2014A Day 12: Count to Ten

Our first non-Arizona visiting astronomer was taking data with Clio and VisAO tonight. His name is Brett Addison of the University of New South Wales, Sydney.

Here is a picture of the team with our visitor. On the left side of the room going back: Jared, Katie, Brett, Hugo. On the right, coming forward: Alfio, TJ, Laird, Ya-Lin. Photo courtesy Jordan.

Also Alycia arrived safely today.

Today the seeing was bad to very bad for almost the whole night.

Seeing was off the charts. Yet we managed to close the loop with very very low gains and only 66 modes.

A zoom-in of the seeing. The part where it starts to get better is at around 5:30am, and we started around 8pm, so that was a long night of a lot of bad seeing!
The AOI GUI is running very smoothly tonight, which is great because we won’t have Alfio here for the whole run…

Alfio made a new mirror diagnostic last year that shows the mirror commands sampled at a very high speed. See the video here: It’s a really cool one!

Then this run he added the plot to the right that shows the maximum mirror command at each time step. I liked this plot so much because it shows you both how stable the loop is as you are adjusting the gains, and also gives a diagnostic for what happened if the loop breaks open. I told Alfio it was my favorite plot, so he made a quick update to the code:

My favorite plot.

Laird took a photo of the pupil from the NAS. It’s just like last year’s — even the bird-dropping-fiducial is still there, only now it’s de-aluminized tertiary. The slot (lollipop at 9:00) is useful for a fiducial when modeling the PSF of Clio — see my post from last year.
Also this mirror has lots of bird-dropping fiducials. But anyway… Hi Mom! And Dad! And everybody!
Another panorama

In honor of our knocking out targets numbers 1-10 tonight (although we had to skip target 3 due to seeing and faintness, so it was 9 targets total…) here is Tina Dico singing her song Count to Ten: