MagAO-C 2017B

Laird’s blog post yesterday was the last blog post, he said. But today was the day we departed LCO, so usually today is the last blog post. However, he also numbered it Day 15 but the previous day was Day 13. We’ll chalk that up to switching from a night schedule to a day schedule ...

Hi Everyone, As is tradition I’m writing the last blog. This run has been a bit challenging due to mostly poor weather. For example, there were a few nights so cloudy that only photos we actually saved were of “Hedwig” the owl landing on our all-sky camera…. Hedwig is great but we really ...

Well that’s it. The system is completely off the telescope. The NAS with the WFS and VisAO is safely packed away in the Aux, as is our intrepid Clio. The ASM is all wrapped up on the floor of the Clay dome, ready to be trucked down the the cleanroom tomorrow. If you’ve ...

A blog post mostly in pictures. From yesterday: Tonight was the last MagAO night of 2017B. The night was split between Matias Diaz observing for Blake Pantoja, and Amelia Bayo with her student Daniela Grandon. Mauricio Martinez brought us a giant chocolate bar as a welcome to the Turno and the End of Run gift. Thanks Mauricio! ...

Before dinner today, Jared, Laird, Alycia, and I visited the GMT site (thanks Dave!). I had been looking at GMT’s two weather towers in the distance from the LCO lodge since I arrived last week, so I’m glad the tour request went through. The site is still under construction, and it’s pretty much filled with ...

Another long night of high winds, high seeing, and generally no good for astronomy conditions. Jennifer Lumbres is here learning how to run the AO system. Tonight she got to experience her first earthquake as AO operator. I think this should count for quite a bit in the Adaptive Optics course she’s taking this semester (someone ...

The most exciting thing to happen tonight, alas, was the return of our friend the owl. You can see her or him silhouetted nicely here against that white background known as clouds. Note the red and blue dots representing where the telescopes are pointing are straight up overhead — that’s because both domes are closed ...

This sequence from the all-sky camera is a blog post in and of itself:

It’s been a cloudy couple of nights at Las Campanas. We’ve watched cloud banks as we walk to the telescope: Clouds stream overhead as we open the the dome: Clouds fill the all-sky cam once our targets are up: monitored the clouds from space: saw clouds over the Magellan telescopes from the “Hotel”:and noted clouds as we walk to breakfast ...

After two summers of working with Kate, she let me (an undergrad who has never been observing before) come with her to LCO. In short, this might be the most beautiful place I’ve ever been, viscachas are my new favorite animal, and I’m realizing more and more how little I know. (According to Kate, knowing ...

Do you want high winds, clouds, or bad seeing? If you wait long enough you can have all 3 at once. Btw, you can tell Katie was driving because she just popped the clutch and peeled out (no 10 modi loop). See this post to understand. Quote of the day: “The AO ...

Tonight was the first science night of 2017B for the Giant Accreting Protoplanet Survey (GAPlanetS). Unfortunately, the timing of the run is such that all of our best targets are reaching their highest point in the sky as the sun sets. This is important because stars rotate the most rapidly with respect to our instrument ...

Kate and her student Clare arrived safely today. Their first night is tomorrow night but tonight they helped with trouble-shooting and ran VisAO. At the end of last night, I was thinking, “Well, that went pretty smoothly, we got on-sky so fast, tonight we’ll finish our engineering early.” Hah. Today Juan woke Laird up in the afternoon ...

In a new world record, the crew installed the ASM, the Nas, and Clio all in one day. After dinner we finished connecting and cabling everything. We went on sky and closed the loop around midnight. Clio is still getting down to a cool 55 K (-218* C or -360* F). It started out at ...

It’s not thaaaaat cold, just above 0C in Tucson. Our blood is thin, you know? MagAO is ready to bolt on the telescope tomorrow. We spent today unpacking the ASM, moving it up to the summit, cooling Clio, ...

Guess what… we’re back! Laird, Jared, and I made it safely to LCO after 27 hours of travel. Clio is already on the vacuum, pumping down since Tuesday thanks to Jorge Bravo. The sunset was cold and beautiful. And by the way, Kesha’s back too. Hopefully our 2017B run will be just as powerful and beautiful ...