We're happy to announce that Octopart will have a booth at Maker Faire Bay Area May 3-4. We had a blast last summer at Maker Faire Austin and we'll be releasing a slew of new features then. Come say hi to us at our booth!

In other news, we've been busy with bugfixes lately - sorting by lowest price now works as you would expect. If you're looking for the most economical 2n3904 transistor, or bnc tee, look no further.

It's Valentine's Day and here at Octopart we know that our users are itching to get their loved ones an electronic component to accompany that candlelight dinner.

Thinking of giving that special someone a red led made by Avago? Pick from these.

Wouldn't a really large order of RJ-45 connectors be romantic?

Or maybe a transistor from Texas Instruments starting with your special partnumber, 2N1, would add that sentimental touch?

You've been in need of these filters for a long time, and we're extremely happy to release them today, as our Valentine's Day present to you.

As always, please e-mail us with comments, bug-reports and suggestions. And stay tuned, this is just the beginning.

The geographic South Pole is located in the center of Antarctica, several hundred miles away from the nearest coast. It sits on top of 3km of ice and the warmest temperature ever recorded is -13.6 °C. Precisely because of its remoteness and unique weather, it is a great place to do scientific research.

Despite all the snow at the South Pole, it's actually a desert with almost no precipitation. Snow gets blown in by storms and it piles up year after year. All equipment at the South Pole has to get dug out often and, of course, all stationary buildings eventually get completely covered. The first American station built in the 1950's is completely buried as is a C-130 which crashed just short of the runway in 1970. One of the nicer side benefits of the snow are circular rainbows called "sun dogs". The rainbows are caused by sun light refracting off ice crystals in the air as seen in the picture above.

There have been three separate stations built at the South Pole since 1957. The newest station (Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station) which was just completed in 2003, is built on adjustable stilts to accomodate the rising snow. It houses about 200 scientists, construction workers and support staff in the summer and about 90 in the winter (people who "winter-over" stay at the South Pole from February to November and cannot leave for the entirety of the dark winter because it is too cold to land planes safely). The station has all modern amenities including a full court basketball court, but most work is still done outdoors. From construction work to the deployment of scientific instruments, most people spend a good part of their days working outside at -20 °C.

The combination of altitude (9,306 ft.) and dryness makes the South Pole a perfect place for observing the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMB). The CMB is an extremeley weak microwave signal which was produced 300,000 years after the birth of the Universe and which essentially provides a snap shot of the universe at that time. It has been measured to have a black body spectrum in all directions which means that at some point in the early Universe, all matter was in close proximity - physical proof of a Big Bang. In addition to using CMB measurements to test fundamental physical theories about the origin of the Universe, physicists are currently using the 10m South Pole Telescope to count galaxy clusters by looking at small local variations in the CMB.

There are many other experiments at the Soth Pole in addition to the South Pole Telescope. The largest experiment is the IceCube Neutrino Observatory. IceCube uses the 3km deep ice sheet beneath the South Pole to track galactic neutrinos which have traveled through the earth from the Northern Hemisphere. The ice sheet underneath the South Pole was formed by packed snow accumulating over the course of 100,000 years and it is the clearest ice on the planet. To detect neutrino events, IceCube is embedding thousands of photon detectors in the ice. Each detector can see light from an event hundreds of meters away and the goal is to instrument 1km^3 of ice. In order to instrument the ice, the IceCube construction team first has to drill a hole which is 1m in diameter and 3km long. This is done by heating water to near boiling and using a high pressure nozzle as a drill head. The process of "melting" a constant diameter hole straight down requires the use of complicated models and a sophisticated feedback loop fed by many nozzle sensors. Of course, this is complicated by the fact that all this work is done at the South Pole where energy (and therefore water) is hard to come by and weather beaten equipment fails often. Each hole takes 5000 gallons of fuel over the course of 18 hours to drill.

In the next (and last) post I'll write more about IceCube's detector modules and the remote calibration lasers that I worked on.

Every austral summer (November-March) several thousand people travel though Antarctica on behalf of the United States Antarctic Program. The United States maintains three permanent bases on the continent (McMurdo, Palmer, South Pole Station) and also supports many other field camps for the duration of the summer. Although the only purpose of the US presence in Antarctica is scientific, every aspect of life on Antarctica has to be imported which means the logistics are equivalent to a large military operation in the harshest weather on earth.

Travel to Antarctica begins in New Zealand. There, in warm paradise, amidst the kiwis and other flightless birds, the US government issues you extreme weather gear from thick socks and underwear to boots and snow goggles. Everybody is given a bright red jacket so that people can be easily identified against the whiteness of Antarctica. Because of Antarctic logistics, all travel in Antarctica is handled by the US Air Force. Just recently, the Air Force started using C-17 jets to fly from New Zealand to McMurdo Station which has cut the flight time from 9 hours in a propeller driven C-130 to 5 hours. Weather delays are frequent though and it is a badge of honor to fly all the way to Antarctica only to "boomerang" back because of an unexpected storm. Of course, once you are beyond the point of no return, you are beyond the point of no return.

McMurdo Station is located on the coast of Antarctica and is reachable by icebreaker. It is the place where Robert F. Scott established his base camp and the hut he built is still there filled with one hundred year old cocoa tins and hanging seal skins. Because of the relative ease of reaching McMurdo it has become the central base for the US and most scientific missions are supported from here. Compared to other bases and field camps, there is quite a bit of wild life in McMurdo. Skuas (the seagulls of Antarctica) and seals are relatively common but penguins are very rare. If you want to make a weather hardened Antarctic veteran angry, ask him how many times he's seen a penguin. Of course, the day after I left McMurdo, the penguins showed up. Luckily, some of my friends were traveling there and took pictures so I could share in their joy. Maybe it's for the best that I wasn't in McMurdo for the penguins. If you touch a penguin the US Antarctic Program bans you for life and it's pretty hard to resist giving them a little poke.

Most visitors to McMurdo are transients on their way to somewhere else. I stayed there for several days on my way to and from the South Pole. Unlike McMurdo, which is reachable by icebreaker and can go above freezing in the summer, the South Pole is a frozen desert sitting on 3km of ice and has never recorded a temperature above -13 celcius. The Air Force uses their work horse cargo plane, a ski-fitted C-130, to fly almost all personel and equipment to the pole (recently they did the 900 mile journey by land to prove the feasibility). In the next post I'll write about the South Pole.