Well the Wildcats lost to the Buckeyes this evening, but take heart, Arizona, things are looking up for us MagAO’ers down here.
The main highlight of today is that the AO system is running closed loop on 0.8″ simulated seeing at 1 KHz sample speeds (where we were at the end of Comm 1). We have 300-325 modes running with a brand new (better) basis set of Fernando that will hopefully work on sky (which would be an improvement over the 200-250 modes achieved on-sky in comm 1). We’re going to keep the CRO on tomorrow night to take the time to get our interaction matrices and camera focus positions right… but everything seems to working well.
There was also a VIP guest tour of AO operations today, and the guests were “more excited than undergrads” (as Vanessa put it) when we demonstrated closing the loop.
Vanessa and I have been working on all sorts of housekeeping and optimizing Clio tasks…
Of course the zoo is still hopping here:
“You should show them the chaos that is MagAO” –Dave
“Sitting through an earthquake here feels like observing at the MMT” –Laird
“It’s the Wild West — It’s Cowboy astronomy” –Katie & Vanessa