Month: August 2012

I couldn’t stay awake long enough last night for all of our videos to upload to youtube. Unless your name is Posterity you may not want to watch every second of these, but there are some interesting things happening.

Here is the NAS rolling out of the cleanroom. Scroll to 0:56 for Jared’s most important contribution to the project to date:

And here it goes from the lift to the truck:

Here we are placing it on blocks to stabilize it. Also, Jason comes up with the official MagAO logo:

See last night’s post (Day 7) for the drive up the mountain.

Here the team is using a come-along to get it back off the truck:

Here is the end of unloading and the placement of the NAS in the Aux building. It passes several Magellan instruments on the way in: The Planet Finding Spectrograph (PFS), Megacam, MMIRS, and Phase-Cam.

In this short clip the electronics racks are rolled into their new home. They fit.

A big day for Magellan AO today. As planned, we packed up our computers and the NAS and moved them to the summit.

This video shows the truck leaving the cleanroom. This was the practice run for the much more delicate NAS.

After lunch, we moved on to the NAS itself. We homed our stages, put on our dust covers, installed the electronics box lids, and threw it on a truck.

This video shows most of the loading process and the drive up the hill.

This video shows the NAS making the last turn at the top.

The other big news from today was the run’s first Guanaco sighting. Laird caught some movement on the side of the hill on our way to lunch, and Jason and I got as close as we could to investigate.

Days without a motherboard failure: 6

We start our move up to the Clay tomorrow, so today was mainly spent getting ready. We disconnected and drained the supply lines for the NAS cooling system.

That hose, along with a bunch of power and data cables, was made into a cable and we started wrapping it around the NAS. The NAS will move up to the Aux building between the telescopes tomorrow.

Another detail to worry about is balancing the NAS so we don’t overload the rotator motors. The crew finished a counter-weight today, and Alan and Tyson installed it.

Meanwhile, we also tested the main chiller which keeps the ASM itself cool.

Emilio wrote some software to monitor and control the system. See below for a video of it in action during the above test.

While everybody else has been getting their hands dirty, I’ve been putting our VisAO camera through some tests (mainly focusing). As I complain about regularly, we never get very much time to see what it can do. Here are some reduced images with our coronagraphic occulting spot.

Tonight’s quote: “Hey Laird, how long do you plan to use this instrument? I mean it’s not just for Jared’s PhD right?” (Jason Lewis)

Tyson and Jason finished designing our new cable wrap system. Here are some views of the plan (note: if you are an important person at Magellan, check your email for more):

Luckily Juan found a piece of 4″ PVC pipe to use for the “stove pipe”. I don’t want to know where it was used before.

This morning we declared our CCD cooling system air-tight and started running water through it. Here are some videos of the filling, pressurizing, and starting of the pump for the first time.

All this plumbing appears to have paid off. Our CCD39 read noise is down to 4.1 electrons, and we can read our CCD47 (the VisAO science camera) full-frame with 4.5 electrons – and maybe lower depending on ambient temperature. The cooling system helps us achieve these numbers because it keeps dark current low. The CCD 39 having low RON helps us work on faint guide stars, especially important for Clio2 (in case you missed it, Katie posted an update on Clio2’s progress towards shipping here).

It wasn’t all work today.

Today’s quote: “I can imagine the feeling.” (Alan Uomoto)

And speaking of Alan, I know at least two things about him. He reads this blog, and he cares. So much so that he went out of his way to make sure that Marcia Males has a poop-free picture of her son.

And on my way down for supper, I had a close encounter with the VisAO mascot. He’s getting to know me I think.

Days without a motherboard failure: 4

This morning we woke up to this:

We’re here for a reason – to find out what doesn’t work so we can fix it before the real deal happens in November. Today’s discovery was that the planned route for our cable wrap through the Nasymyth platform deck won’t work. Our instrument has to rotate to track the sky through the night, which means our power, data, and cooling lines all have to rotate with it. So we need a cable wrap to manage them as they get longer and shorter. Tyson and Jason are busy sketching out plan B.

Speaking of cables, the staff has been running new network fiber for us. Our system moves lots of 1s and 0s every second, so we have our own networks to handle it all.

The observatory was inside a cloud for most of the day. We frequently couldn’t see the next building over.

Tonight’s quote: “Ok, whoosh is maybe a strong term. More like swish.” (Laird Close, discussing rotator speeds and decapitation)

Days without a motherboard failure: 3