I fell asleep trying to write this blog last night, if that tells you anything about how hard we’ve been working now that we’re back down here at LCO. That’s right — all good things must come to an end, and MagAO-X’s first experiment with remote operations has finally called it a wrap. Uninstall day started bright and early (well, dark and early) at 5AM, where we briefly regrouped with the home team on Zoom before the telescope closed up. Once the telescope was safely parked, we took a few measurements on the platform for posterity and began the familiar procedure of undoing all of our hard work from install day back in March.
It hasn’t been overly cold here but it has been super windy! That made it even more important to bundle up our instrument real tight for the ride down the hill.
Despite only having three of us here, we were able to stay on pretty much the same schedule as we do when the whole gang is lending a hand. Everything was moved into the cleanroom and all but the DM cables were complete before dinner, which is a lot more work than it sounds like. Our smooth progress came to a grinding halt, however, when we started to have serious problems with the drives on one of the computers. While Jared and Joseph tried to diagnose the issue, Parker and I packed up the infrared camera for our friends Rob and Viktoria back in Durham.
At this point, I can’t really remember what exactly happened the rest of the evening. That’s my bad for waiting so long to write this blog. But by looking at the random photos in my camera roll I can tell you that we did the following in some order at some time after we brought everything to the cleanroom:
- Uninstalled and packed up the HDFS to bring back to the HCAT lab
- Removed the y-band filter from fwpupil
- Back-flushed the glycol system and cleaned the filter
- Drained the CRED-2 of glycol
- Checked the ADC alignment
- Removed the infamous cardboard tubes
And before we knew it it was already 11PM.
Colors of the Day
Since we pulled an enormously long workday, I’m choosing two of my favorite contrasting colors from the sunset.
