MagAO doesn’t Tweet (yet) [“Loop is open. Shell RIP. #LifeAtLCO”] but today it’s time for a lifestyle post:
Some flowers for the various mothers.Lifestyle shots. #LifeatLCO
And with TJ here to run all 3 cameras at once, Jared and I get a nice break #LifeAtLCO TJ running all 3 instruments at once
Yesterday’s song was from Maverick. Here is the Maverick choir singing Amazing Grace. It’s pretty swinging and there are a lot of great singers in there. Enjoy!
Sigh. And also, our X stage started doing that thing again tonight. Laird, we may have to have one of our wonderful cable routing bonding sessions. You know, the kind where I hold the flashlight for 5 hours while you talk to yourself with your head inside the instrument. I can’t wait.
Since we had clouds, I bailed on the control room and went down to the astronomer’s lounge. Much comfy.
I got a new laptop on this run. It took a long time to come after ordering it, so Amali brought it down for me. It’s got a touch screen and everything.Sun on the wind monitorA horrible sight.
Here’s another Clint Black song. It also describes TJ’s last couple of nights.
We had a solid run of 2 nights with good weather and incredible seeing. Sadly, that run is over. Tonight the clouds came rolling in around midnight and didn’t let up. Before they came in, the wind picked up and forced us to point at a very southern star.
While we were taking data, we noticed that the Clio PSF was elongated on one side of the chip but perfectly round on the other. To troubleshoot this issue, Katie and I decided to mess with Clio’s knobs (for instrument folks: move the camera lens around). We were trying to see if changing some alignment might fix the elongation. Here’s what we found:
These images were taken with the star at different positions on the detector and the camera lens adjusted to a new value. When we put the camera lens back to its nominal value, here’s what we found:
On the whole, the images are pretty similar. And more troubling, the overall PSF shape didn’t really change, which means the camera lens wasn’t responsible for the weird elongation. More problem solving to do later!
Since I am a LEGEND (A. Vaz, Nov. 29, 2015), I am going to forego the song requirement and bring back quotes. Here’s a little convo we had when the wind started to pick up:
“T.J. will point the telescope straight into the wind if you don’t watch him.” –Jared
“It’s true, I will.”–me
Goodnight/morning everyone.
Edit by the blog administrators:
TJ doesn’t want to play our game, so here is a video of him — the game will resume tomorrow:
After that horrible beginning, we’ve now had a solid run of clear calm skies. Almost relaxing. This is Day 14, and it’s also blog post #360. Did we come back around yet?
Last night we had some fun with a surprise binary. This is at H-alpha:
4.8×0.0079 = 38 mas = 1.8 lambda/DFind the Vizcacha
One of the clean room Vizcachas is still around. We just saw he/she for the first time a few days ago. Pretty skittish so far, maybe it’s a new tenant.
Vizzy is back!Peak-a-vizzy
Toto blessed the rain, and Clint Black likes it now.
