Author: Eden McEwen

MagAO-X 2025A Day 20: you can see yourself out

I regret to inform you, dear readers, that things did not get better. This is not a happy story. Your brave AO operators do not triumph over the atmosphere, because… well it’s a natural phenomenon with a mean streak. We don’t pull an underdog move, miraculously rally, and through the power of friendship get phenomenal data at the last second. We limped towards dawn and the day crew takeover. The last night of the run was a wash, and honestly we’re glad it’s over.

When AO is on the telescope, you don’t get red on this plot…

Now that you’re adequately disappointed for us, here are some good things that happened today:

  1. The sunset was beautiful!
I have a soft spot for the dome reflecting pink cloud glow.

2. The vegan ate well!

A meal so beautiful it needed it’s own fancy plate.

3. Baby viscachas are still very cute!

Hey! Did you know it’s the hoppy holiday today?
If you want it enough, you’ll find him.

4. Another Laird theory proved!

During the course of our bright observations tonight, where we were attempting some engineering despite the seeing, we noticed that our performance was way worse than it should have been… when pointing to the south, where the control room is. Camtip (the champ) bounced like a pingpong ball. Then when we point to the north, away from the telescopes, suddenly smooth sailing. Camtip a beautiful steady ring. (Not useless!) A more detailed proof probably forthcoming, but initial evidence indicates AO doesn’t like the telescope pointing at 210-240 degrees. One more thing to think about when picking targets.

The plots to look at are the circular wind plot against the areal view of where the telescopes point.

5. We got Easter candy!

The bunny (or should I say vizzy?) delivery is always a treat, and which treat changes year to year.

Thank you LCO for making the holiday special!

6. It’s Matthijs birthday!

Well, at midnight it was. He went down the hill before we had a chance to sing him a midnight birthday song in the control room, being a responsible day crew member. So happy birthday to our only postdoc! Hope you have some downtime from your rigging intro to enjoy more puzzles.

That’s a face that says “yum”
sunrise caught by Sebastiaan

Given that the atmosphere basically booted us out the door, we’re done here. The last photons of 25A were tallied up, as scattered as they might be. The sun has risen, the DM cables are tucked into bed, and the day crew will take it from here.

Night crew jumping one last hurdle on the way to bed.
Tucking cables getting tucked in.

As I successfully got every observer to use my daytime calibrated incoherent speckles tonight, I find this quote specifically apt :

“It’s wonderful when you can bring sparkle into people’s lives, especially under difficult circumstances.” — “Castle in the Sky”, 1986.

Song of the Day

Thanks Joseph for introducing me to the perfect song to encapsulate the night.

AHHHH! by Teen Jesus and the Jean Teasers

MagAO-X 2025A Day 14: bug buses, homebound planes, and fantastic foxes

We are happy to report the successful and uneventful homecomings of the first half of our observing crew. Uneventful in that none was stranded in a city they didn’t mean to be in. Successful in that they ended in the warm embraces of various roommate species.

Farewell Joseph!
Sir Alexander reclaims territory.
And we were all jealous.
Delta too intimidated to mess with their schedule.
Plane train closure.
Coming home to loving faces.

For the half of us who remain, the weather has been treating us. Poorly. Has us saying “”If What I Think Is Happening, Is Happening, It Better Not Be.”

So we did not have an alfCen kind of night. We had a “give it your best shot” engineering kind of night. Which stretched until we had to switch to our observer’s time. You’re welcome for the good seeing Gabrielle, Jialin ordered it just for you.

This seeing had such strong low winds our DM looked haunted.
Advanced readers will be able to spot the dark hole.

Our engineering is humming merrily along. Sebastiaan and Josh started the night with dark hole digging. Matthijs LOWFS’ed. Katie successfully wrangled dispersed speckles. Jared’s gain optimization is a huge hit. I’m enjoying my donuts. We’re as happy as we can be with seeing at an all time high.

Speaking of happy… a quick ode to the vegetarian cooking of our Chef’s this turno. Thank you for the beautiful meat free meals! For those of us up at lunch Sunday there was even a vegan empanada, eaten too quickly for the camera to catch. We have been absolutely spoiled.

So beautiful, I almost cried.
cloud sea, by katie
the trio, by me

The quote of today was inspired by the main characters of the Lodge, our very own fantastic foxes, our charming culpeos.

Keep an eye out for a sweet message from our TO Ivonne, who agreed to do a little blog on her last day. Thank you Ivonne!

Song of the Day

Yeah the song and the quote is gonna be from the same movie. It’s a good movie.

Petey’s song from FANTASTIC Mr. Fox

Sebastiaan Haffert wins prestigious New Horizons Prize

Our ex-postdoc in international news? Our very own Sebastiaan Haffert has had the honor of winning the 2025 New Horizons in Physics Prize in astronomy with Rebecca Jensen-Clem and Maaike Van-Kooten!

This year’s New Horizons in Physics Prizes honor early-career researchers across a wide range of fields. […] In astronomy, Sebastiaan Haffert, Rebecca Jensen-Clem and Maaike van Kooten have designed and enabled novel techniques for extreme adaptive optics, which are systems that compensate for the effects of Earth’s atmosphere on light reaching terrestrial telescopes. Their work promises to enable the direct detection of the smallest exoplanets.

The Breakthrough Prize recognizes scientists responsible for cutting edge work across the sciences. Some call it the “Oscars of Science.” The New Horizons Prize is awarded to to early-career researchers.

Congratulations Sebastiaan! You’ve even gotten yourself on the Steward Observatory home page.

Three years of MagAO-X reveals sharper images of PDS 70 companions

Artist’s impression of PDS 70 and its two young planets, surrounded by their own dusty halos.

MagAO-X has shown over the last three years how powerful multi-epoch data can be on one of the most prominent protoplanet system PDS 70. Steward observatory recently highlighted Professor Close’s paper in an article by Penny Duran, quoted below:

MagAO-X’s sharp images revealed the first observation of young planets dramatically changing in brightness. The researchers saw one of the planets (PDS 70 b) fade to one-fifth its original brightness over just three years while the other (PDS 70 c) doubled in brightness, Close said, explaining that the rapid change in brightness at H-alpha could be due to changes in the amount of hydrogen gas that is flowing onto the planets.

Planet variability wasn’t the only thing disentangled from the dataset:

“We can see, for the first time, rings of dust surrounding protoplanets made visible by the bright starlight reflecting off of them,” added Jialin Li, a doctoral student in astronomy and co-author of the paper.

Figure 6. from paper showing Strehl ratio improvement and intensity fluctuation over the three years of H-Alpha imaging.

Read the Paper in the Astronomical Journal: “Three Years of High-contrast Imaging of the PDS 70 b and c Exoplanets at Hα with MagAO-X: Evidence of Strong Protoplanet Hα Variability and Circumplanetary Dust” by Laird Close et al.

Read the full article: “Sharper image: U of A-built instrument reveals pictures of ‘baby planets‘” by Penny Duran

MagAO-X 2024B Day 16: The end is in sight

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.

For the first time in WEEKS our last days at the LCO hotel are on the board.

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.

silver nuggets of cheesy gold
Buddy system for the empanada toasting.

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.

The CamSci’s have a warning yellow border if you dare take data without including them.

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.

Data from RAqr, showing bright H-Alpha emission lines from an otherwise dim companion bright dwarf.
Some simple line broadened absorption lines in the big beautiful mess of AO loops.

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.

Sebastiaan very cleverly traded his time from 2:30-5:30 UTC to Alycia.

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.

IR shot of our telescope mid observation by Joseph.

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.

team control room
team downstairs

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.

Holding On by Tirzah