October 2014 – Extreme Wavefront Control Lab

2014B Day 5: Corrected Dispersion

The big story over the last 30 hours has been our atmospheric dispersion corrector, or ADC. When you look at a star through the atmosphere, it will be “dispersed” into a rainbow, meaning that the different wavelengths of light (colors) will land at different spots on the camera. But if you have an ADC, it takes out this dispersion. The ADC is two prisms which have to be rotated in opposite directions in a fairly precise way. Well, ours stopped being precise, or maybe it was just random. Opinions vary. We spent the last half of last night taking pieces of it apart and testing various theories. We didn’t get anywhere, but after a long-day’s sleep, Laird had a plan. To keep a long story from getting longer, one of the two rotating prisms tends to get jammed up in one part of its range of motion. We now have a workaround in place for this, with a bunch of software hacks to enforce some new rules. So, problem solved! Just like that.

ready to find some planets — That image makes me pretty happy. See how the lines (they’re speckles in a very broad pass band) running out from the star are all straight? That means we have the ADC working.

To put that in perspective, when I went to bed yesterday morning I was pretty sure we had to pull MagAO off the telescope and tear apart the ADC. It’s good to be wrong about some things.

Losing some time to the ADC troubleshooting hasn’t been too hard to take, because we’ve had some cloudy nights.

rotate my knife-edge — The Babcock Lodge with some clouds

Magellan with clouds. This is a rare sight as far as the MagAO team is concerned.

Here are some more pictures of the mounting and cabling from yesterday.

t.l.c. — Laird and Katie hooking up Clio

lego man — Here’s Laird and me connecting all the cables that let us talk to the system.

MagAO’s favorite Chef is on this week. Here’s an example of why we love Hector so much.

hector is the man — This was dessert at Lunch! You should stop by for dinner some time.

I found some more flowers today.

hi mom! or not, cuz you use an ipad — Some more flowers.

Clouds suck. They should never come near any observatory where I have time. But, they make for nice pictures.

sticker for spotting her — Tonight’s sunset. Click for panorawesome.

nice shirt — The MagAO team shows off some of our swag. Note that I’m not looking at the camera, I got distracted by the loop “pausing” and was making sure it came back ok.

There’s a lot of pressure for us instrumenteers in the days before a run, especially such a long one. We have many people coming to visit us and use MagAO, and we need to have the system in top form when they get here. I think we did it — MagAO is ready to go. But, needless to say, we worked pretty damn hard the last couple of days.

2014B Day 4: Closed Loop

Today was a long night. Too long to report all the events. But, we installed the NAS and Clio, took off the ASM cover and put on the wind monitor, and closed the loop!

Get ready for 37 nights of this — We closed the loop! Do these screens look familiar?

Three students from the Universidad Tecnica Federico Santa María, Javier Garcés,
Sebastián Zúñiga, and Mario Castro, arrived today. They will be working with us on vibration testing, and will spend some time in Tucson in early 2015. They also helped me cable and move Clio today:

Thanks — Here are the Chilean students helping to move Clio. They were very motivated and we look forward to working with them.

Look like pink flowers — Laird was very proud of his plumbing manifold (bottom left). I like the impellers

I am — Inspecting the shell yesterday. Do I look nervous?

Sadly we haven’t seen our mascot, Vizzy, at the clean room yet. Did he move out? …

And my Yogurt Naturale!!! — I love breakfast here! All the meals, actually. Here is yesterday’s breakfast with the fresh-squeezed cherimoya juice.

2014B Day 3: Switched On and Switching Over

The big news for today is that Laird and Katie cabled, plumbed, and powered-up the ASM. We’ve never done that before without at least one Arcetrian in the room. It all went very smoothly, and the ASM is ready to go on sky!

Where does this thing go? — Laird and Katie connected the ASM power and communication cables and the cooling lines.

R.I.P. — This nice display shows our shell in the “RIP” (rest in peace) state. We were happy to see this, as it meant all the electronics were working.

Our day started with Oscar introducing us to the Cherimoya. It’s a really flavorable sweet fruit. We also had fresh squeezed Cherimoya juice for breakfast.

dinosaur egg — That”s a Cherimoya. In front, that is. That’s Povilas in back.

Not really paying attention until it's too late — Tonight’s sunset, or just after it.

We started switching over to a night schedule. That means we got up for breakfast at 7:30 and worked until 2 am. We finished out the night testing some new plumbing fixtures for the NAS. At least we’ll sleep in a little this morning.

We should be on-sky tonight. Baby get ready.

2014B Day 2: Clio is Alive

There was a cold wind blowing today but in the hottest/sunniest parts of the day it calmed down. During this time we moved the ASM from the clean room up to the Clay dome:

I remember the days when this operation brought out the whole mountain to see — Here the Isuzu is moving the ASM up the hill from the Clean Room to the Clay telescope

Juan and Laird wanted this pic — This is the new way to connect the Come-Along Strap for moving the ASM on/off the truck via the lift gate at the Cerro Manqui summit where the Clay telescope is

It’s beautiful up here. Breakfast was amazing: fresh-squeezed orange juice, oatmeal with warm milk, dos huevos fritos por favor, and unsweetened whole-milk yogurt — yum! I hiked up and down the mountain 5 or 6 times and it’s really helping with my jet lag to be out and about in the sunshine.

I connected Clio and got it up and running. Victor helped me cool it down as we were doing this. First Laird and I put the new washers Manny made in to help support the gold electronics box as the Delrin was starting to crack/warp.

Oh Clee Oh — Laird and I are putting in the washers to help hold up the Clio electronics box

Here are the washers from Manny that Laird and I put in the Delrin plate

I did a couple fills too — Victor is cooling down Clio with liquid nitrogen

First time I did it by myself — Clio’s Alive!

Clee oh take images complete — Also Clio can read out the chip!

Meanwhile, Jared did the same thing with VisAO — plugged everything in, moved the motors, took test images. Later Laird cleaned the optics and Jared tested characterized the images:

V to the I to the Z squared Y — Here Jared is hacking away on his spiffy DJ setup

Here he looks like a real doctor — Laird is cleaning the telecentric lens. He is dusting it with a Q-tip

Do we look like real doctors? — Laird is teaching me how to put the Wollaston prism in and out of the beam

And we saw all sorts of wildlife today! Donkeys, a guanaco, a snake (little garter snake), and a vizcacha bounding up the stairs! Here are the ones we were able to get pictures of:

It's like a vision test that will show the real MagAO aficionados — This is a guanaco (kinda like a llama) that I saw down in the saddle while we were moving the ASM. Sorry for the terrible picture from my anti-zoom camera phone.

So those were the fauna, now for the flora. It’s spring here and the desert flowers are coming up – beautiful!

Enjoy! — Jared took these flower pictures for the various mothers … and any other MagAO fans who like pretty things.

This song makes me think of home, more MN/WI than NM b/c of the farm refs. For the Moms, the Dads, the Grandmothers, and the Grandfathers, we miss you. <3 Agnes

2014B Day 1: Isn’t this fun?!

MagAO fans… we have arrived! It’s nice to be back here at LCO in Chile, where all the coffee is strong, all the viscachas are good-looking, and all the food is above average. Jared, Laird, and I left Tucson on Saturday and arrived here on Sunday, for an uneventful trip. Believe it or not, due to various issues with our respective houses in Tucson (involving construction, plumbing, and wildlife), we are all looking forward to some peace and quiet on the mountain even though this is such hard work!

But see, it is so beautiful and peaceful up here:

No vizzy yet though. — Gorgeous views of LCO. It’s good to be back!

2014B here we come! — Here’s the NAS and our equipment, waiting for us!

After dinner, Laird and Jared inspected the ASM and the NAS:

yay! — Laird and Jared inspect the shell. It’s still in 1 piece!

PI^2. — Jared and Laird remove the dust covers from the NAS.

And I worked with Victor and Juan to vacuum-pump Clio:

Actually it's already pretty vacuous. — Here is Clio being pumped to vacuum.

And finally, I thought I’d share a couple older pictures with you. One is Jared giving a public talk a few weeks ago about MagAO and extrasolar planets, at a super fun event called “Space Draft” (https://www.as.arizona.edu/space-drafts-public-talk-series) at a local Tucson brewpub called Borderlands:

11 lambda/D is easy — You can see the Magellan Clay telescope and our logo on his slide — we got to see all our old friends today!

And the other picture is of the 3 concurrent Sagan Fellows at the University of Arizona, which we took last week at dinner with a friend visiting from out of town. My fellowship is just ending and Ian’s just started so this was the only time to get the overlap picture! We all study extrasolar planets and we hope you keep following the blog to hear more about what we are up to!

Hi Kate R! — Katie Morzinski, Jared Males, and Ian Crossfield — the 3 concurrent NASA Sagan Fellows at the U of A — overlapping briefly.

Quotes:
“Isn’t this fun?!?!” -Jared, happy to be back.

It’ll be 6 weeks until Jared and I see Tucson again, so here we go: