Today’s the day. And it’s going to happen again and again. But for this time, the first order of business is to pick up where we left off at the end of the day yesterday and move MagAO-X, safely, from the cleanroom -> up the summit -> onto the Nasmyth platform.
Moving from the clean room to the telescope
The team continues where they left off yesterday, but now donning hard hats and hard-toed boots since the cranes are needed to transfer the ~2000 pounds of instrument onto its specialized cart (and off its specialized cart later on…!).
Special thanks to the hard-working staff at LCO, we couldn’t have done it without you.
First year Master’s student Tiffany Nguyen captures the vibes expertly on move day.
…But so do the other grad students 🙂
It is critical that once MagAO-X is on the flatbed truck, it is transported -slowly- to minimize the vibrations induced on the various internal optics, which are sensitive.
The instrument was looking a little goofy during the ride up the summit to the telescope, maybe it was enjoying the ride?
Installing the instrument onto the *West* Nasmyth platform
Dedicated readers of the blog may think they’ve seen all this before, but it turns out this install procedure is quite different. How so? Well, for this run, the instrument will be installed on the platform opposite of the usual side of the telescope. This is subject to lead to (undoubtedly) a whole set of new challenges, of which I’m sure we’ll encounter tomorrow when the team works on aligning the instrument to the telescope in this new position with no existing reference marks.
Wildlife intermission
Let’s briefly pause to admire some very nice shots of the various fauna found in and around the LCO campus. Pic credits in this section go to the wickedly-talented Viktoria Kutnohorsky!
Afternoon executive time
Today we ran into an uncommon situation where we weren’t expected to be working on jobs related to the instrument. This is because the Magellan-Clay telescope wasn’t quite ours to infest yet (there is another observer who had one more night of telescope time, and needed sensitive calibrations to be taken during the day). As such, many of us found other outlets to let loose for a bit after a week of hard day preparing the instrument for its first night on-sky.
We’ve a new addition to the calves –> cows crew! Shoutout to our Durham collaborator Rob Harris for hanging out with us at the LCO gym.
Color of the Day
In anticipation of getting on-sky in ~24 hours, the swatch of the day is black w/ white polka dots.
Song of the Day
Today’s song performed by a couple of biblically-accurate French Canadians