Imagine you’ve got an invisible treasure in a shopping cart with two broken wheels. You’re blindfolded, and you can only keep the treasure if you can push the broken cart to an exact location on a giant noodle flopping in the wind. That’s MagAO/Clio spectroscopy.
Since I want to take spectra of “faint” companions to nearby young stars, I have to carefully set the angle of my targets to be parallel to the slit. The slit angle changes a lot.
Throw clouds and power-outages into the mix, and suddenly trying to limp a star onto a moving target becomes quite the challenge.
I did get some good photometric data and perhaps some usable spectra. I’ll have to wait and see how the spectra turn out.
Maybe I’ll learn to compile target lists of 0th magnitude stars and observe without the rotator. But until then, I’ll be pushing instruments to their limits!
Here’s a video of the Clio Slit:
And here’s a video of Clio’s star nudger:
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