Tonight I feel as if I earned some cred as a Systems Administrator. We had a brownout around 9 PM this evening - nothing very noticeable to the eye, but two five second periods where we dropped 25 volts from the 440 volt station feed. It seems a small amount but that little change can play hell with electrical equipment.

The next several hours was spent by facilities engineering, science techs, and IT running around checking to see what equipment was affected and, if affected, to what degree. Personally, I had about ten servers lose power in a distant building due to reasons unknown (they are supposed to be connected to UPS systems to prevent that).

Most everything we have can be accessed remotely, so I spent two hours doing so, checking services, restarting servers, looking at error logs to see if anything else was affected, etc. Most everything was fine. Our redundant domain controller was not.

A domain controller (for the non-techies) is an essential part of the computer network infrastructure in a large corporate environment. It doles out the rules that allow various computers and network-capable devices to talk to each other and the outside world. If you lose access to your domain controllers, your network becomes very unhappy very quickly. We run two here for the purpose of redundancy.

My backup domain controller had decided to power down during the brownout and I could not contact it via remote services. Because of its necessity, I had a late night trip in store, all to push a button.

The building that the domain controller is in, the RF (Radio Frequency) shack, is about a mile from station, on the ‘edge of the world’. It’s the building that houses all of the control systems for our satellite connections, the network components to communicate with the satellites, and our backup computer systems. So, off I went to make an 11 PM trip to the RF building. I bundled up. It was -70F with a -100F windchill.

The walk was eerie in the best of ways. Most everyone on station was asleep and no equipment was running. The only sounds were the thrum (soon distant) of the power plant and the wind. When I stopped, letting the crunch, crunch, crunch of my walk in the snow wind down, it was as quiet as I’ve heard here yet.

The stars, newly arriving in our final days of twilight, are incredibly brilliant here. More so when you are on the edge of the world, so to speak, with the nearest manned station 800 miles distant. Out past the buildings, on the edge of the horizon, the sky holds great power. Looking up, smiling, I could only imagine the sheer magnitude of awe I will carry when the Southern Lights begin.

Stateside, winter nights after a fresh snow are my favorite times to wander. Whether in a city or in the woods, sounds are somehow both muted and amplified, the light heavy - as if the entire world has been draped in a thick blanket. It creates moments that are easy to share and easy to lose oneself in, easy to find warmth in a smile or the glow of a window.

Here, that window is covered (to protect light-sensitive science projects), that smile frozen (covered up by two layers of neck gaiters), that blanket stretched over an entire continent, but the warmth is still present. We just look around in a few different places to find it.

Tonight, I looked up.