MagAO Commissioning Day 30: Local minimum – Extreme Wavefront Control Lab

Well, we are almost home… we made it to the Dallas airport. When we left in early November, the election had just concluded and I was still eating Halloween candy. Thanksgiving has come and gone. And now that we are back in the US, we are hit with the usual full-blown American Christmas with music, trees, and poinsettias overstimulating our tired traveling brains. We were trying to find the Admiral’s club in DFW and were talking very nerdily about MCMC algorithms to help us find it, and Laird said “I hope we don’t get trapped in a local minimum!” So here we are in a local minimum, and will be getting back to Tucson in a few hours. So let’s look at some highlights from the run.

Sol — The trip started with a solar eclipse on Nov 13th

soaring — We played some ultimate frisbee to unwind and for team comraderie.

MagAO1 — The control room was packed -- but we never ran out of cookies!

Kate Alan Phil Jared Ya-Lin — We saw some beautiful sunsets

Four years — And had some touching advisor-student moments

I put on my pants just like everyone else — We asked for more cowbell, and Simone wavefront-sensed by eye and figured out that we were phase-wrapping at the pyramid ... and that it could be fixed with a sign change in the interaction matrices

21 mas — And made the highest angular resolution image in the universe -- Theta 1 Ori C in the optical. We later beat this by a few mas on the same binary. Better images are on the way.

Last quote of the run:

“Is it finally safe to say things around you two?” – Laird, to Jared and Katie.