It’s nearly three weeks into this observing run and being stuck on this mountain together has finally driven us to form opposing factions. Professor Laird Close fearlessly leads the “day shift” camp: holders of doctoral degrees, champions of going to bed at a reasonable hour, and cart-building aficionados. The second “night shift” faction is largely anarchist, with its leadership defaulting to whichever graduate student is the least sleepy when a decision needs to be made. Only the unthinkable, an alliance between these two groups, will grant us the strength to accomplish our next monumental task. That’s right—it’s about time to uninstall MagAO-X from the telescope.
But before we do that, we had one last night of on-sky shenanigans (and science!) to get to. Before sunset, Eden went pro-photographer on some viscachas, and Jialin caught a tender moment:
We then briefly reconciled our differences to focus on something both night owls and early birds can agree on: watching the beautiful sunset together. Sadly, this is our last sunset with Sebastiaan and Elena before they head back to the Netherlands. We wish they would come hang out with us in the Sonoran Desert sometime, not just the Atacama… “Parting is such sweet sorrow”
It is the [west], and [XWCL] is the sun“
Tonight was an observing night for our Michigan/MIT collaborators, and we were able to get some really nice Hα images once the seeing calmed down in the second half of the night: “[MagAO-X] will make the face of heaven so fine / That all the world will be in love with night”. The day-shifters missed the best seeing due to their sensible bedtime, but on their way down the mountain they stumbled upon some critters we hadn’t yet met on this run:
By any other name would [be] as [scary].”
Once we’d closed up for the night, the de-cabling crew took on the task of shutting down the instrument and beginning the removal process. Despite a pervasive, nagging sensation that we were under-supervised, we managed to get the instrument ready for the day crew’s craning operations.
As I write this, the day crew is up on the telescope platform picking up where we left off. Despite our differences, I wish them the best of luck in their endeavors. We’ll reunite in the cleanroom sometime later today to begin reassembling the whole thing—but that’s content for another blog post.
Song of the Day: okay, okay. This might be a bit of a stretch from this run’s blog rules. I really love classical music, but since there had to be song lyrics written into the blog post I thought I’d have to abstain this run. Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet Overture does not contain lyrics, however it is based off of a play that is rife with quotes that seemed appropriate. We’re getting close to the end of the run here, so I figured why not: