First sighting of a large water body since early March.
Like any triumphant victory, the champions must eventually turn homeward. After an amazing few weeks of scientific discoveries, engineering miracles, and accidental binary friends, we packed up our many multi-terabyte hardrives and headed down all 8000 ft back down on our way home.
The pine that makes the lodge el Pino.Traveler above a sea of fog, colorized, 2024A dreamy model GMT, bigger than the ones we have back home.
We had an early morning bus filled with some napping, clear skies and a view of the bay. Post drive we got a quick break at El Pino, enjoyed the sights, touched grass, and confirmed that there was still that weird vizzy people were calling a rabbit. After a brief respite of healthier snacks and preferred beverages, we all packed back in the van and left for the La Serena airport. All except for Josh, who by a cruel twist of fate was the only lab member who got completely rebooked with a separate itinerary back to Tucson. We miss him to this day.
Last known photo of Josh Liberman.
And then the whirlwind of luggage hauling, TSA searches, elite lounge scouring, airplane sitting, more TSA, and sleep-deprived airport navigation began. Despite the 36 hours in transit, we did make time for the important traditions.
Cervezas and papas fritas pre Las Serena TSA. Post-TSA Jay, plane watching.Inducting the uninitiated into the SCL Terminal E Ruby Tuesdays Pisco sour fanclub.
But just like that, or maybe “after all that”, we finally emerged blinking in the Tucson sun. After clunky suitcases were retrieved, goodbyes were brief. It’s hard to be sentimental on dubious amounts of red-eye sleep and to people you have just spent three weeks secluded mountain top, stepping on their toes.
One of the many attractions of Chile includes some friends, the Gemini telescope.
But like any epic tale, why not tell it twice? Your favorite AO squad couldn’t resist the encore to such a successful run, and we will be back in May for 24Ab. In the meantime we will be catching up on our sleep debt, hugging our loved ones, and quickly putting in a load of laundry.
Do you have what it takes to be the next great AO operator? Well today is the day that tests your mettle. Starting as bright an early as our crane operators will let us, we do a little bit of everything this 24hr shift. We pack, we crane, we unpack, we unwrap, we level, we cable, and at the very end of it all we finally get to do a little bit of why we’re here: astronomy.
Careful cart alignment requires many positions.Aligning bolts on
The day started out with the projects greatest fiend, the cart. We build it around the table to help it roll from truck to the telescope. Every time we assemble and disassemble this 200lb or so beast, we grow closer as a team. And perhaps ever more resentful of it. The instrument and legs arrive separately at the telescope, after getting separated at this clean room lifting step. We make sure all these moves are safe by applying tension to big items to make them go slow.
Don’t stop pulling!Slowly loading with a come-alongKeeping MagAO-X safe, one arm workout at a time.
Next the PI takes a nice long walk with his million dollar baby up the hill. The rest of us know it’s best to let them have their space.
The not-IZUZU executing the turnJared walks up with the instrument.
While the flatbed makes its slow ascent, the rest of the team prepares the platform and tools to make ready for its arrival.
MagAO-X returns to Clay after almost exactly a year! (2023A finished on March 17th, and we brought it back on March 18th 2024)Wheeling the instrument to the scissor elevator. Going up!
Once the instrument is in the telescope dome, there’s a set of reverse craning and anti-cart activities that need to quickly happen. Good thing we’re getting good at this. As long as we follow Laird’s carefully labeled baggies, we don’t go too wrong.
De-carting is at least a 3 person activity.
Juan and the guys went back to get our electronics while Maggie lead the table team in the fine grained work of leveling a two ton floating table. Maggie might just need to be our Laird on the May run, and under her guidance we leveled the table in record time!
Using two perpendicular levels to check the table’s inclination. Final leg checks before the tabel starts floating.
The electronics rack gets its ride up, and is placed next to the table, and then we can start recabling all the things we unplugged just last night. It’s a big dejavu moment. By dinner, we have all but one DM connected. (We still eat fast though, because the less on sky time we waste, the better. )
Cabling, but this time, at even more altitude.
Meanwhile, our astronomer heavy contingent started to make their way out here. Out of three who were supposed to arrive today, only Jay made it, for a various calamitous reasons. Logan got all the way to La Serena, and will be joining us later this week. If all goes well, Jialin will make all the connections she needs and will be here by tomorrow.
Two more of us making it out of Tucson. Well look who finally showed up!Big XWCL family dinner!
Dinner was quick, and we all raced back up the mountain to finish the last little bits. Since it’s our observing night, we finally got to claim the observer-reserved speedy red automatic. Now that all our cars aren’t manual, we aren’t limited by who can drive stick. Happy to report that no one even screamed as I took my first drive up the mountain!
Two cozy cleanroom Vizzies we spotted on our way up!
The final mad dash of cabling and clean up wasn’t captured, but rest easy, we once again worked a small miracle and got the instrument science ready on the platform. We even got our first sunset picture on the catwalk with nearly the whole team.
The first catwalk sunset, nearly everyone made it. Logan might be in La Serena, but she did not miss the sunset.
Once the sun went down, we finally got to an open dome and down to science.
The team assembles for the excitement of the system getting online.
First up was commissioning some of the newest of our DM technology. These alignment patterns were made fairly recently by members of the lab to test our DM actuators on the light from the pupil.
After making sure everything was working, we returned to our old friend, pi Pup. This bright double star system is one of our favorites because it’s companion is bright enough to be seen as soon as we close the AO loop.
Z band, visible light, closed loop image on sky. The companion is on the left of the image, right next to one of the DM speckles. This image is about 0.74 Strehl.
We were lucky that in our first hours of engineering, we got solid and steady 0.5 arcsecond seeing. We were able to capture some great footage of MagAO-X in action. Below, you can see in real time how turning on the AO system gets us from a blob to a stellar PSF.
The Jared-cam, all four screens of our megadesk, closing the loop on pipup.
In another commissioning victory, we got FDPR working on sky with the NCPC DM. This technique probes phase and amplitude with defocus to reduce our non-common path errors. With our first round of testing, we were able to improve our SR from 0.77 to 0.86 with our rough calculations. (In case these numbers mean nothing to you, we were very pleased with our 0.63 last time, 0.77 got Jared smiling, and 0.86 nearly knocked our stinky socks off.)
And with those victories, it was on to science. Katie got an hour or so to test ADC algorithms with Sebastiaan, and Jared tested some binning code. Both projects need a little more debugging time, and so we’ll probably revisit them later this week. We got back on sky for Sebastiaan’s target just in time for the seeing to explode.
We went from a 0.5 as night to a 1.5 as one way too quickly…
Sadly, this weather isn’t the kind our instrument was made to operate in, so in the late hours of our very long day, we gave up on scince targets and I got to sneak in a few more engineering tests. (Things have to be pretty hopeless for the team to let me test optical gain unchecked.) The team trickled down the mountain in twos and threes as we finally ran out of steam from our very big, very hard, way too long day.
But don’t let the ending spoil the fact that we just managed a miracle. We got from a truck to a beautiful, record breaking PSF in less than 24 hours. We have only had one night, and are already proving the robustness of algorithms that we weren’t even sure were going to work on sky. Plus, two new group members, Josh and Katie, survived one of the hardest days we go through. Congratulations team!
Song of the day:
How could I not pick this song for the first night of the run?
First Light – Hoziera peaceful and unbothered Guanaco to end the day.
Is there anything more tantalizing than an fresh, unopened box of MagAO-X? This team just couldn’t resist. The unpacking festivities started at the first call of the returning night shift astronomers and did not finish until our good friend Orion had completely risen.
The very first gift of the day was an early morning Carlos Culpeo spotted by a Josh who’s sleep schedule hasn’t quite agreed with all the travel yet. This curious fox was later spotted at lunch, and we hope he becomes a regular.
Professional CarlosMorning CarlosMoving CarlosLunchtime Carlos
After a reviving breakfast of the highest LCO standards, we shuttled up to the clean room and got to work on our hard hat activities. This includes the reverse of everything we did in Tucson (see Logan’s packing video) but enjoy these snapshots of cranes and dollys and etc. to jog your memory.
Geared up and ready!Getting the instrument box in position. The bolts are taken off the door. Door is taken off the box.Now we de-box the box. MagAO-X freed and in good shape!aaaand all the bolts had to go right back on the empty shipping box.
We were so fast and efficient, we had time to catch another fan favorite, Gary, who wandered up to the parking lot to check on what we were up to.
Grad students rushing overFirst picture before the grads were alertedA contemplative Gary retiring form the hubub
With another good animal omen bestowed upon us, and lunch in our stomachs, we got back to work freeing the electronics box from it’s larger, wooden box. Don’t try this at home kids, these are advanced crane moves best performed with at some two professionals and at least four grad students standing around in hard hats, looking anxious.
Workplace briefing with a view. Grad student stabilization.The classic leanCollecting boltsClean room move
And all of a sudden, MagAO-X was out of it’s box and in the clean room, and it was only 3pm! Every time, it seems like we do it faster. Even our crane operator Juan was surprised. About at that time we all were ready for some caffine, and a break from hard hats.
The much needed 4pm coffee break
Woof. What a blog post. We’ve unpacked it, so we must be done, right? What, we still need to set up the clean room? You mean we’re only halfway through? Well… if this blog post is long, it’s only because you’re right there in it with us.
Before we could do anything else, the clean room had to get… actually clean. The youngest and spry-est of us took on the challenge. Special recognition to Katie for surviving the fumes of the glass cleaner long enough to finish the clean room mopping.
The classic big mop and aerosol combo.Three cheers for cleaning what no one wanted to clean!And still, everything looks alright!panels coming off! more bolts!Checking out what’s up with Vis-X
Once Laird arrived, some initial optical inspection occurred! Welcome Laird! Turns out you can only do so much without the cameras on to tell you what’s misaligned, so the real alignment will have to wait for tomorrow.
We ran into some unexpected traffic on our way back up to the cleanroom from dinner at the lodge:
Once we were finally clear, we finished up with the nitty gritty of glycol and cabling
Checking that there are no leaks, and the coolant is running smoothly. Passing on re-cabling secrets to the next generation.
The good news? ITS ALIVE. All of the computers have turned on, the new GPUS hare happily chugging along, and we are ready for the DM cabling and alignment tomorrow. If you made it this far, congratulations, you have gotten through what will probably be our second longest day of the run.
Happy sunsetGreen flash?
Wow, does it feel good to be back.
Song of the day
Maggie says we gotta have some nature? Here’s a cool condor shot I took today!
Maggie giving her HCAT talk, overviewing phasing on the testbed.
GMagAO-X just hit another big milestone, we just finished up its Preliminary Design Review (PDR). If you haven’t been to one before, a PDR is a chance for a design to be critiqued and tweaked before moving on. If a project does well on its PDR, it’ll have good reason to be funded and moved to its next phase, the Final Design Review (FDR). If the committee finds it needs more work, an instrument might have another PDR in its future (this has happened to a few other ELT instruments).
Our hope is that GMagAO-X becomes a first light instrument at the GMT, and the PDR is a huge first step.
A huge thanks to the committee members who made their way to Tucson to give their expertise to the exercise:
Antonin Bouchez (who previously worked with GMT AO, and now is the director of AO at Keck)
Dimitri Mawet (PI for KPIC, the High contrast fiber fed instrument at Caltech)
Mike Bottom (UHawaii)
Markus Kasper (ESO)
Alan Uomoto (Carnegie Observatory)
The two days were filled with talks about everything from science motivation, to optical design, to predicted schedule and budgeting. We got to do it all in Steward’s historic dome, specially outfitted for the experience.
Jared pointing
Since we had them out here in Tucson, the festivities got to include gadgets like a to scale model of of the GMagAO-X design, a non-functional 3K like the ones planned on in the design, and the patented optical locking clamp. Maggie also got a chance to show off the HCAT bench, for some hands on learning.
The 3D printed instrument, it rotates!Hop clamp inspecting.Maggie demoing the HCAT bench.
This was also a good chance for the rest of the team to catch up on where the GMagAO-X project is at.
Miscellaneous grad student attendees.
Thank you again to all the people who put in the work to pull the two days of review together, the committee for their attention and helpful comments. GmagAO-X is a stronger instrument because of the PDR!
[We love Logan but we aren’t always great at getting Blog posts out :S ]
Editor’s note: This blog post was left in “draft” status for eight months, and Logan is long since back in Tucson, but its contents are too important to leave unpublished. The management regrets this delay.
