MagAO-C 2014B

We’re home!!! And we had a good trip back: It was a good run. 37 nights on sky, good weather, good telescope, good AO, good crew, good astronomers… good data! Thanks to all who made this run a success. 42 days away from home is a long time. But from our pre-astronomer lives, Jared and ...

Hello, it’s MagAO’s favorite mascot, Vizzy. Laird, Jared, and Katie left on Day 41. Here are some pictures from their last couple days at LCO this year. I miss them. I’m glad they came.

According to the blog, we were working the night shift for 36 nights (see Povilas, the blog can be useful). That means we’re almost completely nocturnal at this point, and not doing so well at this “awake during normal hours” thing. We have an overnight flight from Santiago to Dallas tomorrow night ...

Yesterday was day 40 and we switched back over to a day schedule, but the blog server was down so here I am posting now. Thanks to the 4th-floor at CAAO for getting us running again! A few final pix from our last night on-sky — night 39: Day 40 was a short day for me. ...

“Ultima noche nadie se enoja”… Old Chilean saying, “on the last day (night) nobody gets mad”, so finally the last night for this run is here Katie and Jared can’t wait for it to be over, just a few minutes ago they both say “last target of the night !”… I know the feeling, so ...

We only have 1 more night of observing left. Can you believe it? And after all that, the last two nights are mine and Katie’s to do with as we please. We have a nice informal queue worked out between us. It goes something like: seeing 0.5″ or better, we do ...

So it’s my time to write? Last night for me on the mountain, and to date the finest AO shift. The team is smoothing the instrument quite a lot, and on my call I’d say the biggest issue was helping Laird when he had “engineering issues” with the washing machine (the shame!). You guys still have a ...

Finally, after working for two years at Las Campanas, I could collaborate with the AO Team, which went as a rather smoothly work. Also the collaboration from Katie and Jared is amazing. They have been here for 36 days, and it appears just as if they had been a couple of weeks. What I’m trying ...

This was our night: We were closed for the first 7 or so hours of the night. I got some software maintenance done, and at one point I went out into the dome to see what was going on. I found Laird and Katie with their heads inside the instrument. We finally got to open ...

Tonight… MagAO and the Return of the PI: We are happy to report that Laird arrived safely today. He ran the AO tonight, and gave Jared and I a break — it was nice to not have to worry about the loop! He made it all the way to sunrise. (Jared and I ...

  It’s been my first time observing at Magellan and I hope it isn’t my last! Everyone here at Las Campanas have been great, especially Katie and Jared, thank you guys for all of your help and company through the night shifts 🙂 This was possibly the closest to America that I’ve been for a Thanksgiving, I’m ...

This is my 3rd thanksgiving in 4 spent with MagAO somewhere other than home . 3 years ago I had “thanksgiving” in Florence with my Mom and Dad and Laird. 2 years ago we were here at LCO duing our first-light commissioning run. This ...

Infrared cameras are tricky beasts, forced by us ground-based astronomers to work while bathed in background photons impinging from every direction. Clio is also a bit on the complicated side, working as it does all the way out to 5 microns, with two camera scales (hence a movable camera lens), two filter wheels, and various other moving parts. During some ...

Ending last night, I left the telescope thinking of what to share on this blog, driving “home” (Nagoya Palace). A cute shot shaped the place where we stay half of our life. “Nagoya Palace” from the road.   Day 30 is not from a regular night shift, longer than my 12 days a long time ago. Even though, ...

We had another good night. Some thin/patchy/high clouds blew in after about 2 am, but we were on a bright star and really didn’t notice. It was “Empanada Sunday”, and we all had empanadas for our night lunches. The most exciting part of my day was getting to see Vizzy at the ...

My blog post for tonight was inspired by the coincidence of Katie searching the online astronomical database SIMBAD for a bright star near where I wanted to point on the sky and finding “AO Men.” No, Laird and Jared haven’t been honored with entries in SIMBAD. As I said, it was coincidence.   Variable stars, as they ...

Tonight was great. Good AO loop, good weather, good science. Last night, though, the internet was down for a few hours in the middle of the night, so we weren’t able to investigate the airglow until tonight, which we saw last night as fringing on the all-sky cam. Yuri Beletsky, Magellan Instrument Support Scientist and ...

We opened our blackout curtains to a cloud-free sky yesterday evening. And then we had a long relaxing night in 0.5″ +/- 0.1″ seeing. We feel much better about life this morning. After 26 days of continuous MagAO, we have a few corrections and clarifications to make: First of all, I did not change my ...

Long boring night tonight, sitting around waiting for clouds to clear. We started out ok, but after about 2 hours the clouds rolled in. We closed for several hours, and then opened but couldn’t get anything done with extinction jumping between 0 and more than 5 mags. The only other noteworthy event was that ...

The past few weeks have been full of exciting firsts* for me: first trip to South America, first real Spanish conversations, first taste of mote con huesillos, and especially exciting — first time observing at Magellan, and first time using MagAO! *Unfortunately, there’s not been a first sighting of the famed viscachas — or any other high desert ...

Well Kate, we don’t have a clever fix for you yet. But why be clever when hacking will do? The technical difficulties last night were from timeouts in the TCS communication (which mysteriously had never timed out until we tried taking data for Vanessa……). Jared implemented a workaround in which we timed ...

Metaphorical rain in this case, not actual rain – don’t panic! I’m told there’s a blog post like this one on every run, though I’ve been lucky enough to avoid being here for them so far. Tonight, we had a few technical difficulties. For those of you in the know, this picture speaks volumes. In good news, ...

I go back down the mountain and begin my journey home tomorrow. I had a successful night and a half with some pretty good seeing, and I’m quite pleased with my data. As Jared mentioned 2 posts ago, my observations required pushing Clio and the MagAO system to their limits. While we identified a few ...

Clio is a good little camera. It has chip defects, cross-talk, and ghosts on bright stars, but what thermal-IR camera doesn’t? It also has a lot to offer and is very popular as seen by the telescope demand for MagAO/Clio. It has a deep enough well depth to take L-band images in ...

So the last two or three nights we’ve been using MagAO at its geometric limits. By that I mean the various angles and rotations and cable contortions that the exciting science targets required. There was a conversation like this last night (accuracy not 100%): Francois: “What’s the elevation limit?” Jared: “Thirty degrees.” Francois: “So I can ...

Tonight started rather auspiciously with the best green flash that I’ve ever seen. Unfortunately, neither Jared nor I got a good picture, but here’s one I took during an  early commissioning run. Trust us – it was epic. During twilight, Jared and Povilas added gaffers tape to the guider CCD. In the end though, they decided ...

My duty here on this run is to give Jared and Katie a bit of a break, which includes taking over some of the blogging. Tonight we started the night by swapping out the batteries in the wind monitor, which meant that we had to tilt the telescope over so that we could get to it. ...

We had an action packed night, with many more targets than we’ve been observing so far on this run. The AO system wasn’t on its best behaviour, but we have learned to recognize most of its bad moods quickly and we can usually slap it back into shape right away. Kate Follette is here, ready ...

Our T.O. for the last week, Jorge, has dubbed us “the aoista operation”. Tonight was pretty calm – no major technical problems, a few scientific discoveries, and a pretty relaxed night. The clouds rolled in a couple of hours before dawn, so we closed out with some minor engineering tasks. Tonight was TJ’s last ...

Things went pretty well tonight. Alfio called us to check in and we could proudly show him that his software is keeping MagAO running smoothly: In fact, we are mostly keeping his chair empty for him: Except for when things need attention: Our friends over at Cerro Pachon are observing with GPI on the Gemini South telescope ...

It’s day 13 – we’ve been here almost 2 weeks out of 6 now – so we’re almost a third of the way through. I think of it like running a 5k (3.1 miles) where the first mile is the phase where you try to get out ahead of the pack, and the second ...

Now that we have 3.3V where we’re supposed to have 3.3V, and we’re using good fiber cables, everything is easy. It was also a nice night, with stable (if not always good) seeing. This is much more relaxing than some earlier nights. It also means there isn’t much to write about. These next ...

The other day we said we were back to normal… the clouds had gone away and we had a great night on-sky with a good AO correction, doing fun science. However, some not-so-normal problems cropped up again, and we just got through a bit of a stressful time. We were losing communication with ...

Tonight was Laird’s last night for the first part of this run — he goes down later today to return home for a couple weeks, then he’ll be back again for the last couple weeks of the run. Jared and I will be taking care of everything while he’s gone. We were also ...

Well things finally got back to normal tonight at LCO. Not a cloud in the sky, seeing was 0.5 arcseconds most of the night, T.J. fell asleep in the control room, and most importantly – our good friend Miss Viz was hanging out at the clean room today! We haven’t seen any Viscachas ...

We were clouded out for the first half of the night. Once we got open, we started out observing “Runa’s Star”. Runa picked his star as a set up target during our commissioning run 2 years ago. He also deserves credit for designing one side of our MagAO coffee mugs. Once the clouds ...

On a submarine they say you don’t really start learning how the reactor plant works until you stand your first watch by yourself. It’s kind of the same thing for us, this is our first run without Alfio here to clean up our messes. Tonight was fun. We pushed MagAO into ...

Tonight we saw some cute pictures of the various children in our lives dressed up for Halloween. Well don’t worry, but we had the holiday covered here as well. Here is a monster of an old man who showed up just before sunset: He looks scary but we let him run our instrument. ...

The big story over the last 30 hours has been our atmospheric dispersion corrector, or ADC. When you look at a star through the atmosphere, it will be “dispersed” into a rainbow, meaning that the different wavelengths of light (colors) will land at different spots on the camera. But if you have an ...

Today was a long night. Too long to report all the events. But, we installed the NAS and Clio, took off the ASM cover and put on the wind monitor, and closed the loop! Three students from the Universidad Tecnica Federico Santa María, Javier Garcés, Sebastián Zúñiga, and Mario Castro, arrived today. They will be working with ...

The big news for today is that Laird and Katie cabled, plumbed, and powered-up the ASM. We’ve never done that before without at least one Arcetrian in the room. It all went very smoothly, and the ASM is ready to go on sky! Our day started with Oscar introducing us to the Cherimoya. ...

There was a cold wind blowing today but in the hottest/sunniest parts of the day it calmed down. During this time we moved the ASM from the clean room up to the Clay dome: It’s beautiful up here. Breakfast was amazing: fresh-squeezed orange juice, oatmeal with warm milk, dos huevos fritos por favor, and ...

MagAO fans… we have arrived! It’s nice to be back here at LCO in Chile, where all the coffee is strong, all the viscachas are good-looking, and all the food is above average. Jared, Laird, and I left Tucson on Saturday and arrived here on Sunday, for an uneventful trip. Believe it ...

MagAO has produced another Ph.D.! Kate successfully defended her dissertation on Thursday, at the very un-Astronomer hour of 9 am. Nevertheless her talk was well attended, and all of that hard work paid off. Congratulations to Dr. Kate Follette, Queen of VisAO SDI. Now that the fun is over, Laird,Katie, and ...

We’ve had a few meetings lately to prepare for our upcoming 2014B run in Oct–Dec. This will be our second regular science run, and our operations are becoming more smooth and efficient, so we are going to have a more streamlined personnel plan. It will also be our longest run yet (37 nights!). We ...

This past week the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute (NExSCI) hosted the 2014 Sagan Summer Workshop, which was on Imaging Planets and Disks. Several members of the MagAO team and extended family attended, and presented some of our latest and greatest results. The workshop was held on the campus of Caltech, in Pasadena. We all ...