Temperatures plummeted last night. Lately we’ve had temps around -20F, maybe down to -30F, but today it stayed solidly between -43F and -36F…right around that magic value where the two scales cross: -40F.
Later in the afternoon a thin fog crept over the station. The flat white can be so many things – crystal clear with bright, sharp blue skies and glittering snow, or a greyish white nothingness which we call being “inside the ping-pong ball” where you can’t tell where the ground meets the sky…it can be blowing 30 knots, scouring the earth with a gritty onslaught of ice, or at night of winter, when it’s the most peaceful place on earth; crystalline stars spattering the infinite abyss of sky.
A flagline to nowhere
The moon last night…huge and beautiful.
The berm under a winter moon
The Green House – Looking like a real Arctic Research Station here! …just missing the Tauntauns.
Bundled up for picture taking
I know for a while again
the health of self-forgetfulness,
looking out at the sky through
a notch in the valley side,
the black woods wintry on
the hills, small clouds at sunset
passing across. And I know
that this is one of the thresholds
between Earth and Heaven
from which even I may step
forth from my self and be free.
– Wendell Berry
AntarcticArctic 
Ooooh – thank you for this! I had to Google the poem to trace it to Wendell Berry, who I keep rediscovering and promise, yet again, not to forget. Such gorgeous, evocative pictures…
Haha thanks Pablo! A friend shared that with me a while ago…