Alycia Weinberger – Page 3 – Extreme Wavefront Control Lab

2015B Day 27: No Meteorological Miracle

One of the downsides of observational astronomy is the lack of control we have over our experiments. It’s just annoying that we can’t re-create star and planet formation in our laboratories and observe the evolution of planetary systems over billions of years. And then on top of that, we have to deal with the epitomy of the unpredictable and uncontrollable — the weather! I think this accounts for the rather superstitious way that astronomers, not generally given to magical thinking, talk about the weather. I remember hearing that one should always walk around the telescope catwalk clockwise (or was it counterclockwise? Luckily the point is moot here at Magellan where the catwalk doesn’t go all the way around.) to keep away the clouds. We joke about the colleagues who are “weather curses” and seem to always bring the clouds with them.

We can’t even enjoy all the wildflowers up here without seeing them as evidence that El Niño is out to get us. Out for a walk earlier today, in the glorious sunshine of a clear blue sky, I still managed to scowl at the butterflies.

Tonight was the 8th night of Chanukah. Alas, there was no meteorological miracle. The winds only came below our AO-secondary-imposed 20 mph limit for a couple hours before returning to sit at about 20 mph and taunt me:

So, last night’s incongruous song involved sharks, among other things. And sharks reminded me of the TV show “Shark Tank” for entrepreneurial products, and one of their successful products was a Chanukah Christmas tree topper, which brings me to the fact that tonight is the final night of Chanukah. Wait, you didn’t like that link, ok, here’s LL Cool J telling you to do a mitzvah (good deed) this Chanukah and support the “I have a Dream Foundation.” Satisfied by the link to Chanukah? Good. Tonight’s song is: All About that Neis – Hanukkah by the Maccabeats. Neis means miracle, though not of the meteorological type. And it’s a parody, so it gives fond memories of previous years’ song rules.

2015A Day 35: Light Time

My family knows that if they want to plan something for me months in advance of when the next semester’s telescope schedule is released, they should consult a Moon phase calendar and choose a time near New Moon. You, dear readers, undoubtedly know that astronomy and not astrology dictated my schedule — infrared astronomers are usually found on telescopes during “light time,” i.e., when the Moon is up more than half the night. Light time is generally considered less valuable, because you can make observations at any wavelength when the sky is dark, but you can’t do visible light imaging of very faint objects when the sky is bright. That’s why the time before infrared astronomy is known as the dark ages (just kidding).

I was just out walking under the nearly full Moon, which drowned the Milky Way, glinted off the reflective Magellan domes, and cast my shadow upon a lit ground. So, of course, I was contemplating whether the history of science would be different if we had no Moon or two moons. What if we hadn’t had the monthly circuit of the Moon to teach us orbital dynamics and the laws of gravity and the geometry of our Solar System? Or what if we had multiple Moons that kept the sky bright all month and prevented us from observing deep space? Why, then we really would have been in the light-time dark-ages until the advent of infrared astronomy! Perhaps even worse, what if Jupiter hadn’t had bright moons that Galileo could see orbiting? How much longer would it have taken to arrive at a theory of gravity and an accurate picture of our place in the Universe?

I confess I’m being an overly smug infrared astronomer here. Tomorrow the Moon will be near a target I want to observe, and though our infrared camera won’t care, the wavefront sensor works in the visible and we’ll have to see just how flooded with photons it is. That could really make me a lunatic. See how the Moon drowns the all sky camera:

On a separate topic, both Magellans and the duPont telescope are being run by female astronomers tonight! I will here put in a shameless plug for our other blog, Las Campanas Belles. If you don’t speak Spanish and/or don’t know about the ringing rocks, you at least have to check it out to find out why we call it that. Here are some of our observers:

four women observers — Alycia Weinberger, Amanda Bosh, Jackie Faherty, and Katie Morzinski

With all this talk of the Moon and ladies, tonight’s song has to be “I wished on the Moon” by the Billie Holiday, the lady who sings the blues. Tonight, we’re not singing the blues because it’s a great night. Paradoxically perhaps, listening to Billie Holiday makes me happy.

If you really must listen to any other version (Jared), you can listen to this one, but only Billie Holiday will do for my wishes on the Moon. And I refuse to look for a parody of it.

2015A Day 33: Don’t Panic

For the third day in a row, the internet connection is spotty to nonexistent. I was thinking about the early 90s, when I was a graduate student, and my advisor, Gerry Neugebauer, was the director of Palomar Observatory. He wasn’t keen on getting internet to the dome because, as I recall, he thought astronomers would waste time on their email and pay
insufficient attention to their observing and that they would come to the mountain unprepared. I think both things do happen, but that generally the benefits of connectivity are enormously high. How else could we blog?
Seriously, though, while we could come prepared with any object we might possibly want to observe, instead we can find the coordinates of objects and their finding charts when we want/need them. While we could come prepared with a library of papers on all those targets, instead we can download them when we need them. When technical difficulties arise, it’s essential to contact the experts who aren’t on the mountain. And being all the way in Chile is made much nicer by being able to call home easily with VOIP.

As if the internet weren’t already crisis enough, we’ve had technical difficulties with the AO stages last night and tonight (see last night’s blog post and my above comment about contacting experts who aren’t on the mountain and who are, in this case, in Italy).

You might we wondering, am I telling you absolutely everything?

Well not exactly. If that weren’t two crises enough, Katie and Jared are almost out of their Starbucks instant coffee. Panic could ensue before they’re resupplied (see 39 seconds in):

You can tell that’s an old movie because of all the leg room the passengers had. American Airlines executives today would be incredulous at how they could fly such empty planes; it’d be like the incredulity young astronomers show about how we could live without internet at the telescope.

On a happy note, the wind is low, and the clouds have moved off just north of us:

Since the winds are in our favor, I would post some wind music from Wind (I don’t think it’s ever been covered), but we don’t have internet access to YouTube tonight. Or email. But we are doing infrared astronomy and weirdly the connections to astronomical databases are working. Gerry, here’s a toast to your memory.

Edit: I’m back to post the “Wind song” from Wind:

Post Edit by the Blog Administrators to comply with The 2015A Blog Rules:

2014B Day 31: Clio Smiled at Me

Infrared cameras are tricky beasts, forced by us ground-based astronomers to
work while bathed in background photons impinging from every direction. Clio
is also a bit on the complicated side, working as it does all the way out to 5
microns, with two camera scales (hence a movable camera lens), two filter
wheels, and various other moving parts.

During some tests of ghosts and pupil reflections that I did with Katie
yesterday, we noticed some interesting abstract shapes. Of course, the human
brain is always keen to find patterns, so I liked this image where Clio smiled
at me with a twinkle in its eye:

As a result of Clio’s smiles, we go for the Cheshire Cat smile and tend to keep our primary target to the upper left of the detector, which places the ghosts and reflections as far away as possible.

These images were taken of one of my favorite stars in the L’ filter and the wide camera, but we see the same basic patterns on stars I don’t like as much, in other filters, and in the narrow camera.

Since we’re mainly interested in science (planets, disks, etc) close to the primary star in the field, this constraint doesn’t cramp our style too much.

People always ask me why astronomers bother going to the telescope any more. Obviously, we don’t have to go to the Hubble Space Telescope (though it’d be fun). It is possible to make a telescope operate remotely. It takes a lot of money, but yes, it can be done. Ground-based telescopes face more changeable conditions (see bath of infrared photons, above) including the atmosphere (enter MagAO), and thus are even harder to automate. But to be honest, part of the joy of being an astronomer for me is collecting my own awesome data. I like the anticipation of sunset on a clear sky and the tired feeling of satisfaction at dawn. OK, I also like the sense of control.

One angst-inducing feature of taking one’s own data is having to know when to stop. We come to the telescope with lists of objects to do, usually lists that will take far longer to finish than the available time. We do on-the-fly data reduction to see how we’re doing. This leads to my, sadly proved by experience, rule, which I will here set out as Weinberger’s Law: While at the telescope, the signal-to-noise of your data will appear higher than it does when you get home.

Jared claims this isn’t true for principal component analysis reductions where
quick look reductions at the telescope have insufficient computing power. I
maintain however, that Weinberger’s Law has more to do with optimism and
impatience (get to the next target while the conditions are great!) than CPU
cycles.

We have just discovered that this is the highest MagAO run blog post EVER (for a day). It’s a good thing Clio is smiling on day 31, because there are still 8 more days of observing.

Tonight’s song was easy to choose, as it had to come from “Ghost in the Machine” by
the Police. In my opinion, Clio is female like all capable machines (see, for example, the
oevre of children’s stories by Virginia Lee Burton
Mary Ann helps Mike Mulligan, Katy rescues the town, etc.). Plus, “Cleo” is more likely to be a female name, at least in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (apparently there are no young Cleos and no baby Clios at all).

So, since Clio is a “she”, the song is “Every Little Thing She does is magic.”

2014B Day 28: Variability for Good

My blog post for tonight was inspired by the coincidence of Katie searching the online astronomical database SIMBAD for a bright star near where I wanted to point on the sky and finding “AO Men.” No, Laird and Jared haven’t been honored with entries in SIMBAD. As I said, it was coincidence. Variable stars, as they are discovered, are designated by capital letters starting with R, followed by the constellation name (or abbreviation). But there are lots of variable stars (in fact, when you get into the details with Kepler, there are hardly any stable stars, but let’s not go there right now), so after R-Z, then variable stars are called with double letters RR-ZZ and then AA-RR. So, AO Men is the 69th (or something like that; there are a lot of arcane rules of the naming, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable_star_designation) variable star discovered in the constellation Mensa. As I said, there are a lot of variable stars, so all the constellations I had the energy to check had an AO.

This led me to consider these stars as friends of AO:

AO Men – Unfortunately, there’s no constellation Womensa, but if we consider “men” in the sense of “humans”, Katie and Jared certainly qualify as AO Men (get it — yeomen), as they do an incredible amount of work up here to make this run a success.

Quote of the night: Jared, bragging about his hand strength — “That’s AO Men right there.”

AO Car – the little manual transmission Toyota that I drive up to the dome in when I’m too tired to hike it.

(Note: the coordinates are not exact for the named stars in the little Aladin-Lite images because of how I did the screen shots. If you want to observe these AO stars, look up your own coordinates first!)

AO Cap – the hard hats the team has to wear when working in the dome (modeled here by me in a selfie)

AO Pup – The vizcacha, of course. Sadly, I haven’t seen her on this run yet.

almost tame — A vizzy hanging out waiting for sunset

AO Cam – The wavefront sensor detector. The system has been running so smoothly that it’s been largely ignored. See — no one is in front of the AO Cam in this picture from tonight. In fact, as I was writing this, the screen saver on the computer went on.

And finally, the star as my favorite question, “What is ‘AO For‘?” Tonight, the answer is that it’s for producing awesome images of young stars so I can image their disks and planets (if they have any). Of course, the night wouldn’t be complete without a binary star (it’s not AO For, but it’s what AO is for):

Here’s one thing that doesn’t vary: MagAO is awesome.

Katie is insisting there be a song. I chose this for the lyric, “After changes upon changes
We are more or less the same.” And because I just really like Paul Simon.