice peek at the area behind the elevated station. The 56 images of this panorama were photographed with a Nikon D80 and stitched with Autopano Pro. |
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http://GigapanMagazine.org vol 1 issue 2
Contributor: Cap'n Jack Sharp The vehicles at the South Pole require a lot of tender loving care. It's cold outside. Steel becomes brittle. Oil doesn't flow and everything gets encased with ice. Winter is fast approaching. Most of the vehicles that we use here now are on tracks or skies. Rubber tires just won't do in these temperatures. The ground is an uneven maze of white drifts that are sculpted and redistributed daily by wind-blown snow and ice. Even the tracked dozers and snowmobiles can get bogged down in sugary snow or a large drift. The heavy equipment shop is usually busy completing preventative maintenance to keep the vehicles running and repairing broken machines that have not fared well in the cold. Broken parts can become an insurmountable issue when replacements are needed and not available until the planes start flying again. You can see a variety of motor vehicles in here today. Have a look around to discover what's making tracks at the South Pole as sunset approaches. The 15 images of this panorama were photographed with a Nikon D80 and stitched with Autopano Pro. |
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http://GigapanMagazine.org vol 1 issue 2
Contributors: Katy Jensen and Nathan Greenland So, here we are in the arches between the elevated station and the Dome. Within the arches you find the Facilities, Engineering, Maintenance and Construction (FEMC) shops, the power plant, and massive areas for storing building supplies, spare parts and fuel. The nearby ice tunnels run under the surface near the arches, and they connect the station and the arches to a number of outlying structures. This cavernous room with the monumental steel doors is in the logistics facility, which is commonly called the LO. It is designed for receiving incoming cargo. Most of the new materials arriving at the Pole on next summer’s planes and on the traverse will come straight here. In the coming years we hope to also move most of our storage off the berms and into these well-lit and wind-resistant arches. Once through these doors, the cargo will be sorted, inventoried and put in its proper place. It will be a major improvement in inventory control. The last plane of summer left here a month ago, and there will be no more flights until mid-October at the earliest, and so this room has been fairly quiet lately. At least there haven't been many people down here. We don't get a lot of snowfall at the Pole, but with temperatures that never get much above 0 degrees Fahrenheit, the snow that does fall doesn't melt. We are approaching winter, and with recent winds of up to 30 knots, the persistent snow is swirling just above the ground in gossamer, white rivulets. The wandering snow seems always to be looking for a way inside, and it has found a convenient inward route through a gap in the LO doors. Ours is a very light, very fine, powdery snow, at least on the surface. Easily picked up and put outside on the blade of a shovel, much of it quickly returns to us on the edge of the wind. A quarter inch gap in a doorway can create a deep drift that extends far into a room. As we work at tightening up the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station for the winter, this room looks like a good place to do some snow shoveling and an equally good place for creating a hindrance to the incoming snow. And so we see a doc with a shovel moving the snow outside where it belongs, and we see the carpenters at work tightening up the gap the doors. Have a look around this place. Even if it is -55 degrees Fahrenheit in the LO today, and the wind is howling mightily beyond the doors, you probably won't even have to dust the snow off your keyboard when you are done. The 23 images of this panorama where photographed with a Nikon D80 and stitched with Autopano Pro. |
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http://GigapanMagazine.org vol 1 issue 2
Contributors: Camille Parisel and Erik Verhagen It is the day before sunset at the South Pole. IceCube Drill Camp is deserted and cold. During the summers of 2004 to 2008, hundreds of scientists and ice drillers were at the South Pole for this massive project. Their multiyear goal is to complete a huge neutrino detector under the Antarctic ice. When they are done, they will have drilled 80 holes and placed in each of them a string of 60 light-detecting modules (DOM’s). The 4800 DOM's will be a single 1 cubic kilometer telescope in the clear ice deep beneath the South Pole. We are approaching winter 2009. The drills have stopped. Nobody is deploying DOM’s and most of the IceCube crew has left. Today only 2 IceCubers remain at the South Pole. They will stay here through the winter, working on the computers as they gather data from flashes of light passing through the ice. If you were here at the South Pole this summer, you might be wondering about the location and the size of the drill camp. It has been moved a little towards the northwest, and some of the buildings, most noticeably the TOS, and the reels of hose and wire have been moved to winter storage on the berms. Once the sun returns, the buildings and materials will be dragged back to the drill camp and everything will be in place to start a new drilling season by December. When you look at this icy landscape, notice the position of the sun in the sky. Tomorrow the sun will sink below the horizon and the South Pole will fall into the deepening twilight, waiting for the darkness of winter to begin. The 62 images of this panorama were photographed with a Nikon D80 and stitched with Autopano Pro. |
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The North Pole. I suppose that the best way to think of the North Pole is to consider a single point on the sea bed under the Arctic Ocean where all the Earth's lines of longitude converge. It is the one point in the Northern Hemisphere around which our planet turns, and its position now is marked by a titanium flag that was recently placed on the ocean floor by the Russian Federation.
Above the North Pole and that Russian flag we have 4261 meters of salt water and a layer of sea ice that varies in thickness from 1 to 3 meters depending on the time of year and the temperatures of the air above it and the water beneath it. The Arctic ice cap moves relative to the sea floor. The moving ice provides no permanent foundation for a research station of even a camera or a flag. The ice that was on the ocean’s surface above the North Pole when I was there on July 25, 2008 has since moved on to somewhere south. Indeed, this ice had shifted several miles before we left the vicinity of the North Pole later in the day on the 25 of July. Early polar explorers had a difficult time reaching the North Pole in part because of the moving target. The ice could move faster than they could move. Expeditions lasted years as they wandered on the shifting pack ice. The location of the Pole had to be calculated using the height of the sun, and it had to confirmed mathematically many times as the explorers approached 90 degrees North. When explorers stopped for their calculations, the ice still moved them along so that their calculated position would no longer be correct. Our journey took only a few days, and confirmation of our arrival at the North Pole required no sextant or calculator. We arrived at the Pole on an ice breaker, and our position at 90 degrees North Latitude was confirmed by GPS. There is a prediction that global warming will melt the north polar ice during this century. There was even a suggestion that the Pole might thaw this summer, which was not true at the end of July. You can see other panoramas from our Polar expedition on the gigapan.org web site. |
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http://GigapanMagazine.org
vol 1 issue 2 Contributors: W. Lance Roth, Kristina Shiroma and Katy Jensen Here is the interior of the Balloon Inflation Facility, (BIF) as we prepare to launch dual plastic balloons. We are using plastic today because the latex balloons break prematurely in the cold temperatures of an Antarctic winter. The plastic balloons are able to carry their payloads high enough to gather the data that we need. The payloads are radiosondes that are carried by the balloons to altitudes of 10,000-11,000 meters above sea level. There they collect data such as humidity, temperature, pressure, wind direction and wind speed, and they send the information down to a radio receiver at the Pole. In the winter months, information from South Pole’s daily weather balloons is sent back to the United States to be used in forecasting weather worldwide. In the summer, the meteorologists launch balloons twice daily to collect the same type of weather information to support the planes flying over Antarctica as well as provide information for worldwide weather forecasting. During the summer you would see round, white latex weather balloons flying above the South Pole. There are two payloads today. In addition to the meteorologist’s radiosonde, the balloons will carry a separate sonde for the scientists from the South Pole’s Atmospheric Research Observatory (ARO). They send up their weekly balloons to measure ozone levels in the stratosphere. Their sondes collect and transmit data that will be used to study changes in the ozone hole which develops over the South Pole with the return of the sun each year. As September and sunrise approach, ARO will also be increasing the frequency of their balloon launches. There are a few hints in this photograph that tell you that you are somewhere very cold. Have a look around and see what you can find. The 24 images of this panorama were photographed with a Nikon D80 and stitched with Autopano Pro. |