Author: Eden McEwen

Three observing nights left! Wait actually just two! We love it here, we really do. Our TO’s are lovely, the company is great, and the science is incredible (especially this run). But there comes a time in any astronomer’s trip where we start gazing wistfully out to the sunset horizon and thinking longingly of the family and beds and cats waiting for us back home.

First, a moment of mourning for our fridge hoard of empanadas that only survived one night of cleaning crew scrutiny. Though we did not get to enjoy as many of you as we wanted, know that you were loved while we had you.

The main course tonight was a VisX sandwich, with a filling of Jaylishus. Luckily, we’re getting good at swapping between normal operations with our imaging cameras and the spectrograph, and overheads are dropping across the board.

We looked at some sources that were sure to illuminate the high resolution grating. These systems are easy for our AO system to lock onto, but high spatial resolution data is immediately interesting, or “astrophysically unsettling” depending on perspective.

VisX imaging on such bright targets requires only a few exposures for noise, and we spent the first few hours merrily jumping between targets and interrupting our good TO’s naps.

Midway through the night, the seeing seemed to say we had overstayed our welcome. We went from a variable, but usable seeing to “AO system can’t operate in these conditions” and “it’s amazing that we’re making an image at all” in a short 30 minute span. Just in time for observer handoff.

Needless to say, we didn’t have much science we could do with chart breaking seeing. We got as far as acquiring, but the star was so far spread around the coronagraph (when we could even close the loop at all) that the hour was chalked up to wash. So we got up to some hobbies in the down time.

Two teams competed heartily on both the Wednesday and the Sunday crossword. Neck and neck, brains were steaming. But in the end, who can really say which team won, especially when one team refused to screenshot their times.

Alycia graciously handed back the telescope to Sebastiaan, and more visXing occurred. Also more neural nets. And perhaps even some trapezium camsci calibration. It feels like we’ve been here forever, but it still surprises me that we have just two days to wrap up this run.

Leaving you with some more peaceful words. Because I’ll be thinking of them even when I’m gone.

Song of the Day

Ok I didn’t do a great job with the quotes this time. But sometimes you just want a song with a beat.

Last night, after such quality science, and the night before with rapid fire engineering accomplished, tonight was set to be a good mix of the both. Jared engineering in the early eve and Sebastiaan reanimating the Vis-X visible spectrograph for the rest of the night.

Alas, the mountain had other ideas for how we should be entertained. But what’s a crisis to this elite team? What’s two? What’s three? We are robust, especially with a remote PI directing us like agents on chessboard. Today we survived a glycol booger, a power outage, and mysteriously missing vis-x camera software. Ultimately, it’s not a novel crisis that dampened the night, but our old enemy atmospheric seeing.

Wakey, wakey, rise and shine, the computers are at 99 (deg C). Do not fear, the timely work of Parker and Jay before dinner, in which they had to squeeze the tubes and flush the filters and whatnot, halved the temperatures our control computers. Computers which we would prefer to not live at boiling temps.

The glycol team triumphantly entered the dining hall before service stopped, a real win considering how often we miss dinner for these kinds of things. The night was off to a good start with clear skies and decent seeing for the first few hours of engineering. By the time engineering wrapped up, things were looking very un-twinkly.

Next up, Sebastiaan. Which required half a postdoc professor in the instrument to shift the optics into a Vis-X configuration. Fingers in the blackbird pie, if you would. His spectrograph disperses visible light from 400-900nm in both low and high resolutions modes.

And then things got dark. Literally, the power went out for a good minute. It’s on again, off again, on again. But MagAO-X? It stayed on. A testament to ol’ reliable, the UPS’s. Almost simultaneously, Joseph sprinted to get camera software back where it should have been on ICC. No really, we should all be impressed and very grateful the whole thing didn’t fall apart. Take a bow, take a bow, take a bow.

Back in action, we were pumped to start seeing the spectra roll in:

But then we started to look more like this:

For no good reason, the seeing spiked. And when we say spike, we mean a dramatic 0.6″ to 1.7″ swing. And then we were looking at the DM struggling. The seeing was so unfriendly that even our backup backup engineering targets weren’t interested in the 6.5m telescope.

This didn’t stop our tenacious dutchman from exposing till civil twilight.

All things considered, it was a night. We’re still adjusting to the sleep schedule, and the people are sleepy. Enjoy some photos, and we’ll see you tomorrow. Hopefully we’ll get more of the 0.4″ nights and no more of this 1.2″ nonsense.

Bonus: inaccurate quoting

Thanks to Elena’s camera enthusiasm, we now have a little piece of midnight whimsy captured. For better or for worse. Hover for some choice quote picks that have been randomly assigned.

Thanks Elena! Thanks everyone for having no filter at 3am! or 3pm!

Song of the Day

As per the rules, lyrics from the song of the day can be found sprinkled throughout the blog.