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:
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.
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.
It’s great to be back at LCO after a 15 month drought from observing here. That’s the longest I’ve gone without being here since 2009! All the same great people are still here, and it’s a pleasure to be back working with the staff and MagAO team. If you’re wondering about the title of the post, it’s from a new sign in the Clay Telescope kitchen that seems to have to do with making sure not to steal the dishes. Maybe it reads less like an edict from a communist authoritarian government in Spanish (“Colaboremos con el orden y trabajo”).
Tonight started with a unimpressive, as in barely noticeable, penumbral Lunar eclipse, but a nevertheless beautiful Moon-rise. The Moon is an astronomical object that my little thermal IR camera can detect for sure. On the other hand, Jared and I are considering writing our own FLIR control software for observing alpha Cen.
Moon rise at 10 microns.
This afternoon I did Google Hangouts with both of my sons’ science classes. I think there was only one question asked by both sets of kids, and it was how much it cost to build Magellan. The best question I got was, “What is the most surprising thing you’ve ever found at the telescope?” I love the question, but I didn’t have the heart to explain how many hours of data reduction go into discoveries after leaving the telescope. Unfortunately, the slow internet connection we’ve had here meant they didn’t get to fully appreciate the video show that Mauricio put on as he slewed the telescope for them.
Speaking of Mauricio, here’s a cool (pun intended) picture of him washing the Clay primary with CO2 yesterday, in the IR, of course.
Cleaning Clay’s primary with cold CO2.
I saw two vizcachas at the ASB this afternoon and four vizcachas out behind the telescope tonight. You want to see IR photos of a vizcacha, you say? Why, of course you do.
That’s one hot vizzy
The internet is not letting me post pictures or YouTube videos. So here are some lyrics for Rock Lobster by the B-52s:
Here comes a stingray
There goes a manta-ray
In walked a jelly fish
There goes a dog-fish
Chased by a cat-fish
In flew a sea robin
Watch out for that piranha
There goes a narwhal
Here comes a bikini whale!
Oooh, wait, some bits are getting through finally…
Labor rights in Chile come up quite a bit at the Observatory. At Magellan, we usually have three telescope operators between the two telescopes so that they can switch off and thereby not work too more than 11.25 hours continuously. This week, Jorge is stuck with us all night though because Mauricio is on vacation. Luckily it’s summer here, and the nights are short. We have been working about 10 hr this week, from the time we open the dome to the time we close it (well, when I say “we open” I really mean “Jorge opens”). Labor laws also make it hard (impossible?) to hire employees who work at night sometimes and during the day at other times, such as, for example, a person who could do AO operation during AO runs and other technical jobs at other times.
Chilean labor rights don’t extend to University of Arizona employees (i.e., Jared and Katie), alas for them. They get to be those night AO operators here (though perhaps they work at night back in AZ too). Again, it’s not so bad this time of year, and they seem pretty cheerful despite the “Day 30” title of this post. Last June was a different story. To quote Katie, “If you’re doing 80+ hr of real work, you will absolutely burn out in 6.5 weeks. See 2015A.”
Labor relations have been on my mind today because the Chilean airport workers are going on strike tomorrow and Friday, just in time for me to try to get home. Laird Close arrived today and said the airport was a zoo. Lan Chile has cancelled its flights from La Serena to Santiago (and vice versa) tomorrow. Luckily, I asked the helpful staff at Las Campanas to book me a bus ticket. So even though I now have to leave the mountain at 8 AM after finishing observing at 6 AM, I should get to Santiago in time for my flight to Estados Unidos. And I’m looking forward to sleeping in my Salon Cama seat (fully reclining, like business class) for a blissful 6 hr.
Even more luckily, the air traffic controllers are not striking, so the international flight seems likely to go (though the fact that the American Airlines representative I talked to today claimed there were no disruptions at all just led me to think AA is clueless more than it led me to think the situation is fine).
Meanwhile, today’s been a good day. It was sunny, and this lizard and I both enjoyed that:
I also saw two guanacos, thanks to Katie who alerted me to their presence down the hill north of Magellan. It turns out they make a really interesting sound calling to each other. Listen carefully to hear one calling to the other (and look carefully to see one running).
This guanaco is also running — running MagAO that is!
And of course, sunny means clear!
The Devil is still the NE winds, which briefly caused me to have to abandon one of my northern targets, but only briefly. Ah, LCO, here between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea.
Wait, I hear a song coming on. Last night, Jared used “The Devil went down to Georgia,” which brings me back to Ella Fitzgerald, First Lady of Jazz, and one of my favorite artists to listen to while observing, relaxing, stretching after a workout, flying, and probably (we’ll find out tomorrow) taking a 6 hr bus ride.
