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 katiethe 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.
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.
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.
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 goldBuddy 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 roomteam 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.
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.
The strong, independent, folks keeping MagAO-X running. They don’t even have their PI on site.The strong, independent telescope that keeps MagAO-X running. It doesn’t even have it’s TO on site.
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.
Fig. 1. One should observe a sharp spike to 100 degrees, a gap as the computers went down for tube repairs, and then a much cooler system post fix.
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.
This DIMM number, for those who don’t live their life by them, is very, very good.
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:
Locking in on the first spectrograph target of the run. The binary loud and clear on the spectrograph
But then we started to look more like this:
The face you don’t want to see sebastiaan make when the data comes in.
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.
When the seeing gets above 1.5, MagAO-X starts to mock us.
This didn’t stop our tenacious dutchman from exposing till civil twilight.
See: The pink of pre-sunrise in the open door.
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.
