Extreme Wavefront Control Lab

Well that was exciting.

The last three of us are on our way back to Tucson. We love being at LCO, but after spending most of two months there it’s a great feeling to be going home.

In case you missed it, MagAO-X works! We can close the loop on sky with real starlight propagating through real turbulence. Laird, Olivier, and I first started developing the concept of MagAO-X in early 2015, and many people have contributed along the way. I’d like to especially acknowledge the awesome contributions of the “army of grad students” [not my words] that really made MagAO-X come together over the last 4 years. Great job team.

We are all super thrilled to finally see our hard work pay off. Here’s to many more successful MagAO-X runs at LCO!

To my knowledge the tradition has not yet been upheld on this run. So here it is.

Our driver made sure to point out the locals on the way down.

La Serena looks, to us passers-though, like it’s more or less normal. That may not be 100% true, but it’s nice to see some familiar characters.

Way back in 2012 an intrepid, fresh-faced crew of AOistas stopped at the SCL Holiday Inn for Pisco Sours after a long run at LCO. Laird, Alex, and I recreated that photo at the very same table. A few things have changed (though I still have never seen a pirate mine).

The big caveat is that the run isn’t quite over, at least not for me. MagAO-X itself isn’t on the way yet, but will be following us in the next week or so. I won’t be able to completely relax until it’s safely back the in lab at Steward Observatory. Hopefully fewer delays than the trip down, and we’ll be back to work after the New Year.

Well it has been a long, exciting, and successful run for MagAO-X first light, but now it is time to say goodbye to LCO (until next time). We successfully closed the loop on-sky with MagAO-X and took plenty of data to take home with us, and now we are all packed and ready to ship MagAO-X back home! We expect MagAO-X to arrive in Tucson by January, so we will have a few months to work on the instrument before we return to LCO in May 2020.

Today, we finished boxing up MagAO-X and the electronics rack. We cleaned and organized the clean room and made sure all of our MagAO-X tools and equipment were stored safely, and then we were done! We finished just in time for a nice, relaxing dinner and now we only have our clothes to pack. Here are some pictures from today:

After lunch, we spotted a family of guanacos! There seemed to be a mother, father, and two children in the family. I was quite pleased to see guanacos two days in a row after not seeing them the entire time I’ve been in Chile.

We headed up the hill after lunch to pack up the electronic rack.

We were glad to finally see the instrument safely packed up and ready to go. The mechanics did a great job, so thanks to them!

We finished cleaning up the clean room and put all of our stuff away. Now the clean room looks super clean!

• 

• 

Now we are ready to go home. It’s been a great run LCO, we will miss you (the food). But no matter where we go, there is almost no place like home for the holidays.

Yesterday, after our last night on-sky, we began moving the instrument off of the telescope to get it ready to ship back home to Tucson. This also meant that we had to shift back to a day schedule, so Laird and I woke up from a short nap to begin the move at 8:00 am while Jared, Joseph, and Kyle went to bed. The days get a bit mixed up when switching between night and day schedules, so today’s blog post will include events from yesterday and today.

We began building the cart around MagAO-X on the Nasmyth platform on the morning of day 10.

We lifted the cart up to the instrument using the crane and bolted it to the instrument. Then, we lifted up the instrument off of its legs and rolled the legs away.

Then, we rolled the instrument into the Auxiliary building.

To ensure that MagAO-X is installed on the telescope exactly the same way in May 2020, we had the mechanics match-drill four of the table leg plates to the Nasmyth platform. This will help us find the exact alignment position of MagAO-X in the future, to make the alignment process faster and easier.

• 

• 

• 

Laird and I wrapped up the instrument in saran-wrap and emergency blankets for the move from the telescope to the clean room (the emergency blankets are to protect the instrument from excessive heat exposure from the sun).

After waiting for several hours for the Isuzu truck, we finally moved everything to the clean room.

Finally, Laird and I crashed for the night and our first attempt to stay on a day schedule was somewhat successful.

Today, we woke up early for breakfast and said farewell to Kyle, Joseph, and Olivier as they left on the 8:00 am shuttle.

Then Jared, Laird and I headed up to the clean room to pack up the optics and make sure that everything was ready for shipping. When the mechanics arrived, we packed up MagAO-X!

And after the 3 total weeks I’ve spent at Las Campanas Observatory hearing about “Gary the Guanaco,” I finally got to witness the true majesty of this creature up close and personal today. Gary gave me just enough time to take all the pictures I wanted, even posing for me while I was at it.

There is but one day left for the MagAO-X team until we finally head home for the holidays. All we have to do is pack up the electronics rack and do some final organizing, so things are looking good!

Today’s song of the day will be Chris Hadfield’s “Space Oddity,” the first music video ever recorded in space. If you haven’t seen it yet, you should check it out!

Last night was our fourth on-sky night. It also ran right in to our instrument removal/moving day. So, we went from taking a nice long dataset of beta Pictoris directly into taking off cables and connectors for our electronics. I’m still awake, despite feeling like someone dropped a truck on me, so I might as well ensure the blog gets done. Our dozens of readers are no doubt itching to hear about MagAO-X’s performance on its final on-sky night of 2019B.

I’m happy to report things went pretty smoothly! We observed Trapezium, a set of bright and well studied stars that will give us our astrometric solution (by knowing where they are, we can figure out how far apart and what orientation other stuff is). We observed beta Pictoris for a few hours on either side of transit, obtaining a vAPP + ADI dataset. We started off by optimizing our image quality and took Strehl measurements in a few different filters, resulting in some exceptionally sharp z’ band images of HD 9053:

Kyle worked on focal plane wavefront sensing, following the work of XWCL alumna Dr. Kelsey Miller (now at Leiden Observatory). The basic idea is using a little bit of the star light at the focal plane of your science camera to provide information on the real, honest-to-god wavefront error as experienced by the starlight at all optics downstream of the main wavefront sensor and correcting deformable mirror. In other words, yet another way of pushing light back where it belongs to make the sharpest possible images.

In unadaptive optics news, we captured Sirius A and B on our acquisition camera. Just for fun. Here they are:

Laird and Alex worked the first half of the night, but went to bed earlier so they could supervise the crane maneuvers to remove the MagAO-X optical table and legs. The PFS instrument is taking our place on the Nasmyth platform after lunch, so we need to get everything squared away before then. For my sake, and the sake of the instrument, I’m glad it’s in the hands of people who have had some sleep.

Jared, Olivier, Kyle, and I decabled the electronics rack and the AO Operator Computer, and got them safely stowed away until this afternoon when we’ll get them ready for shipment and/or storage. We rode down the hydraulic lift with our computers and rack of electronics. Someone made a comparison to going down with a ship.

After which, we all agreed it was time to collapse into bed.

Except for Dr. Olivier Guyon, who had to call into a meeting.

I should be sleeping right now, but according to your MagAO-X song of the day there ain’t no rest for the wicked…