April 2018 – Page 2 – Extreme Wavefront Control Lab

MagAO 2018A Day 4: Science Data!

Hi there, intrepid readers! I’m Andrew, a first year grad student at Arizona who’s been working with Laird for the last few months. I had to miss the 2017B run because the timing was way too close to the start of my first semester (quite stressful enough already what with moving across the country, thank-you-very-much!) but you should expect I’ll be a regular fixture at these things going forward.

Phil headed back to Tucson first thing this morning, totally exhausted off a full night of Clio troubleshooting. The rest of us — finally getting adjusted to a night schedule — didn’t emerge until around dinnertime. The sight that greeted us was not exactly ideal.

Wispy clouds fill the sky above the twin Magellan telescopes, rather magnificently lit in oranges and pinks. — Okay, these clouds were actually stunning, but we’re not here to sightsee. (Okay, we’re not here PRIMARILY to sightsee.)

The forecast didn’t have any clouds in it days ago, but here we are on night two of a pretty crowded sky. Who ordered this?! I was told it’s never cloudy here! I’d like to speak to a manager!

Having said that, we started the night on a target very far to the south, and all the clouds were to the north, so we were able to get a very steady PSF on this target for several hours. An absolutely gorgeous dataset – I didn’t have the presence of mind to grab a screencap, but believe me it was very gratifying for my first science night. I got to take data with VisAO, and even got to babysit the AO loop for a little bit. (All of this was on the old computers. The new ones…well, let’s just say they’re having some teething pains still.)

And hey, look at that ASM go!

Katie and Paul were still hard at work trying to get Clio in fighting shape, and Katie insisted she needed photons, so we proceeded to look at Alpha Centauri again for a while. After this engineering time we went to grab our second science target…and promptly got completely clouded out. Long story short, there was much wailing and breaking of the AO loop for quite long time. We ended up sitting on a bright star all night so Katie could test between gaps in the clouds, but essentially the entire second half of the night was a loss observationally.

That said, it won’t surprise you that this was the view when we left the dome a few minutes ago:

It's...it's just more clouds. Sorry, I've got nothing here. — Like…seriously?

Laird and I had our eye on the Meteoblue forecast all night, and it seemed to have a pretty good handle on the cadence of the clouds. Unfortunately, here’s what it’s predicting for tomorrow…

Screencap of an hourly weather forecast, showing lots and lots of 100% cloud cover and mid and high altitudes for the night of Apr 25-26. — All those beige boxes? Yeah, that’s cloud cover percentages.

If this holds up, tomorrow might be a total bust for science observations. Of course, we’re all hoping that doesn’t happen. Tune in again, fearless viewer – same MagAO time, same MagAO channel – to find out! (I will be very disappointed if I get completely clouded out on my last night of my first run…)

Wrapping up is easy, wacky cover songs are totally my thing. Without further ado, my go-to example. A classic…

…and one of my favorite bands making something entirely unexpected out of it…

MagAO 2018A Day3: Closed-loop On Sky !

Today was a long and exciting day for the team.

This afternoon we mounted Clio on the NAS (the telescope + MagAO) and Katie and Phil got Clio cold and working with its brand new computer.

Despite a cloudy start to the night we did open and Jared tested the new 64-bit computers for MagAO, there were a few surprises about how to set the shell with so many bits. Jared figured out the troubles and a work around. We then ran for the rest of the night just fine for MagAO. Marco and Alfio also helped remotely from Italy — thanks guys!

Phil and Katie also debugged much of the brand new Clio software with lots of remote help from Paul Grenz (in Tucson) all night long. Great progress was made.

Indi rules — Phil, Katie, and Paul (on Skype) worked all day and night on Clio software.

We did make great diffraction-limited images of Alpha Cen with VisAO in SDI+ mode as well as on Clio. The AO seems to be running great again.

In the afternoon after Clio was mounted I had some time to photograph a wild vizzy bouncing along the rocks — they really can bounce!

ready — A Vizzy on the move — they can bounce!

Since it was full of dark clouds tonight, here is a song about thunder…

and again

MagAO 2018A Day 2: Shell Set w/ All 64 bits!

The ASM and NAS are on the telescope, but, alas, we aren’t quite ready to go on sky. The big news is that, with our usual indispensable help from Alfio Puglisi, we managed to turn on and control the adaptive secondary mirror using our brand new 64 bit computers. Welcome to 2003 or so MagAO! For those of you that didn’t stay up all night, Alfio fixed the Housekeeper_gui bug, and we closed the loop on read-noise with 1e-4 gains. Everything appears to be working.

Here’s the ASM being installed:

New kid. — Laird and Andrew cabled the ASM today.

The theme of this run is modernization. The work on Clio continues:

Mystery Man and Clio Girl. — Phil and Katie hard at work on the Clio modernization.

Last time we were here, it was very green, almost lush. Not so much now.

Still amazing. — LCO has returned to its brown and dry self.

But there’s still plenty of life around the mountain.

Evidence of rains in the past. — There are still flowers making a living here.

Also pretty flowerish. — A different yellow flower coming through this brushy thingy.

So color. Very purp. — We’ve seen these guys before.

Very interesting. — These purplely pods look like they were once pretty too.

Still cool. — Flowers past their prime, but they must have been gorgeous.

MagAO is evidence that crap lasts for a long time in this environment. — No actual animal pictures today, but here is evidence that the Zorros are about.

Not an obstacle. — Life, and flowers, grow wherever they can and everyone just lets them.

Look at those lucky bastards on their way home already! — Tonight’s sunset.

Since I started my changeover to the night schedule, I went to bed and didn’t get up until lunch. I slept for more than 13 hours.

R.I.P. Avicii.

MagAO 2018A Day 1: Surprise mystery guest

Our surprise mystery guest arrived — it’s Phil Hinz, the PI of Clio, who has handed it off to us for these many years. He came down here this time, for the first time since 2012 or 2013, because we got a new computer and are running new software and we have a lot of installing and testing and debugging to do. He and Clio had a very touching reunion — and then we got to work on debugging:

And Clio is happy to see Phil! — Our surprise mystery visitor is Phil Hinz who came to see his long-lost instrument Clio.
[Image description: A collage. Top: Phil gives Clio a warm hug (literally). The black cylinder is the dewar and it’s full of 77-Kelvin liquid nitrogen, thanks to a successful feeding day yesterday, I mean cooling day. Bottom: Phil leans over to look up some code on his laptop which is balanced on a step ladder, and my laptop is on the background on a tool chest with Paul on Skype, and the Clio electronics rack is open and on top of it is the new Clio computer, with quite the rat’s nest of cables coming out the back.]

Phil is very happy to have finally arrived — he had to stay the night in Santiago because his original flight was cancelled due to the LATAM strike, and the Sky flight Laird managed to get on yesterday was sold out when Phil tried. Laird’s new grad student Andrew Sevrinsky also arrived today on another Sky flight.

In the morning, we brought the Adaptive Secondary Mirror (ASM) from the cleanroom to the telescope. The ASM is the thing we move at a frequency of 2000 Hertz and at 585 locations on the back of the mirror, to counteract the effect of blurring from the atmosphere so that we get sharp images. We store it wrapped in plastic in the clean room so that we don’t get any dust in its 50-micron gap, and we store it on its side so that if there’s an earthquake hopefully the magnets will hold it. But for all that nice safe storage down there, then we always have to put it on the back of a truck and drive it up the hill.

Do you remember when this was a whole-mountain event? — Laird and the Izuzu driver make a caravan of 1, transporting the ASM from the cleanroom to the telescope.
[Image description: Another collage. It’s a sequence of 4 pictures of the truck carrying the ASM up the mountain. Laird is walking alongside the truck (because we ask the driver to go about 5 mph). The sun is shining and it’s a beautiful place with the valley and the distant mountains. In the last picture the telescope domes are there.]

In the afternoon we installed the NAS (the housing that holds our wavefront sensor and our visible-light science camera “VisAO”) attached to the Nasmyth port of the Clay telescope. This was the first time we’ve installed it when there’s still another night of science to go — tonight is a MegaCam night. But our NAS doesn’t get in the way of MegaCam, and we had a full crew today, and tomorrow it will take a lot longer than normal to get our stuff installed, because it takes a long time to remove MegaCam and the f/5 and the f/11 — so it was great we managed to get the NAS installed today! Thanks to Juan, Felix, Miriel, Juanito, Victor, and the rest of the hard-working day crew!

With a beam of sunlight for luck — Jared, Felix, and Juan install the NAS.
[Image description: There is a large blue circle that is the side of the telescope. Attached to it is a black circle with 4 boxes standing up off it at 2:00, 5:00, 7:00, and 11:00 — those are the electronics cabinets. Jared is standing to the left side apparently tightening something or maybe checking some cables. Felix is standing on the step ladder wrangling the crane cables. Jaun is standing off to the right operating the crane. A beam of light is going across the image, from some bright spotlights that are not in the picture.]

And now Laird and Jared have gone to bed, but Phil and I are working in the Aux, with software engineer Paul Grenz on Skype, working on getting the new Clio code to work on the new computer. We’re starting the switch over to a night schedule.

I guess today is Day 1 because Laird and Phil are here. Or maybe because it was Laird’s first full day. And finally, we saw some great wildlife today!

I'm not sure if it's Gary - he doesn't have his lady friends about him. — I saw this guanaco on my way down to dinner.
[Image description: A photo with a guanaco standing in profile except looking at the photographer in the center, some desert and mountains in the background, and some scrubby brush and a guard rail in the foreground. The guanaco has a long neck, stand-up ears, a short curled-over tail, and some nice fuzzy legs. It is colored a mix of browns.]

<3 Viz — Laird saw this wild vizzy on his way down to dinner.
[Image description: A vizcacha on the rocks. It looks sort of like a large rabbit, but it has a black stripe on its back, and its tail is very long and bushy like a squirrel. If you could see it hop, it is also reminiscent of a kangaroo. The rocks are big boulders, very angular, probably metamorphic.]

Song of the day:

[Song/Image description: “Shaman’s Call” by R. Carlos Nakai]

[Song/Image description: Flute cover of “Shaman’s Call”]

MagAO 2018A Day 0: Cool Clio Code

Well I’m here. My trip ended up being 27 hours and it was great to get here and sleep and wake up to a delicious telescope breakfast:

So nice — Strong tea, dos juevos fritos, oatmeal, fresh squeezed strawberry juice, and 2 major astronomical telescopes closed up to sleep for the day.
*[Image description: Photo of 2 telescope domes on the top of the mountain, with a breakfast chair and some half-drinken tea and juice in the foreground]*

I found this fine literature in the desk drawer in my room, left from a previous inhabitant:

Wise choice — Literature in my room (not left by me).
*[Image description: The fine literature includes The Economist, Physics Today, and an ApJ paper by the author]*

Today we worked hard on cooling and code. Clio code, AO code, DigiPort code. The mountain internet was down for about 4 hours. Laird arrived safely and the mystery guest got stranded in Santiago and will be here hopefully tomorrow.

Code for Code — Code and Clio cooldown day
*[Image description: A collage of Jared working on AO code, Paul Skyping with Katie on Clio code, Jared and Laird by the NAS, and Katie with Clio]*

I did manage to get Clio down to almost 77 K in one day! Clio drank his liquid nitrogen very well today.

Clio's so cool — The blue line is the outer dewar that I started filling first, at 10am. The red line is the inner dewar, that I started filling after lunch, when the outer dewar got below 150 K.
[Image description: A line plot with a red and a blue curve, showing the temperature dropping. The x axis is time in minutes and the y axis is temperature in Kelvin. Both dewars start flat at the ambient temperature, around 295 K. The curves drop exponentially, but the outer dewar drops at a faster rate than the inner dewar. There is a point of inflection in the inner dewar curve, at the point where the outer dewar got below 150 K. This is where I started filling the inner dewar too; before that it was only cooling passively. Both curves asymptote to around the temperature of liquid nitrogen, 77 K.]

The asymptote isn't actually that wavy — And here’s the Clio cooldown plot in “XKCD” style. You don’t even have to import anything, it’s already included in matplotlib, it’s just one extra line: “plt.xkcd()”.
[Image description: The same line plot as above, only I decided to put the x-axis in hours, and I used the “XKCD” style in MatPlotLib so that it looks like my plot was hand-drawn by Randall Munroe]

And we saw a herd of 5 guanacos running along the hillside as we were heading back up after lunch:

Garys — Herd of guanacos
*[Image description: Guanacos on a hillside in Chile. They are kind of like llamas. They are pretty far away in the picture.]*

Today’s song:

[Song/image description: “Come” by Jain]

[Song/image description: cover of “Come” by Esteban and Laura]