Alycia Weinberger – Extreme Wavefront Control Lab

MagAO-X 2025B Day 15: An AO Puzzle

We’re all here to figure out puzzles like “Do rocky exoplanets have the same composition as Earth?”, “Do all protoplanets produce Halpha emission as they accrete?”, and “Can our AO system reach the contrast necessary to image low mass planets in reflected light?”

It turns out, we also have a lot of puzzles to solve that we didn’t realize we needed PhDs for, such as, “Why is the attempt to upgrade the AO computer cursed?” and “Why does Joseph no longer think computers are deterministic?”

The saga of the long-legged PI and the Cursed Computer (photo credit: Joseph)

Then there are the questions that make us think we should have gone into philosophy rather than science, such as, “Why do we find clouds so pretty even though we hate them?”

The hardest questions are the deep mathematical ones like, “Why is the seeing when I’m on the telescope always worse than the median?”

And then there are the idle puzzles one wonders about at 2 AM such as, “What is the collective noun for a bunch of graduate students? [my vote is for ‘pile’ as in the P in PhD]”, and “How many snacks does it take to satisfy said pile?”

Perhaps a better question is, “Can we get Trader Joe’s to sponsor MagAO-X?”

I’m optimistic that all of these questions will be answered in my lifetime.

But when the seeing gets bad or the sky clouds over, the puzzles we really like are the NYT crossword type (see 2024Ab Day 10). I’ve never made a crossword puzzle before. Tonight I experimented with two free grid-creation applications, and my main takeaway is that the folks edited by Will Schortz are quite impressive. Nevertheless, here for your enjoyment is the AO Puzzle:

Fact of the Day: A record 889 contestants participated in the 2025 American Crossword Puzzle tournament, which is held every year in Connecticut.

Song of the Day

I finally got a walkup song!

MagAO-X 2024B Day 13: These are the nights to hold on to

I think I’ve had observing time at LCO in every month (though I’m unable to figure out from the records I have on my laptop if I’ve actually physically been at LCO in every month), but this is the best November that I remember. The days are warm and lovely, the nights are clear and crisp with good seeing. “These are the days to hold on to” and “this is the time to remember.” I’m busy using this run to forget the 2024Ab weather.

Yes, that is seeing on the DIMM below 0.4 arcseconds — This is the time to remember ‘Cause it will not last forever

Even though I never forget how beautiful it here, I can’t help taking more photos of lovely sunsets and Venus next to the dome.

Oh LCO, [you’re giving] me the best of you

A lot of Magellan observations are done remotely now, but I continue to think people ought to come and experience the Observatory and learn the instruments in person. There are no shortage of students on this run, of course, given that MagAO-X is so hands-on. And I admit that I am remotely observing on two separate nights in the next month alone. But I hope some others see these photos and want to come. I fear a future when we’re all just looking at screens of telescopes.

Our Telescope Operator, Roger, doesn’t have to walk into the dome to look at the telescope. “time is gonna change”

On a different subject, I have to say that for something not very funny to 9 people sharing one bathroom in the dome, our clogged baño caused a lot of hilarity. Thanks to the heroic efforts (though I will spare you the photo) of Roger, Laird, and Parker, the situation was resolved. Now we “look back and have to laugh. We lived through a lifetime and the aftermath.”

Thanks to everyone (including the missing Jared) for their help in making this a great MagAO-X run. “You’ve given me the best of you”

Song of the Day: Anyone my age knows the song I’ve been quoting as it was absolutely unavoidable in 1986-87 and possibly the prom theme for every senior class in America in 1987. Magellan wasn’t my first love, but “I’m warm from the memory of days to come.”

MagAO-X 2024Ab Day 10: “30+ years of speckle”

This week could have gone better: Delayed and missed flights, fog, clouds, bad seeing, and I got a head cold. New at LCO this trip: no Covid test on arrival. In case you’re wondering, I brought my own, and I don’t have Covid.

Last night, I turned the super fancy MagAO-X system with its three deformable mirrors into a very expensive speckle camera. 30 years ago, when AO was in its infancy, I did my PhD thesis taking short exposures to “freeze” the seeing and a lot of Fourier transforms to recover high spatial resolution images. Well, in 1.3″ seeing, MagAO-X could still do some correction (miraculously) and the EM-CCDs in MagAO-X can run fast (I ran at about 60 ms, which is considerably longer than the normal coherence time at visible wavelengths). I can play some of those old speckle imaging tricks on images like this:

See the binary star? Of course you do. I select the best of the tens of thousands of images I took and average them up. Combined with other data I have, these images will let us measure masses of the stars.

Tonight, however, the seeing is finally down to median LCO conditions and the forecasted clouds have not yet arrives, so MagAO-X is weeping tears of joy:

A saturated PSF with all those Airy rings!

I may be bummed about the weather, but it’s been fun to be back here and collaborating with the ever-growing team. People are working shifts, so we didn’t get a photo of everyone, but here’s an obligatory sunset selfie with clear skies above.

And, dear reader, as a devoted blog follower you undoubtedly know that as predictably as the approach of winter brings clouds, Sunday brings:

I saw a fox today too, but sorry, I didn’t get a picture.

Today’s best 15 minutes were spent finishing the Sunday NYTimes Crossword Puzzle with the band of Js (Joseph, Jay, and Josh) as we froze speckles.

Song of the Day

I almost went with Lady Sings the Blues, one of my favorites for bad observing weather combined with colds, but I don’t want to be a downer. So, I’m going with Freeze Tag by Suzanne Vega in honor of those fast images we took and the coming week’s temperature forecast.

The sun is fading fast
Upon the slides into the past…

MagAO-X 2023A Day 16: Too Tired to Blog but This is for Katie

We don’t want anyone reading at home (Katie) to think we’re slackers here. OK, actually, I’ve never actually found Slack useful except here. Basically, MagAO-X has just precipitated my mid-life crisis. First, having joined the observing remotely in 2022A, and maybe it was the effect of all these young people, I decided I wasn’t too old to learn a new programming language. Sure, I thought, I’ll just write a whole new pipeline for a new type of data in a new language (Python). After years of telling everyone that the best programming language is the one you already know, I’ll prove that I’m actually a hip, young programmer. I tell my husband that he should be happy this is the form my midlife crisis took. I didn’t go out an buy the Ford Mustang of my dreams (red, convertible). No, I wrote Python. I didn’t quit my job as an astronomer to vagabond across the world. No, I wrote Python. And yes, starting with being here in person last Fall, I also joined the MagAO-X Slack channels. Because that’s what hip young astronomers do, right?

What would my post be without a tarantula photo of the day? It’s ok team, you don’t have to look away, I won’t post it. I don’t want to precipitate a different type of crisis (arachna-crisis?). Instead, I’ll post Jared’s sunset selfie that I got from Slack (see, I can use it!).

Alright, song of the day. It has to be Forever Young, because that’s what Python and Slack are evidently doing for me. Alphaville’s album came out in 1984, but I associate the song with my freshman year of college in 1987, because my roommate had the album on tape and played it a lot (for those not alive in the 1980s and therefore not yet ready for a mid-life crisis, tapes are a magnetic medium used to store information, in this case analog music). Somehow the song became an anthem of sorts for my then boyfriend, now husband of nearly 25 years, and me. The song is pretty emblematic of 80s youth: fear of nuclear war and suspicion of one’s elders. Each generation has its own angst.

Sometime in college, I bought him his own copy of the album on tape. At some point, I got the CD (for those not alive in the 1990s, CDs were a medium used to store digital information). Some years later when a my grad school office-mate figured out how to rip CDs, I used the IR astronomy group’s Sun Sparcstation and our CD writer (this was hot stuff back then!) to make “mix tape” CD of songs for the then still boyfriend, including, of course, Forever Young. When we finally got married, we asked the band to learn it for our wedding reception. There are some lyrics we have had wrong for so many years that we just keep singing along with ours even though we’ve looked up the words (I can’t hear them sing “perish like a fading horse” and I think “perish like a sea house” makes as much sense and fits the meter and rhyme scheme better).

Uh oh, video blocked here. But maybe those in the US can see it.

MagAO-X 2022B Day 20 – Dripping when we should be KLIPping

I’m baaaaaack. My last post on April 23 promised that if I got to come in person, I’d bring goodies. I tried to make good, but bad weather makes for a lot of snacking need.

Uh oh, two nights to go and the wasabi peas and dark chocolate covered pretzels are already gone. Jared is extraordinarily pleased by his invention of mixing the beans and peas. — Not shown: chocolate covered pretzels

The daytime weather has been lovely, for the viscachas and humans who happen to be awake then. After a couple hours of data taking, the dome started dripping tonight. Maybe our Vizzy friends are taking showers under it.

The dad and teen in my family are almost certainly opting for DoorDash tonight and not nibbling on vegetables. — I like to think of this as “Dad and teen viscachas fend for themselves while mom viscacha observes.” I think they just went out to dinner.

Logan’s Vizzy Viddy of the day.

In case you were wondering, KLIP is an algorithm we use for reducing our MagAO-X data, so we’d rather be KLIPping than Dripping.

I got a taste of sunshine today when I got up early to get my get-out-of-bubble Covid test (negative, yay!) and then treated myself to a cheese empanada by going to lunch. Eden has provided this view of our dome’s “empanada empire.”

The empanada stash. If you take one of my leftovers, I will hunt you down and make you regret it. — Don’t think we only have 18 empanadas; the cheese are two to a packet. There should have been 28 total since Jared made us all order 4 each.

Is it really possible that no one has used Train’s “Drops of Jupiter” as song of the day before? Drops of starlight are, alas, falling on the ground and not the mirrors tonight as drops of water fall from the dome.