Like our new friend Emi mentioned in her blog post, there were a lot of us on the mountain yesterday. Josh, Eden and I rolled up to LCO that morning after a smooth trip from Tucson, and Matthijs joined us later that afternoon. As fun as it was to have (nearly) the whole crew down here at once, the arrival of reinforcements meant Parker, Jay, and Alycia all headed down into La Serena this morning. We wish them better luck in their journey home than they had on the way here.
Before I talk about tonight, I would be remiss if I didn’t shout out the alignment work that Laird and I did yesterday afternoon. With only the power of a ball driver, a suction cup, and a pair of tweezers, we managed to correct the mis-clocking of one of our Lyot coronagraph masks. If you think you have steady hands, try holding them both at arm’s length on-and-off for two hours while navigating a minefield of extremely sensitive optics that stand in your way. This was a task not for the faint of heart—or the large of hands.
We had a beautiful albeit chilly sunset to kick off our night. Logan and Emi went vizzy-spotting, because it is simply impossible to have too many viscacha photos.
Tonight we took a lot of data in MagAO-X’s Hα mode, which is a mode of operation that we use when we’re looking at young systems undergoing active planet formation. The first half of the night was dedicated to our collaborators at Michigan, and we spent the second half observing some targets from our very own Laird Close and Jialin Li. Because Jialin joined on Zoom, we were blessed with a reluctant guest appearance from Jujube:
Conditions were decent, so science went on pretty much uninterrupted for the entire night. At the end of the night the wind started to pick up, but we didn’t let that stop us from taking data until it started to get light outside.
In other news, we’ve been making some critical advancements, pushing the boundaries of extreme AO beyond what has ever been seen before. No, I’m not referring to automatic gain optimization, or coronagraphic low-order wavefront sensing, or even electric field conjugation for quasi-static speckle nulling. Instead, I’m referring to Maggie-OX: our trusty computerized voice that, among other things, now contains a variety of . . . walk-up songs? Picture this: you’re about to sit down at the AO station in the control room. You’ve got a long night ahead of you, battling r0 and τ0 and all the other nuances that come with extreme AO operation. You’re a little stressed, and more than a little tired. Then, suddenly, in the distance, you hear it: the little speaker at the control station playing your specifically-designated hype music. People are clapping, cheering even. You’re sauntering up to the computer in slow motion. Fireworks explode in the background. It’s a scene straight from a movie. You were born for this.
Okay, maybe it’s not that dramatic. But it is fun to have a theme song, and laughter makes the nights go faster. It’s the little things.
Song of the Day: