Author: Eden McEwen

You’ve tuned into a Laird Close takeover night! That’s right folks, only Laird, all night night long. If you know one thing about Laird, it’s that he’s our #1 H-alpha fan. Which is valid if you designed a whole instrument to make it happen.

Things went smoothly, happy skies and clean PSFs. So smoothly, in fact, we had to bring some of our own entertainment. It’s a real BYO affair in the control room these days.

Also today, if you disrespect your sleep schedule enough, you made it to Logan’s origin’s seminar talk! She’s doing some cool things with future high contrast imaging and with JWST right now.

Color of the day:

CACAO good-to-go green!

Song of the day:

We had some quality control stop by the remote operating room this evening. Though I wasn’t in attendance for the early shift, I did hear we passed with flying colors. Or flying animal crackers, as it were.

MagAO-X has been operating true to the golden rule “Having more things just means more things can go right.” Things going right, right in the nick of time, include our stagebs. This stage allows us choose what light to send to the WFS, either a percentage or a wavelength split (specifically H-alpha /IR). Without it, Jialin’s H-alpha observations would have had fewer photons of interest heading to the science camera. Cheers to Jared and the LCO crew for helping us sort it out before observations tonight.

We started the night observing for our highest tier MagAO-X loyalty member, Alycia Weinberger. Thankfully our seeing has returned to reasonable levels and was decent enough for a disk image (or four). A few weeks from now she’ll actually be in Chile observing on another instrument, and can give MagAO-X a good wave for us.

Jialin kept us on our toes in the wee hours of the morning with star hopping, a technique for reference differential imaging (RDI), as apposed to our more common angular differential imaging (ADI) approach. Rumor has it (because no one put it on the blog) that we’ve gone as fast as 39s in a hop between the target and reference star. Tonight we timed to 1m15s, which isn’t bad for a remote operation.

You could say we’ve gotten in the swing of things, hitting a standard of operation. See you next at the end of the month!

Color of the day:

I think in this marathon observing run the original rules still apply. So enjoy Oreo box blue, inspired by the true backbone of SO579.

Song of the day:

Welcome to the day of flips, we’re back on the telescope and everything feels just a little off. Flip the platform, NASE to NASW. Flip the schedule, day to night. Flip the detectors, visible to IR. We were not victorious for all fights involving negative signs, but our 24 hour day was full of flipping successes.

Flipping the alignment with fiducials – Success!

The morning was spent following Laird and Katie’s procedure for getting MagAO-X to the mirrored position of its NASE home. Through some of the smallest moves you’ve ever seen a 2000lbs instrument on rough surface make, we got right to where where the fiducials should sit relative to the instrument and guider. There was some discussion about platform height that would needed to be verified once starlight entered the system.

Flipping over the telescope for acc speed – Success!

Post lunch, Parker flipped the telescope on it side to install some new accelerometer raspberryPi hardware and circuits. He’s now able to read out wibbles and wobbles at 10kHz, up from with his previous limits of 4kHz. With these fast and furious speeds a future of predictive control this run is looking bright.

Flipping on all the switches – 95%

The rest of us spent the afternoon threading MagAO-X back together again. This endeavor is partially plumbing, partially fishing around for wires in the rack, and as we cable up the DM, somewhat surgical. Everything was connected by dinnertime, and only 3 of our 50+ wires ended up being somewhat loose. We’ll still call that a success. Initial reviews of NASW are glowing

Flip-worthy sunset? Success!

We’re almost always on the hunt for a green flash at sunset, and tonight’s really delivered. The cloud layer was flat enough and the air was clear enough to catch a seconds-long glimpse of the green light of a refracted setting sun. We were chuffed to bits, to put it mildly. It may have been one of the clearest and brightest green flash the team has ever seen.

Flipping MagAO-X to NASW- A success all things considered

Certain parts of our operation depend on knowing where the telescope will move next. The platform orientation flip affects how our k mirror keeps our field steady, our ADCs keeps the atmosphere from chromatically dispersing our light, and our woofer keeps the telescope on track with periodic offloads. Not all the flips were caught on the first go through, but by the halfway point of the night we had a PSF just as pretty as we’re used to back home (NASE). We didn’t even have to run up to the platform and re-adjust the bench position.

Flipping to a visitor camera – Success!

Camdurham made its way back inside the instrument and tonight it saw its very first stellar photons through MagAO-X. We got beautiful single and double star spectrum throughout the various engineering tasks. In the image below, you can see MagAO-X providing diffraction limited images throughout the near IR. (You can also see our resolution decrease as the wavelengths get longer.)

Flipping off sidereal tracking – Partial success

Tiffany and Jay have been hard at work finding extended objects for MagAO-X to image, such as asteroids or satellites. These are tricky for the AO system, but they’re also tricky for the telescope which can no longer follow the well calculated paths of stars across the night sky, aka sidereal tracking. With the help of our TO Hernán, we were able to center a weather satellite on our acquisition camera. We weren’t able to keep up with it long enough to send through to our science cameras, so there’s more work to be done on the tracking front. Even with our acquisition camera we were able to resolve the solar panels on the 20ft target.

Flipping to remote ops – Setup success

Meanwhile, back in Tucson, we had Jialin and Josh test our remote operations computer. When the rest of us head home in a week, we’ll be using this setup to control MagAO-X remotely in April and May. A huge next step in making MagAO-X available and flexible for our observers.

Color of the Day

Blink and you miss it green, seen tonight but chased after every sunset.

Song of the Day

Flying out on Friday the 13th comes with some ominous portents. Thankfully, we only seemed to be hexed with suboptimal seat assignments and the briefest of turbulence. As of writing the early crew has made it safely to LCO, tucked in and ready to start fresh tomorrow morning.

For all those traveling later, know that there are some tasty cafes right outside the B terminal now. Post security no longer contains the only sustenance offerings. The Starbucks by luggage check-in has, in fact, even kept up the important renaming ritual.

The welcoming committee to LCO was packed. Just as we turned off the highway a large wild horse heard greeted us. We ran into even more at the top of the mountain.

A family of Burros we’ve never seen before met us in the basin. One family was very bright white too! The more local mountain burros looked to have welcomed some new members recently as well.

After a quick dinner (thank you chefs for staying open for us) Jay and I took a walk to double check we had our essentials in play. It looks like we’re all ready for tomorrow!

The mythical white horse, the albino burro, and auspicious vizzy all must mean something. I’m sure we’ll be able to interpret these portents by the end of the run.

Color of the day: Prophetic Albino Burro White

Blog Rules: Color of the day

1. Every blog should include a color of the day. (Interpretative, but bonus points if a swatch of the color is included)
2. The color should be a reference to a blog occurrence or the song of the day
3. There shall be a song of the day, linked, with song title and artist in the description. (Sometimes the link dies, and the description helps us find it later.)

This is inspired by my love of dialed the color memorization game, and the fact you can color swatch your own photos.

Song of the Day:

You know, I just see horses and I know there’s a way.