MagAO-C 2017A

It has been a great recovery for MagAO from the terrible glycol leak of last year. We have now completed our first science run and it was a big success with a completion of the February targets that we failed to get last year now completed. As readers of this run’s blog posts know it ...

Last night was our final night on-sky in 2017A. Laird went down around 10pm — hopefully he got to sleep fairly quickly, as he had to be up at 7:30am for a long day’s work. Jared went down around 3am — and he had to be up around lunchtime to help Laird. I’m not needed ...

We are still talking about spiders today because that thing was huge and scary. But Laird saved us from the spider… or the spider from us… First here’s Laird’s video he took this afternoon while he was trying to convince it to leave Clay: And then pix from Jared from last night and Laird from this afternoon: It’s ...

When you’re on an observing run, the word “spider” comes up fairly often–usually people are talking about the support structures of the secondary mirror. Tonight, “spider” had a different meaning because THERE WAS A HUGE FREAKING SPIDER IN THE BUILDING. Here is a picture showing just how big this thing was: By the way, can you ...

Las Campanas is my favorite place to watch sunsets. Unfortunately, we only have one star to watch rise and set each day–look how lonely it is. While we’re observing we are forced to fortunate enough to get to watch the sunset and sunrise before turning in for the day. If we lived on another planet, we might not ...

It is great to see you again, specially after last time… I hope you could get very good data on these nights, and weather helps for the time left, good luck guys, beware the moonlight And before leaving Chile, you should enjoy the beach!! Remember we are in summer And for these nights, when you are not working, ...

Tonight is my first calm night driving the AO system in 5 nights. It is great that everything in MagAO/VisAO/Clio is working well together again. Katie is getting great data and Kevin Wagner has joined us at Clay. I was having such an easy time running the AO that I was “volunteered” into ...

As Alex described yesterday, we had to make a major mid-run repair to our system. One of the most important components of our Pyramid wavefront sensor failed on Alycia’s 2nd to last night. So we had to light the bat signal, and, as usual, our Italian collaborators and the LCO crew ...

This was my first time at Magellan along with Felicity B. Hills, a grad student at U. Michigan. I feel like we’ve been truly inducted into the group of MagAO users, watching a very capable instrument team encounter difficult problems and solve them. Alycia graciously let us watch and follow along with her observations for ...

Tonight Alex and Felicity got a chance to take some Clio data and calibrations. Alycia departs today — it was nice having her here — safe travels! The song of the day has embedding disabled: Lego Mariner’s Revenge

Who’s up for a little troubleshooting?

It’s great to be back at LCO after a 15 month drought from observing here. That’s the longest I’ve gone without being here since 2009! All the same great people are still here, and it’s a pleasure to be back working with the staff and MagAO team. If you’re wondering about the title of the ...

Alycia arrived yesterday and today was her first night. She brought a 10-micron camera to do some thermal imaging, including these pictures of me: Tonight went smoothly other than a brief power outage which meant Mauricio had to go turn the compressor back on. He also brought us some cake from Chef Andres! From last night which ...

It has been a busy day. We were searching for planets hidden in young disks but suddenly got attacked by another DSP board failure. Luckily we quickly fixed the problem and closed the loop at an amazing 0.35 arcsecond seeing. Wonderful night. Let’s relax and see some viscachas.     I find this song quite interesting:

Astronomy happened. Stars were involved.

Hi all you MagAO fans, last night we had some excitement (which as long time readers of the blog know — that means something broke). After a fairly routine night we had just settled into a nice rhythm at around 3AM. Then the telescope rotator decided to stop rotating — which wasn’t a big deal, ...

It was a 3-Sagan day: We’ve had lots of good food this week: And tonight at dinner Hector asked us why we hadn’t asked for empanadas in our night-lunch forms — well, we had forgotten it was Sunday! He sent up plenty of empanadas anyway — he takes good care of us! And Alexis made potato chips ...

The clouds stayed away tonight, and we settled in to our normal habits — it’s been over a year since we did that! As usual when left to ourselves, we spent 4+ hours on one target and let the Sun open the loop. Our friends were out enjoying the warm summer weather today.

It was cloudy and windy and foggy, so we stayed in the control room waiting for the clouds to go away. Laird felt bored at the beginning of the night, but he immediately realized the adaptive secondary mirror was in danger. The ASM is very delicate, and even a single raindrop can potentially destroy it. ...

Like the groundhog, 2 vizcachas decided to appear today — I guess that means we have 6 more weeks of summer (? since we’re in the southern hemisphere). Actually, it meant that we had a nice welcome to our first night on the telescope in 2017. We started with some guider engineering, then went on ...

MagAO is all ready to go on the telescope. ASM is in the dome, NAS is packed up, and Clio is cold (enough). Here are a couple of standard day before pics. A new feature at LCO is a crosswalk at the occasionally busy saddle intersection. Such things usually occur for a reason. ...

The 2017A MagAO team made it to LCO! It’s beautiful here on the mountain. Hector cooked us a delicious dinner of fish, potatoes, soup, salad, and pudding. I checked on Clio’s vacuum (which Victor started for me on Sunday) and it’s at $10^{-6}$ so it’s looking good to start liquid nitrogen cooling first thing ...

Well, here we go. Laird, Katie, Jared, and Ya-Lin are on our way to LCO. We’ve already not seen our first green flash. I’m a bit worried though. We’re not even a day into the run and Laird is already exhausted. So we’re bringing back the old “Telephone Game” rules. As usual, every ...