Alycia Weinberger – Page 2 – Extreme Wavefront Control Lab

MagAO-X 2022A Day 23: Feeling Remote

Late last year, we surveyed the Magellan community about what was lost and what was gained from remote observing. 10/28 people who had used a new instrument during remote observing cited a downside as the difficulty learning to use a new instrument. Obviously, MagAO-X wasn’t on during the 14 months of remote observing to that point. I have to wonder if the other 18 people all used a single-object-medium-resolution-visual spectrograph with few choices, … but I digress.

I assert that difficulty in learning to use MagAO-X is a major downside of remote observing. Now, MagAO-X is an experiment not a facility, so it’s not really fair to compare it to the facility instruments. But I’m used to at least having a goal of observational self-sufficiency. Alas, self-sufficiency is remote. So to speak.

I love observing. I love experiments. I am deeply grateful to the MagAO-X team who has been at LCO for the better part of a month and are still willing to collaborate to try some difficult observations with me. I hope I’ll be able to join them in person later this year (and not just because I’m jealous of their empanadas — surprisingly, in that observing survey, only 93/150 respondents chose “Delicious Empanadas” as a benefit to in-person observing. I can only assume that the other 57 are crazy ascetics who survive only on soylent).

My remote observing station in my home office. I notice that I am probably drinking too much coffee. The desktop, if visible, would show lovely images of LCO at night.

So for the song of the day, here are some appropriate lyrics from an appropriately named song on an appropriately named album (Confusion on Electric Light Orchestra’s Discovery album).

Every night you’re out there, darlin’
You’re always out there runnin’
And I see that lost look in your eyes

Confusion

don’t know what I should do
Confusion
I leave it all up to you

Aside question to ponder: I bet everyone reading this can name more famous astronomers than ELO members. I have actually met one former guitarist/vocalist of ELO Part II whose daughter goes to school with my son, but I really only remember his name because he made it a famous building in Athens. Fame is in the eye of the beholder.

MagAO-C 2019B Day 6: Back in the Saddle Again

I’m working on telescope domination this week. I started at Clay using MIKE (well, not really, I got clouded out). I moved to duPont using CAPSCam, I had a night off to visit with the MagAO team, and now I’m back at Clay using MagAO. Tomorrow I’m off to Baade with MagE. Have a telescope or instrument, I’m there!

It’s been a while, so I took last night to get reacquainted with my old friend Clio. It’s like riding a bike (or maybe like being back in the saddle again, though I wouldn’t really know), it turns out. I think I might even have muscle memory for the Camera Control GUI.

Last night was great, but tonight, well, we have some problems. The Clio pupil mask was out of place, though it was fine last night and no one should have touched the motor. Then, the MagAO systems stopped communicating with each other correctly. But by 1 AM, we were back in the saddle again.

So, let’s talk about the weather, animals, and classic songs instead. The sunset was beautiful.

Clouds make for lovely sunsets, and I’m fine with these on-the-horizon beauties as long as they don’t come overhead. If you look very carefully (at least, I could see them on my phone screen), you can see Venus, Jupiter and Saturn along the ecliptic. Yes, our planets seem to have formed in a disk.

We have a big group up here, possibly larger than I’ve seen since my first MagAO runs up here in 2013 or 2014. I love the number of women we’ve got working here. Last night there were none of those beautiful clouds at all, when we gathered on the catwalk at sunset:

a whole lot of AO operators and astronomers — Sunset with the whole gang: Logan, Me, Jared, Katie, Amali, Elisabeth, and Emily

This week, I’ve seen a fox, more than a dozen burros, a herd of goats, and at least three vizcachas, so I’m only missing a guanaco to get LCO animal bingo. I have never seen a vizcacha sunning him(her?)self like this before.

A vizcacha sunning itself on the wall next to the Astronomer Support Building this afternoon.

I am using the classic Gene Autry, “Back in the Saddle Again” as my song tonight.

I’m back in the saddle again
Out where a friend is a friend [here’s looking at you Katie, Jared, MagAO and Clio]
Where the ~~longhorn~~ burro cattle feed
On the lowly gypsum weed [or whatever those plants are outside]
Back in the saddle again

Ridin’ the ~~range~~ sky once more
Totin’ my old ~~.44~~ wavefront sensor
Where you sleep out every ~~night~~ day
And the only ~~law is right~~ sky is fey
Back in the saddle again

Gene Autry – Back in the Saddle Again

MagAO 2018A Day 9: The Universe

I don’t have much to say, so I figured I would title this “The Universe” as that covers anything I might be tempted to say. Actually, we were discussing Arthur C Clarke tonight, and Katie found this good quote from him, “I sometimes think that the universe is a machine designed for the perpetual astonishment of astronomers.” I hope I continue to be astonished. As I said in this interview for the DTM website — it’s a shame to lose a sense of curiosity.

Tonight is my last night, so it’s goodbye to LCO for at least a few months. Good luck to the rest of the MagAO users!

Here are some photos from dawn and sunset:

Dawn on Sunday. Note the conspicuous lack of clouds as soon as the Sun rose. But the dawn was a harbinger of empanadas at least.

Sunset on Sunday. Note that the sky is still clear. The dome was open early for some tests on the infrared camera.

The wild vizcacha of the hillside to the north of the Magellan Telescopes. He/She stayed still just long enough for a photo before hopping away. I like the stripe down his/her back.

The Universe makes us feel small, so that’s a link, perhaps tenuous to this song by one of my favorite singers, Suzanne Vega, called “Small Blue Thing.”

I hope someone strumming in her home studio counts as a cover:

MagAO 2018A Day 8: She blinded me with 73 clouds

Last night was my first night, and after I bragged about bringing the clear skies with me, the clouds rolled in. Nevertheless, we got some good data, if “good” can be defined as finding out a star is binary when I was hoping it would not be.

Note: It is possible to take 73 full frame coadds or cube images with Clio. Yes, 73. That’s tonight’s magic number, in case you’re entering the lottery.

This week has been exciting for the astronomical community, with the 2nd Gaia data release. We now know the distances to 1.3 billion stars, and some at fantastic precision. One of my favorite disk-hosting stars, HD 141569, was in the catalog of the Hipparcos mission with a parallax of 10.10 +/- 0.83 mas (that’s about 99 pc +/- 9 pc or 323 +/- 30 light years). The new parallax is 9.04 +/- 0.04 mas — yes, you read that correctly, a factor of more than 20 improvement in our knowledge of the distance (now 110.6 +/- 0.5 pc). There’s so much to do with the data for studying associations of young stars; it’s going to be a lot of fun.

Can I find a star that is 73 pc away you ask? Why, of course. There’s HD 89252 (actually 73.4 +/- 0.3 pc).

The fun here at Magellan is in studying individual stars’ environments in great detail, when the clouds stay away. I want to turn from clouds to science.

A cloudy sunset was followed by more clouds, some thinner clouds, and then more clouds.

I also want to educate Katie on 80s New Wave Pop:

And, yes, I read the rules, so here’s the cover.

2017B Day 9: Clouds

The most exciting thing to happen tonight, alas, was the return of our friend the owl. You can see her or him silhouetted nicely here against that white background known as clouds. Note the red and blue dots representing where the telescopes are pointing are straight up overhead — that’s because both domes are closed with both telescopes at rest.

We were wondering tonight about the attraction of the all sky camera to the owl. Does it reflect some light so it looks like the eye of a small edible critter? Is the owl vain and looking at its reflection? Is the camera just conveniently located on the ridge where there are plentiful mice about? Is one of the staff baiting the camera to keep us entertained? In this era of fake news, my own son accused me of making up the Magellanic Horned Owl, because it seemed too much of a coincidence to him that I’d be sitting at Magellan and seeing the Bubo Magellanicus.

In other wildlife news, today I saw a herd of (loud) burros, one small vizcacha, and a lot of (loud) birds. I had a lovely walk this afternoon when the sun was out, the birds were tweeting, and I was still optimistic the clouds would clear. There seems to be an exceptional amount of greenery and flowers around, as you can see below. During a public outreach event a couple years ago I made a joke about how green plants were bad for astronomy, meaning of course, that plants need water and open domes don’t. OK, so it wasn’t funny and apparently also went over the head of at least one member of my audience who the asked why the stars cared about the plants.

“And there’s something bout the Southland in the springtime.” This wasn’t the South-land that the Indigo Girls had in mind (Texas this is not, and I’m happy to be a Yankee – but not for baseball!), but it does appear to be spring time.