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.
