Back to the lab

Yesterday the day shift came down from the mountain and told us it was all cloudy and windy again, and that we would probably not want to go up. It was Bingo night at the station so although I was sad for the prospects of no data, I was kind of excited for games. And then we looked outside and there was a moon and there was Venus and there were stars and it wasn't cloudy at all by the time we wanted to go! Our rough cutoff for wind is 20 knots, because any more than that and the snow on the roof all blows into the hatch and onto the telescope. Because the winds were only around 10 knots, gusting higher, and seeming to die down, we decided to chance going up. Bernard is an EC employee, which is government, so unlike grad students he actually has to think about what day of the week it is and whether people will be angry with him for working on a weekend and then not getting any data. We went up anyways, and what a good idea that turned out to bee - we got about 8 hours of crystal clear data again!