Author: Jay Kueny

Today, the night crew from telescope removal day attempted to get back on to a day schedule, which is always so much harder than it sounds. Additionally, we bid farewell to Laird and Jialin! Before he left, Laird gave his stamp of approval towards the state of the instrument after Eden was able to successfully close the loop after we got all the cabling straightened out. Great job everyone who contributed to the DM re-cabling in the clean room, it was perfect the first time…! (I think it was Eden, Katie, Parker, and Jialin)

After all of the major parts of MagAO-X passed initial testing, it was time for me and Parker to shine with some much-needed plumbing maintenance for our computers in the electronics rack.

The frustrating thing that keeps happening is that some variety of slime mold or bacteria keeps accumulating in and around the heatsinks in the CPUs and GPUs and causing embolisms to form in the glycol tubing network after some months of operation. Until we get a permanent handle on this phenomenon, we have to back flush the various components that are most affected. To do this right, we removed the glycol filter and found it pretty caked with that nasty slime mold stuff, which required cleaning to avoid causing a straight up clog if/when we dislodged bigger pieces during the flush procedure.

We report that the plumbing maintenance was a success and saw at least one very large clot get dislodged from one of RTC’s GPUs (oddly satisfying). We cleaned the filter again, for good measure, and confirmed the system was performing as expected. Hopefully we’re good until the next run!

Meanwhile our Leiden colleagues were living it up in the glamorous LATAM lounge at SCL. Sebastiaan looking more less healed and photogenic as ever after a restful night of sleep at the apartments at El Pino.

As is the tradition, we couldn’t miss tonight’s sunset, but in front of the cleanroom this time. ‘Cause at night, the sun in retreat, made the skyline look like crooked teeth.

Bonus Content

There isn’t a whole lot of technical stuff going on these days with the observing run over and the rest of us just counting down the hours until our departure. There has been a lot of discussion about lucid dreaming and dreaming in general this run so I thought I’d share one of my recent dreams from a couple nights ago. This was undoubtedly inspired by Joseph’s fun trip down midway through the run to go see the penguins where he brought up some groceries to resupply our dwindling Snack Stack. Among these items, was the biggest, most beautiful bottle of Benedictino I’ve seen in a long time. For those who are out of the loop, we recently got our most precious bottles of fizzy water (Benedictino) replaced by a generic brand of agua con gas for sustainability, as these new bottles are reuseable and hold a lot more drink. This is obviously an admirable move, I mean, think of all the Benedictino bottles at the bottom of the ocean, but still, it’s not the same, man. And we’ve really been missing this brand of fizzy water.

The dream went something like this:

I was just finishing up dinner at the lodge and on my way to bringing my tray back to the dish pit, when something in the reach-in cooler where the soda bottles are kept caught my eye and hit me like those first rays of sunlight hitting your face after emerging from a dark cave. There was absolutely nothing in this fridge *except* a freakishly large bottle of unopened Benedictino fizzy water. And lucid me decided it was about to be all mine.

The light inside the fridge glowed a ghostly white and blanked out everything else around me, and the Benedictino sparkled as if it were a holy deity sitting before me. Every one of my heartbeats pounded through my body like the distant firing of 19th-century cannons as I twisted off the cap and watched it fall from my nerveless fingers silently into the dark abyss. I grabbed the bottle like an ancient artifact and, with trembling hands, slowly raised it to my lips where I was met with the intoxicating aroma of atomized carbonic acid. Tilting my head back, the fizzy water began its descent into my stomach in a raging whirlpool as the bottle began to rapidly shed its weight. Closing my eyes, a spotlight shone onto me as my mind thundered with horns sounding victory and the cheering of an invisible crowd. Lowering my head back down, I was met with the gaze of an enormous condor perched on the outdoor patio, a cheese empanada clutched in one talon and bottle of orange Fanta in the other, and saw the reflection of the Chilean flag in its predatory eyes. It nodded in approval and with a screech, flew off toward the Magellan telescopes guided by the light of the setting November sun. I looked down to the previously full gallon-sized bottle of Benedictino to find it entirely empty. 10/10 dream.

Song of the Day

It’s time to finally call off the searches everyone. Tie up your bloodhounds, turn off those spotlights, and park your helicopters. That’s right, the mountain’s most infamous instrument has been located after eons of searching high and low.

There were fears that MagAO’s near-IR camera, Clio, had been sentenced to the boneyard to peacefully decay as the many instruments before it. However, despite being undoubtedly still weary from her travels, Alycia generously gave the students a nice tour of the DuPont telescope (a.k.a., the 100″) just down the road from the Magellans where they found our Clio and drew collective sighs of relief from all who were around during the golden MagAO days.

And here it is! The Great Clio! Ready to be born again on another 6.5-meter telescope…!

A special thanks to Prof. Ewan Douglas of Steward Obseratory’s UASAL who was a critical part of Clio’s rediscovery. No need to be humble, Ewan.

Yeah, man. So, after the tour, some of the group decided to make use of some extra time before dinner to prepare for the MagAO-X telescope removal. This Chilean iron is extra dense, I’ll you what. But this dry air will make you soft, so we push on.

After dinner, Laird, Alycia, and received a nice tour from the LLAMAS team who showed us how the instrument was mounted and talked a little bit about how it all the various systems and mounting fixtures work. 1700 kgs of pure instrumental awesomeness.

Some of us got heartier meals for our night lunches than others. Parker’s Pro Tip of the Day is write “extra everything, times ten” on the comment section of your night lunch form to get the homie hookup from the kitchen.

A major milestone in MagAO-X’s career as an extreme AO instrument, Sebastiaan et al. have successfully implemented wavefront sensing and control using a neural network on-sky…! We’ve been learned, people.

In other engineering news, Jared and Eden and I got a 5kHz LOWFS loop locked on one of Sebastiaan’s target for some kick-ass vibration control. Whatcha know ’bout jitter?

Ok, there was actually a lot more that went on tonight, such as Team Jaylycia getting some pro-level data on an edge-on disk. Again, testing the altitude limits of the telescope and the instrument. And probably even more to report on, but we’re pretty…

…sleepy. However, I’ve got one more moment to highlight, as it was the sweetest gesture and gift I’ve received as a direct result of being peanutted. Yeah, somehow peanuts got into my tuna + rice tonight (it was literally just some rice and tuna/shrimp in a white cream sauce) and I took a nasty hit to my health bar. However, one Zyrtec and a bunch of crackers and soda helped me recover enough HP to make it through the rest of the night. Because of this experience, Johnson “The Hook” Johnson crocheted me a “J” protection charm to wear to commemorate my survival. Thanks, man. I owe you some milk.

Song of the Day

I’ve been really into this song during this run. This one really deserves a listen, not only because you all need to see that Warren’s long lost twin brother is a guitar virtuoso, but this guy also pairs one of my favorite music genres (percussive fingerstyle guitar) with a killer voice. Some lyrics found in the body of the post above.

So far, Laird and Sebastiaan have been doing an excellent job directing the in-person crew and we’ve made great progress towards the many tasks that needed to be done before the start of the big move on Wednesday.

Here, we see a lot of the team watching and learning during Tuesday morning’s initial alignment procedures as we prepare to install all the fancy new Lyot and focal plane masks brought down from Tucson.

The first optomechanical task of the day was to install the special masks for the new self-coherent camera. Check out the pinhole on the very upper edge of the mask when held up to Eden’s computer screen! That little pinhole, we’ve since learned, is the key for fancy new speckle-nulling strategies, like Coherent Differential Imaging. Sebastiaan’s and Parker’s faces says it all

… and after a bit of alignment work from the team, the mask is aligned!

Here is the result: there are fringes on the camsci images indicating that light from the pinhole is interfering with the light that transmits through the Lyot stop. Neat! If I were a quasistatic speckle I’d sure be sweating right now.

We broke for lunch and afterwards, it was time to finish up other miscellaneous tasks such as some interior cable organization, reconfiguring the power pathways for the Zaber stages, and squashing some LED lights inside the instrument.

We were initially just assigned the Suzuki for Clay observers “Lil Red” for our daily needs but we quickly realized that our transportation needs weren’t being met. After an email or two, we got permission to use one of the Suzuki Jimnys a.k.a. one of the super cool, white Jurassic Park-looking cars. Score!

One of the smaller tasks of the day was installing a small cable tray inside MagAO-X to help tidy up some of the pico motor cabling we had installed last month during the engineering run. These plastic trays required some slight modifications, which required a trip to the machine shop in the ASB. It’s not often any of us find our way in here, so it was cool to see…!

We had some time after dinner to enjoy the fading of the evening sunlight. some of us drove, some walked, and one of us ran.

From the Rocky Theme Song. We were attempting to do some vizzy spotting on the north slope of the telescope summit with P. Johnson who suddenly looked like he saw a ghost after looking at his phone. We asked what was wrong since this caught all of our attention and he, with a slight mumble of “Jared wants me…!”, ran off into the setting sun. So, when you’re checking out the telescope summit and you get a Slack message from Jared saying it’s time to Zoom, you best start zooming son.

“
Trying hard now
It’s so hard now
Trying hard now

Getting strong now
Won’t be long now
Getting strong now

Gonna fly now
Flying high now
Gonna fly, fly, fly…
“

These summer sunsets are great. Hasta mañana.

Song of the Day