Jay Kueny – Extreme Wavefront Control Lab

Level up! Congratulations to Dr. Maggie Kautz

Maggie looking educated AF — Photo by Eden McEwan. Actually, pretty much ALL photos below are by Eden McEwen. We’re all thankful that Eden tends to go into journalist mode during these types of events!

On Friday last week (07/19), Maggie of House XWCL, first of her name, phaser of segmented apertures, protector of 1/4-20 drivers and the first piezoelectric motors, breaker of drywall barriers, the aligned, enthusiast of The Expanse and master of optical waterwheels made Tucson a little brighter that day with the successful defense of her dissertation!

Maggie’s talk took us on a journey through the world of extreme adaptive optics (ExAO) instrumentation and revealed what is coming next for the development of the MagAO-X successor, GMagAO-X, slated to be installed on the upcoming Giant Magellan telescope. If you’re like me, you were mesmerized by the complexities of GMagAO-X’s parallel deformable mirror design and learned a lot about the optomechanical specifics of MagAO-X and the HCAT testbed.

A great introduction by Laird detailing Maggie’s history as a student at the UofA.

Maggie making short work of explaining complicated concepts surrounding phasing of segmented apertures.

It came to the surprise of no one that Maggie emerged from the closed-door session of the defense victorious and ready to take on the post-student world like an absolute boss. To celebrate, we all convened in the Steward Observatory 3rd floor Interaction Area to sample some celebratory bubbly and treats. Thanks to Jialin, Eden, and Josh for helping me supply some Maggie-approved sweets including coffee cake, jelly empanadas, cookies, and peach melba-flavored macarons (a reference to the sci-fi show ‘The Expanse’).

If you have a spare moment and you’re in the Steward Observatory building gaze upon the new the cork-shaped hole in the ceiling at the 3rd floor Interaction Area [edit: kidding].

Those who don't recognize the guy in light blue, that's our newest addition: Parker Johnson. Welcome, Parker! — The gang’s all here ;’)

Maggie has accepted a job offer to work as an optomechanical engineer as part of the staff at the Center for Astronomical Adaptive Optics here at Steward Observatory where she will put her talents towards the latest space-based telescope projects. Though she is moving to a different office space, we’re all super thankful she will stay close to the group both professionally and physically.

We capped the day off with a fun celebration comprised of family and friends. Congrats again, Maggie!

Miss OpSci rocking the sash expertly crafted by our own (wickedly talented) Eden McEwen!

Song of the Day

The song of the day is Death Cab for Cutie’s “Transatlanticism” which is also the title to the album which Maggie, Eden, and I saw them play live, in its entirety, last September in D.C. completely serendipitously. This also just happened to be the first show of the nationwide tour…!

It’s a long track with a dramatic build-up, but think I speak for Eden and Maggie as well when I say that this song captures very fond memories that we share together.

MagAO-X 2024Ab Day 2: Settling Into Winter

It’s cold. But, at least it isn’t windy anymore. A good omen has revealed itself this night and it’s that the domes are actually open at sunset.

In terms of flashy #blontent, today was pretty sparse. But this is perhaps ideal for lab calibration days! For instance, yesterday was ripe with #blontent in comparison which meant we were tearing apart cabinets, peeling out of parking lots, searching the trunks of random cars all over the observatory to try and find our ESD kit for the DM cabling. It actually ended up being in one of our shipping crates in the clean room receiving area all along. So, it’s good that Jared has been able to focus on getting good calibrations and figuring out new ways to align our most critical components for the run, which is approaching at the speed of light seemingly.

Jared hard at work working on better alignment procedures and quality of life improvements for all the future AO operators.

I got a chance to briefly work on giving old ICC new life using some new computer parts Jared ordered. However we ran into a compatibility issue with the CPU cooler and it won’t fasten to the mobo without special adapters. Apparently this company quietly deemed these to be special order items sometime in last September instead of including them in the box like they have been doing. What the hay…!

Thankfully Eden was able to make an emergency stop at the lab back in Tucson to grab said adapters. Thanks Eden!

Old ICC is getting resurrected! It just requires some parts that are undergoing overnight international shipping from Tucson.

This past afternoon we were delighted to officially welcome UASAL’s Kian M. to the 2024Ab run.

Sorry, I forgot to get photographic evidence of Kian’s arrival.

The best 15 minutes of today was welcoming Kian to LCO and giving him a brief tour of MagAO-X in lab state, the ASB, and the lodge. Also stating the do’s and don’ts for the experience here. Like, DO max out your empanada order on Sundays. And DON’T desecrate the public cheese. Tomorrow we will probably get a chance to hike up to the telescopes and go swashbuckling or something. Anyone else remember their first time on the mountain?

We’re eager to meet most of the rest of the team tomorrow afternoon, safe travels!!!!

Song of the Day

MagAO-X 2024Ab Day 0: Is hot sauce a vegetable?

“You’re back again, so soon…!” Said Hernan as we passed by him walking to the MagAO storage crate to retrieve some steel toe boots for tomorrow. Here’s a quick play-by-play of travel and arrival day for the first wave of the 2024Ab crew:

The traditional pre-flight “Lizzie’s Luggage” at TUS. Left: Sad-which from 2024Aa Right: Good-which from 2024Ab. Some sandwich artists care more than others apparently.

Flying over Safford we got to wave to LBT and the rest of Mount Graham Intl. Observatory.

Picking up groceries at the SCL Starbucks

Now on our way to La Serena! It’s starting to get kinda cold out here…

Well after the ride up we got right to work!

At the end of the last run we ran into an issue with one of the screw jacks in the legs. It became stuck to the point that any more torque applied to the bolt probably would have snapped the Allen wrench, but we managed to get the bottom of the bolt ~1 mm off the ground before it stopped moving completely. We then limped the legs back into the corner of the cleanroom, and here we are now with MagAO-X needing to be re-legged tomorrow morning which can’t be done in case the screw drags on the floor. Thankfully, Juan and his crew came to rescue and with a few squirts of some delicious WD-40 and with some TLC were able to remove the bolt! They even chased the threads with a die and tap to clean them up and applied some grease for good measure.

Unfortunately it wasn’t all W’s in the cleanroom today. We found out that one out of the two fancy new curved monitors meant for the observer station suffered some damage sometime during transit to the cleanroom.

Can this even be returned at this point?

2024Ab blog rules

We’ll stick to keeping it simple this time ’round for the blog rules, so, Song of the Day still applies (all posts must end with a YouTube embed of a song) *and* all posts must include a description of the best 15 minutes of that day/night. The description can include as much or as little detail as needed, and is subjective.

The best 15 minutes of Day 0 was probably meeting up with Juan’s crew in the cleanroom and freeing the stuck screw jack on one corner of MagAO-X’s legs. Having built and daily driven a 1973 VW Bug in my youthen years, I’ve lost many nights of sleep over stuck nuts and bolts. Seeing that bolt finally come free after fighting so hard with it at the end of 2023Aa was honestly a genuine feeling of relief. You had to be there, I guess.

Song of the Day

Folks, it’s cold up here on the mountain. Please bring some of the Tucson warmth with you, we’re gonna need it.

P.S. congrats to Logan, Maggie, and Katie (XWCL) as well as Jaren (UASAL) for going through commencement today!

MagAO-X 2024Aa Day 17: The People’s Cheese

Well, it’s nearly time to add another MagAO-X night under our belt and be greeted by the calls of the exceedingly uncommon black-billed shrike-tyrant (identified by Prof. Close!) from atop the lodge. I won’t be able to top the wonderful post by our skilled telescope operator, but the show must go on.

I hereby request that my cheesy outro replace the need for hidden captions for this post. Gracias! — The Magellan Clay looking magestic as heck during today’s sunset.

Tonight was an engineering/Sebastiaan night and our awesome Dutch postdoc is probably in full-on zombie mode as he has been up for nearly 24 hours getting the VIS-X instrument up to speed, which is a MagAO-X fed, visible wavelength, integral field spectrograph to the eXtreme. In addition to that, he and Josh have been hard at work commissioning implicit-Electric Field Conjugation, which is just a fancy term for “black magic speckle zapping”. Speckles are a type of noise in high-contrast imaging that are easily mistaken for planets or other point sources of interest, so it’s really important that they are suppressed as much as possible.

A point source companion to the central star (which is blocked in this view) is easily imaged in the absence of speckles.

The above images demonstrate the power of iEFC coupled with our knife-edge coronagraph, which blocks the host star in the middle of the frame. See how speckles are actually very effective exoplanet interlopers (top right)? No bueno.

Let’s break for a moment to appreciate the various Equidae who take residence on the mountain. I would like to point out that these photos were shot by the wickedly-talented Jialin Li, who also demanded I stop the car I was driving us in halfway up the road to the telescopes take these pics. No biggie, just 6 complete stops on measly 50 degree incline while driving a stick-shift…!

I regret to inform our blog followers that a crime has been committed here at the Clay telescope. Josh was quickly apprehended as the prime suspect and soon confessed to accidentally taking a massive honkin’ bite out of the middle of the cheese block. The honorable Judge Logan made the remark “This is a public cheese. Everyone has to use this cheese.” before sentencing him to eat his mistake. Apparently everyone took pity on Josh and decided to help him carry out his punishment because this was a full block of cheese at the beginning of the night…!

Ok, ok. Josh didn’t *actually* take a big’ bite out of the cheese.

We’ll end with a pretty picture of the burros during golden hour.

…aaaaand a sweet picture of Magellan Clay basking in the moonlight during prime time.

Song of the Day

We can all thank Josh for brieing cordial and introducing all of us to the GOAT, Ricardo Queso, who is sharply relevant today, may he rest in cheese. The original is a song some us might have gruyere up listening to or have fondue memories of, as it’s a gouda song, made beddar by the ripe wit of R. Cheese. Though good music is best spotted by the rind’s eye, it’s never a bleu day when the bad vibes are sliced off by creamy melody. After all, it just ain’t a party without havarti.

MagAO-X 2024Aa Day 9: Another Day, Another Disk

Now’s about the time of the run where the nightly routine just starts to become second nature; eyes are less bloodshot and twilight is here before you know it. We’ll start this post off with some sunset glamour shots…

One of the iconic Suzuki Jimnys that the telescope operators always drive up was looking majestic as heck at golden hour.

The Clay telescope always presents her best side right this time of night.

Today we were all a bit sad to bid farewell to Katie and Maggie who are off to La Serena to rehydrate and relax at the beach. However, we gained a Logan who was eager to join the festivities and contribute her science.

From the desk of wise guy Sebastiaan: Gaan met die banaan! — Bye Maggie and Katie… hello and welcome Logan!

Missing Tucson traffic extra less today! — Logan confirms that traveling up the mountain is never a dull time — even the traffic is cool.

Tonight’s program featured Logan for most of the night and she definitely #nailedit, finding an impressive amount of white dwarf companions in a very short timespan. There’s probably more to come, as she still has yet to reduce her data and uncover what faint objects could be hiding in the bright halo of the host star. I think it’s safe to say that if finding binaries were a crime, she’d be on death row…!

That feel when Logan discovers her 24th companion of the night

While Logan was winning, the rest of us got to work on doing some networking and installing a bunch of fancy software to be able to control MagAO-X from our own computers. After a bit of labor, I successfully got my laptop connected and was encouraged to parade the fruits of my labor to the others to raise morale. This is needed because it’ll just make our nightly operations more efficient since anyone can contribute to an instrument procedure or data collection without needing to displace anyone in the control room.

cantbelievethatworked.wav — So I guess this VM install *is* possible

There is no spoon. — So I guess this VM install *is* possible

The conditions tonight, especially in the later half, were a real treat and encouraged some challenging observations of circumstellar disk HD 145560 (for Dr. Alycia Weinberger at Carnegie) that we would have otherwise not been able to effectively observe. The only way to know if these observations were successful is to perform the full data reduction (coming soon), but we all have a really good feeling about this one!

Does every photo need one of these fancy hover caption things?

Taking full advantage of the excellent seeing, we stayed on this target as close to sunrise as possible which presented some interesting photo opportunities.