Today marked the arrival of both Guanacos and our new team member Leah Albrow from MIT!
*Disclaimer: The Guanacos may have already arrived but I have yet to see one. For the time being, I must rely on third-party sightings of these mythical beings.*
Tonight also marked an important milestone in MagAO-X’s history. We conducted a whole night of observations with an unmodulated pyramid wavefront sensor using Rico’s new neural network!
The pyramid wavefront sensor exhibits a non-linear response, limiting its ability to accurately measure wavefronts. To mitigate this issue, AO groups will often modulate their pyramid wavefront sensors by spinning a little pyramid prism round and round (like a dreidel or a ballerina or me in my middle school computer lab with the little rolly chairs). But you can only spin a pyramid (or a Josh) so fast. The modulated pyramid is also limited in its sensitivity (the Josh, not so much). But with Rico’s non-linear reconstructor with a convolutional neural net (or NNRCNN for a fun acronym that rolls off the tongue), we don’t need to modulate our pyramid. We can run our AO loop fast and furiously, sensing wavefronts with the greatest of ease.
To celebrate, I have provided a list of things that are modulated and unmodulated.
Modulated:
- My sleep schedule (some nights I go to bed early and wake up around noon, other nights, I dream about permanently residing in Florida and things don’t end well):
- Parker’s facial expressions:
- The number of group members on our observing run:
While we witnessed the departures of Matthijs, Tiffany, and Laird over the last few days, we also gained new LCO first-timers being Rico, and most recently, Leah!
Unmodulated:
- Empanada volume on Sundays:
The wavefront sensor of the hour:
- Our excitement in getting to spend another 5 days at the best telescope in the world!
Song of the Day:
Fun fact:
A squirrel’s front teeth never stop growing.