Our ranks are thinning — Alan Uomoto left today and I didn’t even get to say goodbye. Bye Alan! Thanks for all your help in getting us up and running!!
We are still engineering our many modes on sky and debugging telescope and instrument problems. One of our exciting new modes is Simultaneous Differential Imaging (SDI), which we tried out on-sky tonight!
Our ASM is a beautiful piece of advanced technology, keeping our wavefronts flat at 1000 times/second (read Kate’s post for why!). But occasionally the slopes being sent cause the ASM shell to go into its safe position. It’s either the switch BCU or the BCU 39. We have a spare switch BCU (see below), but don’t have a spare BCU 39 with us. Hang in there BCUs.
My mom would like to know what a vizcacha is — They are these little rodents, basically a rabbit, squirrel and kangaroo in one package, that live here at LCO and entertain us sunning themselves on the wall or hopping like kangaroos across the rocks! The official mascot of VisAO is Vizzy the Vizcacha:
And speaking of mascots, the Clio team have been wearing our UA Wildcat pride here at LCO:
