Vanessa arrived safely today after boarding 6 planes (but only traveling on 3) to get here. We are happy to see her! She is helping with Clio2 engineering as well as AO operations. We also had 2 of our observers arrive today; their run is in a couple days but they wanted to get up to speed on the system. Unfortunately, we couldn’t show them much at the start of the night, because while closing the loop on the first star, we had a hardware failure that got us pretty worried for a few hours. The ethernet module on our slope computer failed. Luckily, we had a spare, and Jared and Laird put it together without any help from our Italian friends who were all sound asleep in Tuscany.
After they got that fixed (in the mean time, Vanessa and I were working on the CLio computer backup), we got on sky. We had amazing seeing tonight.
And we got some amazing data.
We also took some spectral-differential imaging (SDI) data with the Wollaston beamsplitter in to divide the light into the narrow-band and continuum beams. Here is Laird inserting the Wollaston, which he has to go up to the instrument in the telescope to do:
It was a beautiful night.
We’re all quite tired.
But seeing Raphael and Pele dance it up on Xai //na gomasen is quite energizing!
And you can see their dancing much better in this video, I love the Namibian dance style!