MagAO-C 2015B

We made it back home! The strike ended the day we flew out so we didn’t end up riding the bus from La Serena to Santiago, but thanks to Nelda for arranging that so that we were sure to get there either way. And thanks to Juan Gallardo and the rest of the ...

He revisado las Reglas del Blog y nada dice sobre el idioma que debe utilizarse. Por eso, lo haré en español, una licencia para el último día del equipo MagAO en el Observatorio Las Campanas. Aún no se sabe si viajarán a Santiago en bus o avión, la huelga terminó esta tarde. Durante las 33 noches de ...

Greetings from the 3rd and final night of the GMT phasing experiment, and also the final night of the 2015B AO run!   We are in the process of designing a sensor that will be used to phase the segments of the Giant Magellan Telescope.  The GMT will have  seven 8.4m diameter primary mirrors and ...

  It is a thrill to be here at LCO and in particular at the Magellan Clay. Being that it is my first time visiting a major ground based telescope facility nearly every experience is a new one for me, from the endless mountain vistas, to the occasionally spotted wildlife, to the sheer size and complexity ...

I am Ken McCracken the mechanical engineer on the AGWS project.  I have been to LCO about ten times since 2008 primarily to support the MMIRS instrument. Other than the 24 hours of travel time it takes to get here I can’t think of a better place to work given the exceptional facility and accommodating ...

My name is Alan Conder.  I work at GMTO and this is my first trip to Magellan; in fact, this is my first trip to any observatory. I came to Magellan to participate with the team from SAO to field the GMT prototype phasing camera.   In addition, I arrived a week early to test a new ...

Labor rights in Chile come up quite a bit at the Observatory. At Magellan, we usually have three telescope operators between the two telescopes so that they can switch off and thereby not work too more than 11.25 hours continuously. This week, Jorge is stuck with us all night though because Mauricio is on vacation. ...

We might make it. Alycia has one night left, and our next and last observer arrived today (get ready for something different — more to come). The winds were finally a bit calmer tonight, and seeing was bouncing off 0.5″ for a while — but we still ended up with some clouds after midnight. ...

Well, dear AO team, you finally entered to the final countdown, there are less than 10 days to leave “Las Campanas Observatory” just on time for Christmas, I guess. I really hope that all the science you obtained, be the source of great discoveries, that will make your team proud, and also all of the ones ...

One of the downsides of observational astronomy is the lack of control we have over our experiments. It’s just annoying that we can’t re-create star and planet formation in our laboratories and observe the evolution of planetary systems over billions of years. And then on top of that, we have to deal with the epitomy ...

Hello Everyone, Having just finished up three nights over in Baade, the MagAO team has very hospitably welcomed me (Kate R.) as their guest tonight.  As you may have heard, last night didn’t go so well, giving Katie and me the opportunity to poke around in the Baade dome at 1am:   Fortunately, today the clouds have slowly ...

I’m glad to not have to come up with anything terribly clever to say tonight, since Jared and Katie already gave away the 2015B blog award (deservedly, to Amali Vaz). Here is why I’m having my own private pity party right now… and a zoom in on the wind data… My two nights are up, and unfortunately ...

Things are going well this week and the weather is ok. Waiting for the new star wars movie, here we go!!! The song of the day, speaking of Jukebox Heroes and Blockbuster movies: Hero by Chad Kroeger: And a picture of myself for Alberto:

Except when corrupt databases and/or fiber communication problems force us to do a hard reboot of the whole system, and there’s not enough time before sunrise to make it worth bringing it all back up again. Then we stop, even with stars in our eyes. In keeping with tonight’s outrageous claims on astro-ph, we observed ...

Day 22, Kim is helping a lot, Kate R. arrived today, Kate F. arrives tomorrow, astigmatism is fixed, MagAO is well. Things with holes worn through: Dawn run yesterday: Sunrise today: Yesterday’s song of the day was by Dawid Podsiadlo from Poland. Today’s song of the day is by another overseas David, Davido Adedeji Adeleke from Nigeria:

While it is Day 21 of operations for the MagAO team, it’s only Night 2 of MagAO observing for me! But it is my Night 9 of observing in total: I just finished a seven-night run with the Gemini Planet Imager and mountain-hopped over from Cerro Pachón to Las Campanas on Sunday to join Katie, ...

I’ve been here for more than 3 weeks. 2 more to go. This time we have actual Danzig, singing to the various mothers.

Last night we lost ~5 hours to the X-stage problem. Tonight we lost about an hour (of perfect weather and amazing seeing) due to the BCUs locking up and the shell doing that thing where it panics. Yet we still squeezed in some good data for our own projects. Was Vanessa Bailey ...

We seem to have more problems on *our* nights than on any others. I guess that’s a great customer service policy, but we’re really in this to do our own science. So, the X stage is dead (again) and it says “Morzinski” on the schedule. We spent the first half of the ...

Jackie and the DTM Tweeps have been putting up signs about Tweeting #LifeAtLCO. We are closed due to crappy clouds here at Magellan. So we had a little coffee party and chatted. #lifeatlco pic.twitter.com/0sc08dAcMU — Jackie Faherty (@jfaherty) November 24, 2015 MagAO doesn’t Tweet (yet) but today it’s time for a ...

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 ...

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 ...

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: One of the clean room Vizcachas ...

Well, we hope you enjoyed yesterday’s blog post as much as we did! Amali’s clever and amusing artistry prompted us to develop the first-ever MagAO blog prize, and a new category of Award Winning Posts (at right). Here we present the 2015B MagAO Blog Award to Amali Vaz for her creation entitled A ...

Dear Gentle Readers: My name is Amali and I come from the LBTI and while I am superlative in many ways, generating coherent sentences from real words is not one of them. However! Katie (after, perhaps, too many nights of my not-sentences) says I am allowed to just blog pictures and diagrams, so, here, CHECK OUT ...

Regular readers of this blog have been hearing claims this entire run that the weather has been suboptimal and that the poor team has barely been able to take any data. I’m pretty sure this is just laziness on their part, because I’ve barely seen a cloud over the two nights I’ve been here: Tonight the ...

We give thanks for the stars coming out and the wind dropping down a bit, enough to get Trapezium in the North: And my first Thanksgiving dinner was a few weeks ago when my folks were visiting: Thankful astronomers: I really hope all those papi’s let JLo go:

Now that our engineering time is over — without us getting to do any engineering — it of course was a fairly clear night. Still some clouds blowing around, but the kind we can burn through with a 6.5 m telescope. Since we haven’t had much time to shake down MagAO, our first group ...

Well another night like last night. Amali got here today and she started up AO and also learned how to operate Clio. And then we sat here like this: And this: Sadly this means we didn’t get much of our engineering done. Oh El Nino… Another song dancing in the streets: This one to cheer ...

Open for less than 1/2 an hour tonight. I can’t work like this. Since we had a flash mob last night, here’s a song about people dancing in the streets. It also describes our cloud problem.

Today was our first night of Arizona engineering. We have a lot of calibrations to do, with all of our modes, but sadly it was cloudy and windy out of the North. I hear it’s because of El Nino. Sunset: These pictures are all from the past week or so. Which one is Tucson ...

We have reached 100% MagAO for 2015B. If you visit LCO you’ll notice that many, if not most, of the car doors have bird droppings all over them just behind the mirrors. This video shows you why — some of the birds have discovered that other birds live inside the mirrors, and spend most of ...

For the first time in MagAO’s history we closed the loop on our first night. It usually takes too long during the day to get everything done. We didn’t get Clio bolted on, but we were able to close the loop with the “dummy dichroic”. Following last night’s song, which was a Gaga Parody, ...

Clio is cold, thanks to Mauricio Navarette’s help with the liquid nitrogen. He brought a longer hose, showed me how to clear out the warm air before pumping it in, and filled Clio when ever he could today. Jared and I went for a ride in the new Clay car with Michigan grad students Jeb ...

Based on the issues Jared has been having with the Adsec Supervisor harddrives, we decided to test booting off the Clio harddrive spare that Vanessa and I made a few runs back. Laird and I supervised the crew moving the ASM to the top. Mauricio and I began pumping down Clio. And ...

It’s been really cloudy the last 48 hours. There have been no vizcachas at the clean room. I found a couple on the north side of the telescope this morning though. The clouds were still around after sunset. Laird and Katie made it! Laird lost some luggage, and they’re both tired after a hectic trip, but ...

I spent my whole day working on computers — hard drive partitions and RAIDs and RAM. So I don’t have much to talk about. There is a new power line going in just west of the road to the 100 inch. I’m not sure, but my best guess is that it has something to ...

We’re back. Actually I’ve been back since yesterday, but after a long stressful trip with lots of delays and lost luggage I didn’t get around to a post yesterday. All of our stuff turned on and is working great. I did find a failed hard disk, but the RAID is already synched. Our new ...

2015B is upon us. I’m getting ready to leave in a couple days. My parents drove down from NM for a visit since I won’t be seeing them at any of the upcoming holidays. We hiked to the top of Blackett’s Ridge — a 1700-foot elevation gain — and it was a ...