Month: November 2014

Tonight was Laird’s last night for the first part of this run — he goes down later today to return home for a couple weeks, then he’ll be back again for the last couple weeks of the run. Jared and I will be taking care of everything while he’s gone. We were also talking to our friends at Mt. Graham, Arizona and Subaru Telescope, Mauna Kea about their respective pyramid WFS observing runs.

Before tonight, I was busy with Clio engineering and science, so I didn’t have a chance to run the AO system much last week. But tonight was TJ & Alycia’s first night and since TJ can run Clio just fine, I was running AO with bits of advice from Laird on what he’s learned operating the system this week. So there was a lot going on, and we didn’t have the best seeing, so I didn’t get much in the way of pictures. However, I have a couple pictures from the previous night, which was my science night looking at brown dwarf and planetary-mass companions to stars. Here are a few pretty pix from Clio:

Speaking of brown dwarfs and planetary-mass companions…
I went to a meeting last summer called Exoplanets and Brown Dwarfs: Mind the Gap, focusing on the overlap between the fields and how studying one kind of substellar object enriches the study of the other. It was a great conference and Startorialist Emily Rice led us in making a fun video about brown dwarfs, which I hope you enjoy watching as much as we enjoyed filming:

Well things finally got back to normal tonight at LCO. Not a cloud in the sky, seeing was 0.5 arcseconds most of the night, T.J. fell asleep in the control room, and most importantly – our good friend Miss Viz was hanging out at the clean room today! We haven’t seen any Viscachas on their usual roosts, but one was there today.

As I said, tonight we got the absolutely perfect observing conditions we’ve come to expect from LCO.

The great conditions have led to some really nice results. Here’s a 47% Strehl ratio image at z’ (that means it’s really good).

We also did some work at H-alpha. Here’s a nice H-alpha jet coming from a young binary star system. FWHM in this image is 30 milli-arcseconds. That’s from stacking 15 second exposures.

At the end of a great night, we saw a gorgeous sunrise over the Andes. Here’s a shot of the MagAO ASM, Clay, and Baade right before we closed up.

I don’t think these have been on the blog yet this run.

So, the last week has been pretty rough from an observing perspective. The clouds and bad seeing means a lot of stress and frustration. I think this video captures what it’s like sometimes in the control room during nights like we’ve had up until now.

Here’s the song of the day. I’m guessing this is going to be a staple at McKale center this year.

We were clouded out for the first half of the night. Once we got open, we started out observing “Runa’s Star”. Runa picked his star as a set up target during our commissioning run 2 years ago. He also deserves credit for designing one side of our MagAO coffee mugs.

Once the clouds cleared we got to work.

On a submarine they say you don’t really start learning how the reactor plant works until you stand your first watch by yourself. It’s kind of the same thing for us, this is our first run without Alfio here to clean up our messes. Tonight was fun. We pushed MagAO into some new territory, at least for the three of us. Before and after, and once the dust settled, we did some really cool things.

The night started by replacing the Clio vacuum pump down in the bowels of the telescope.

We did some astrometric calibrations.

This is the image that almost broke MagAO

Still a bit cloudy, which continues to make for gorgeous skies at sunset

And finally a Viscacha pic. Can you believe this is the first one?

Since this is day 7, I present, out of many well qualified candidates, the following as the quote of our first week. It’s Laird describing how he operates the AO system: “part of the problem is I can’t actually read any of these numbers. I just click on shapes.”

It’s true. I’m pretty sure that if I made a warning pop up that said “You are about to destroy MagAO — Ok — Cancel” he would click Ok as long as it was in the right place.

Here’s your song of the day. Enjoy.

Tonight we saw some cute pictures of the various children in our lives dressed up for Halloween. Well don’t worry, but we had the holiday covered here as well. Here is a monster of an old man who showed up just before sunset:

He looks scary but we let him run our instrument. And he did a great job of frightening the PI.

I did a bit of searching to try and figure out what that gorgeous display of clouds was. I’m going to go with Altocumulus Mackerel. Look it up. But I can’t tell if it’s going to be, “Mackerel in the sky, three days dry,” or “Mackerel sky, mackerel sky. Never long wet and never long dry.”

Tonight, though, the clouds remained thick and patchy until the dawn. We were still able to work through the clouds, locking on an 0.5-mag star (Achernar) and later, a -1st mag star (Canopus). The AO system reports the magnitude back to us and we had up to 9 mags of extinction! But this was sufficient to do our tests of things like software, communications, and scripting. I also tested Clio’s wide camera.

Yesterday I was able to focus Clio and verify that our focus positions haven’t changed since the last run.

Our Chilean students (Javier Garcés, Sebastián Zúñiga, and Mario Castro, from the Universidad Tecnica Federico Santa María) left yesterday. We will see them in Tucson in January and look forward to seeing how their vibration data are, which they took last night by attaching their in-house custom accelerometers to the telescope and instrument.

Anyway, it was a good night even for the clouds, because we were able to do so much testing. I’ll leave you with a couple more pictures and the song of the day.