Today the honour of blogging is all mine (Matthijs). A few of us went up before dinner to start preparing for a busy night full of experimental engineering observations (in particular Sebastiaan after he had stayed up until 10.30am to align VisX again). During daylight we of course managed to enjoy the company of some of the cute critters around here.
Sebastiaan started out the night with some observations of Betelgeuse, until it got too low and the ADCs which we only noticed because of our most underrated camera (which deserves more praise). After that, Elena spent some time looking at the self coherent camera (SCC) imaging.
During this observing run Sebastiaan and Josh have attempted multiple times to use EFC for some deep dark hole observations of Alpha Centauri (in order to please Jared). These observations have been tarnished by bad seeing, bad calibrations, fluctuations in the laser power and alignment issues. Here’s an impression of what that did to Sebastiaan:
However, today was the day that all the stars aligned, good seeing, good calibration, good alignment (scripts) and it finally worked.
Eden has been looking at some donuts all week (no one knows why) but she’s finally figured out to turn these donuts into some (possibly) correct Strehl estimates (camtip FTW).
Myself, I interjected myself between some observations just to try out my semi-analytical FLOWFS control loop (of which I forgot to take a picture…).
Elena also managed to get some pretty PIAA observations.
In conclusion, we are doing great and if I had to summarise it in a movie quote I would say: “Desert power” – Dune 2021 .
Song of the Day
Someone mentioned potentially observing a target with 1612 in the name (or I might have imagined it) but this song has been stuck in my head all night. Enjoy!