Tonight was an interesting night. We got on sky pretty quickly and proceeded to taking science images with ~1″ seeing. Everything was working well until the seeing blew up to >3″ for about an hour, essentially killing our first target.
The AO fought admirably throughout the horrible seeing bursts but eventually we just had to wait it out. The seeing eventually died down to a steady 1-1.5,” allowing us to make some great science observations for a few hours.
But the night wasn’t done messing with us. Our next obstacle: clouds. They came in and pretty much obliterated all flux hitting the wavefront sensor for about about 2 hours in the second half of the night. After some good old-fashioned waiting and looking outside with our own eyes to inspect the clouds, we were convinced there were enough non-cloudy holes to move to the next science target.
But then we encountered our third obstacle: a telescope malfunction. This effectively killed the rest of the night for us.
However–while we were on sky we did make some great observations of some very interesting targets. All in all, despite the various problems, I would call tonight a successful night. Everything is semi-awesome.
Pictures:
Quotes:
Various people at various times: “Everything is not awesome when the seeing is bad”; “Everything is awesome when the clouds disappear!”
Laird: “I can’t work in these conditions. I can’t do this.” (referring to operating the AO in the horrible seeing)
Laird: “It’s not me, it’s you” (claiming it’s not the AO’s fault)
Laird (redacted)
Jared (in response to redaction): “You know, you can just make up quotes for the blog.”
Goodnight/morning everyone.