Well, folks, it’s been a few days but the content you crave is here. That’s right: viscacha photos! Just scroll past all this boring stuff.
Today was a sort of sneak preview of install day. MagAO-X exists as two separate and arguably equally important halves, the electronics rack and the optical table. We eventually need both halves on the platform. However, they must be sundered in two for transport, as they are connected only by a delicate umbilical of electronic cables.
We have started staging the main part of the instrument at the summit in the auxiliary building, which saves a fair bit of time on our install day. This means cables are coming off the day before.
As always, the most delicate part of the operation is the disconnection of the hand-soldered ribbon cables that carry commands to our MEMS deformable mirrors. Eden, Parker, and Katie carried out this fiddly task (along with removing many other, less fiddly, cables).
Once the cables were disconnected and secured, MagAO-X had to be wrapped for transport. I always think it looks like a foil-wrapped burrito.
The burrito had to be lifted off its legs, which we did with the help of the staff here at LCO (and a big honking crane).
The legs are a little adaptive acoustics system of their own, which can remove vibrations transmitted from the ground before they mess up our images. The legs get a separate ride, while the main part of MagAO-X rides up to the telescope on its little cart. Which is in turn on a truck.
I cannot be sure, but I believe the above image was the result of Katie Twitchell imagining a world in which the active leveling system was able to keep the orientation of MagAO-X constant despite going uphill.
Alas, the electronics rack is now lonely. It stays in the cleanroom overnight to be available for last-minute software work before we move it to the summit for installation on the platform.
Fortunately, I was there to keep it company.
Literary Interlude
I have chosen the option to embed a quotation rather than lyrics from the Song of the Day (as per blog rules for 2024B). Many of us spent good chunks of this day in the library at Las Campanas trying to finish other related work in the lulls between major operations.
This quote from “The Library of Babel” seems relevant to exoplanet direct detection in general:
Visiblemente, nadie espera descubrir nada.
A la desaforada esperanza, sucedió, como es natural, una depresión excesiva.
For the obligate Anglophones:
Obviously, nobody expects to discover anything.
Naturally, this inordinate hope was followed by a profound depression.
Jorge Luis Borges is one of the quintessential magical realist writers, and “The Library of Babel” is one of my favorite short stories about … libraries, (in)finity, combinatorics, information theory, and perhaps cosmology? You should go read it (or en Español, si quieras).
Viscachas
The viscachas have been harder to spot this run, but we got a bumper crop today courtesy Laird and Parker, with five confirmed viscacha sightings.
Song of the Day
Today’s song of the day is unrelated.