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Astronomers Find the Calmest Place On Earth
The Narrative Fallacy writes "Live Science reports that astronomers in search of the perfect site to take pictures of the heavens have combined data from satellites, ground stations and climate models in a study to assess the many factors that affect image quality — cloud cover, temperature, sky-brightness, water vapor, wind speeds and atmospheric turbulence. They have pinpointed the coldest, driest, calmest place on earth, known simply as Ridge A, 13,297 feet high on the Antarctic Plateau. 'It's so calm that there's almost no wind or weather there at all,' says study leader Will Saunders, of the Anglo-Australian Observatory. 'The astronomical images taken at Ridge A should be at least three times sharper than at the best sites currently used by astronomers.' Located within the Australian Antarctic Territory, the site is 89 miles from the PLATO (PLATeau Observatory) international robotic observatory. The new site would be superior to the best existing observatories on high mountain tops in Hawaii and Chile, Saunders says. 'Because the sky there is so much darker and drier, it means that a modestly-sized telescope would be as powerful as the largest telescopes anywhere else on earth.'"
Located within the Australian Antarctic Territory
Note that the USA, Russia, China, and many other countries do not recognize this territory as being in any way Australian.
Katabatic winds are caused by cooling air moving downhill, so it seems to me that they would be the greatest around the shoreline and non-existent at the center.
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Fortunately, it's on a mountain ridge. The smog/fog will go....down.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
The Antarctic gate was in storage after being retreived from McMurdo.
The original Giza gate was in use at SGC until it was beamed up into Thor's ship before it crashed into the pacific.
Then the A-Gate became the primary because the G-Gate was thought lost in the Pacific, but it was infact retrieved by the Russians and they ran their own gate program.
It was the A-Gate that was destroyed by Anubis. The G-gate was then purchased back from the Russians after they figured out that Anubis's gate-blower-upper-thingy was destroyed.
Yes, I'm a Gate Geek.
Since it's so calm, it'll just accumulate, then condense on the cold optics. Have fun seeing when your mirror's frosted over with an inch of rime.
Presumably you put the generator a sufficient distance away to minimize any disturbance to the optics, or to seeing quality. The area gets almost no precipitation and probably no animal life, so anything you lay on the ground will remain undisturbed. In this sense it seems like an ideal place to run an automated telescope, if you can get past the somewhat difficult access issue.
Regarding the "condensing on the optics" problem, astronomers have hundreds of years of experience dealing with this issue. The simplest approach is to slightly warm the optics using resistive heaters. As long as the optics are slightly warmer than the surroundings, any water in the air will condense somewhere else. You don't want too much heating, since then you form convective air currents above the mirror that harm the seeing conditions. However with some reasonably accurate temperature sensors and a feedback controller, the condensation problem is straightforward to solve.