Day: May 3, 2018

MagAO 2018A Day 12: #LifeAtLCO

Thanks to our many resourceful observers posting over the last several days, I have accumulated photos to share. This is an LCO lifestyle post.

Trays of fresh-squeezed juices are displayed at breakfast.
[Image description: Trays on 2 tiers with 10–15 glasses full of varied colorful juices.]
Don Hector (head chef from last turno) stands proudly by his delicious pizzas.
[Image description: A collage. Top: A man with a chef hat and a shirt embroidered with “Carnegie Institution for Science” smiles for the camera. In front of him on the serving table are 4 pizzas of different flavors. Bottom: A tray with my dinner of Chilean-Hawaiian pizza (avocado and pineapple), soup, and lemon water.]
Breakfast on Alycia’s last day.
[Image description: A collage. Top: My breakfast of 2 fried eggs, oatmeal, and fresh strawberry juice. Bottom: Alycia and Jared are sitting in front of their breakfast trays. Alycia is talking to Jared and the photographer. Jared is smiling and is caught mid-blink. ]
A mostly wild but partly tame vizcacha hanging out by my car at the telescopes.
[Image description: Collage of a vizcacha by making cute poses sitting up by a white sedan with a missing hubcap. The vizcacha’s head looks kind of like a rabbit while its tail looks kind of like a squirrel.]
This vizzy was wild when it started and became tame. That’s because we call them wild when we see them on the hillside, and tame when we see them on the clean room.
[Image description: A vizcacha in profile on a masonry stone wall. Its tail is curled into a coil. The dorms are off in the distance, and the flattened mountain top for the GMT is in the background.]
This is where Patchy settled on the clean room, after being scared into seeking a safe space by me walking down the stairs.
[Image description: A vizcacha sits on top of a stone wall below a tile roof. Its ears stick up and its tail curls.]
A glorious sunset with a silhouette of a vizzy.
[Image description: A bright red sky is in silhouette with a scrubby bush, some other small plants, some rocks, and a vizcacha on a hillside.]

Song of the day, just cuz I like it:


[Song/Image description: Derniere Danse by Indila]



[Song/Image description: Cover of Derniere Danse by Hristina]

Update: Now that we are in the US, apparently the first version isn’t available here, so here is the other version:

MagAO 2018A Day 11: Here Comes the Sun

Amelia Bayo, Pedro Poblete, and I here, your friendly observers from Chile! Unfortunately the weather hadn’t improved since the last night at the beginning.

Katie’s picture of the Magellan telescopes on May 1. Cloudy!

We had the telescope closed with very thick clouds (we couldn’t even see the moon for most of the time) until about 3:30 am when the sky rapidly cleared up. We did manage to get some data for a few hours upon opening following up the astrometry on some binary stars. As we were trying to get as much data as possible during our short night, at the end of the night we were racing to beat the rising sun to close the AO loop on and observe our bright astrometric calibrator to be able to measure the position of our binaries accurately. We were able get some good data and detections for the time we got, though!

Hedwig the owl also made an appearance on the all-sky camera at the end of the night.

Now I’ve left to cross a few mountains to La Silla for hopefully some clear nights. Good luck to the rest of the MagAO observers and thanks a ton to the team!

 

Here’s for our beating the sun to finish and a better forecast for the next few nights:

(Fun fact: Carl Sagan originally wanted the song on the Golden Record aboard the Voyager probes, but it was decided against due to possible copyright issues even though the Beatles were for it.)