South Pole
In midsummer, as the sun reaches its maximum elevation of about 23.5 degrees, high temperatures at the South Pole in January average at . As the six-month "day" wears on and the sun gets lower, temperatures drop as well: they reach around sunset (late March) and sunrise (late September). In midwinter, the average temperature remains steady at around . The highest temperature ever recorded at the Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station was on Christmas Day, 2011, and the lowest was on June 23, 1982 (for comparison, the lowest temperature directly recorded anywhere on earth was at Vostok Station on July 21, 1983, though was measured indirectly by satellite in East Antarctica between Dome A and Dome F in August 2010). Mean annual temperature at the South Pole is -49.3 °C (-56.7 °F).
Robert Schwarz (astrophysicist)
Robert Schwarz is an astrophysicist who is () now beginning his 14th winter at the Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station--the 8th winter in a row. This is the most winters that anyone has ever spent at the South Pole, and the most that anyone has ever spent in a row. An avid photographer of the pole, many news organizations used his photographs in their coverage of the medical evacuation flights from the south pole in June, 2016.
Schwarz, a native of Munich, Germany, told "The Antarctic Sun" that he first became interested in astronomy on a Boy Scout field trip to the island volcano of Stromboli, near Sicily. “It was an absolutely amazing star sky,” Schwarz said. “That’s how I got hooked on that. I wanted to know more about it.” He holds an undergraduate degree in chemistry, math and physics, as well as a master's degree in physics from the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. While a graduate student at the Max Planck Institute for Physics, he saw a job posting to spend the winter of 1996-1997 working at the South Pole, and has returned for many winter seasons to work on a variety of science experiments at the Pole. He applied to the European Space Agency to become an astronaut, and has expressed interest in traveling to Mars. In his spare time at the pole, he teaches an introduction to astronomy class to other winter-overs. When not at the south pole, he visits his family in Germany and goes sailing near New Zealand.