Empanada Sunday is always hard to follow, but today started off on a really strong note: an adult and a baby vizzy graced us with their presence just before sunset. Viscachas are notoriously jumpy creatures (in both senses of the word), so there was a National Geographic-esque effort to get some decent shots. Fortunately, our efforts paid off. I now present to you some full-resolution images of the cutest little guys known to mankind:
And some slightly-less-cute behind-the-scenes footage:
After the sun went down and vizzy-viewing was over, we got straight to work. Jay and I first fiddled with some cables on the platform to diagnose a shutter issue, and before we knew it, we were on-sky. The seeing started off a little rough at >1 arcsecond, but after a little patience and a little tweaking the AO system, we started to produce some good images for our collaborators at Michigan/MIT.
(quick aside: if you don’t know what we mean by “seeing,” this blog post by Logan offers a quick and easy explanation).
The last few hours of the night were for engineering. We started off with a game of telephone: Laird went onto the telescope platform to do some alignment with Jialin acting as chief flashlight-holder and walkie-talkie user. I sat in the driver’s seat in the telescope control room with the other walkie-talkie and Jared on Zoom. To get our mirror aligned, I relayed communication from Jared over the walkie-talkie to Jialin, who then relayed the message to Laird. Then Laird would tweak the alignment and tell Jialin, who radioed the message to me where it was finally heard by Jared. Thankfully it only took us a couple of iterations, and nothing got too garbled as the message made its way from Point A to Point B.
After alignment we continued with more engineering tasks, mostly trying to use our low-order wavefront sensor to get vibrations under control. I also got some time to experiment with the ADCs (atmospheric dispersion controllers). Unbeknownst to me, as I tinkered with speckle fitting and prism angles, the other two first-year grad students on the mountain (with the help of the talented Jialin Li) were taking portraits that would make any astronomy aficionado burn with envy:
Oh well. There are many nights yet to come. In honor of finally (sort of) getting into the rhythm of a night schedule, the song of the day:
Don’t wake me with so much
Michael Stipe (and also me)
. . .
My bed is pulling me, gravity