Being confined at home can make anyone a little bit Genghis Khan, as my cat can attest.
Today’s Song of the Day is “Genghis Khan” by Miike Snow. Please enjoy the video, below.
Author: Joseph Long
MagAO-X 2020A Stay at Home Day 10: On memes, cats, and the merits of ISO 7010 Registered Safety Signs
When every weekend is spent at home having a mild time, one must find one’s own diversions. After the cooking is done and the phone calls to friends and family concluded, I scroll idly through the daily output of internet meme-makers. This usually provides a few minutes of distraction, eventually running aground on reposts and old memes.
To avoid doing chores, I have been plumbing successively more obscure sources of memes to waste my time. First, there were the Spanish-language memes.
Eventually those ran into the same problem: reposts.
We had to go deeper. How about… Spanish-language wild-felid social-distancing memes?
My sister, future wildlife biologist, sent me that one. It’s from the Instagram account @andeancats, a “not-for-profit project [seeking] to develop the first Andean cat documentary in order to raise awareness to people around the world.”
Jared really wants to see an Andean cat at Magellan, if we ever get to go back. He went trawling through their past posts and found this:
Isn’t that just the cutest?
However, even the deepest veins of obscure internet amusements ran out eventually, so I went to work on my DIY fabric masks. But, because I refuse to do anything simply, I had to design my own fabric for social distancing chic.
Which led me, in a roundabout way, to the ISO 7010 standard for registered safety signage. Which, after a month at home, seemed like yet another collection of funny internet pictures.
Eventually, I decided on the following motif for DIY textile crafts in the age of COVID-19:
Happy to report that the fabric and mask project has been a success. Perhaps not in terms of viral particle blocking, but aesthetically. And isn’t that what counts?
Your song of the day is “The Spot” by Your Smith:
MagAO-X 2020A Stay At Home Day 2: The city looks pretty when you’ve been indoors
Greetings from the home office! I’ve always been a fan of using my laptop to run my computations on other computers in the lab or data center, so you’d think this MagAO-X Stay At Home run would be mean standard operations for me. Unfortunately, while I’m rarely at my desk in my office, I’m not usually at home. (And I miss my favorite coffee shop terribly. 😭)
Still, it’s been nice to spend some quality time with the cat. We don’t normally spend mornings together, so there was a bit of adjustment when I tried to use my desk and interfered with his morning sun-bathing.
I have been occupying myself by building some software for generating synthetic photometry. Photometry is the surprisingly subtle art of quantifying how bright a star or planet is, and synthetic photometry quantifies how bright a body could be given a model. It turns out the system of squinting at the sky and saying “gee, that’s pretty darn bright” only worked for the first few thousand years of astronomy.
(Now we say “Well, you know how bright that one star is? It’s, like, way dimmer than that.”)
This is important for the interpretation of high contrast imaging data of exoplanets, as what we measure (brightness) and what we care about (planet mass, or minimum detectable mass if no planet is found) are only related through these models.
“That’s cool about the planets, but can we get more cat content?” I hear you say.
Fear not, dear reader. Today is Friday, which means we held the XWCL group meeting over video chat. We gave April Fool’s Day a miss for this year, but we still wanted to annoy our fearless leader.
Since we have limited opportunities to bother Jared with, say, unwanted realizations of his face on canvas (in the style of the renaissance masters), we resorted to silly Snap Camera lenses. We decided “Cat on Head” was the way to go, but he one-upped us with an actual orange cat on his actual head.
This is why he makes the big bucks, while we are lowly students.
Your song of the day is “City Looks Pretty” by drone-y Aussie Courtney Barnett.
Sometimes I get sad
It’s not all that bad
One day, maybe never
I’ll come around
MagAO-X 2019B Day 10: The Blog Must Go On
Last night was our fourth on-sky night. It also ran right in to our instrument removal/moving day. So, we went from taking a nice long dataset of beta Pictoris directly into taking off cables and connectors for our electronics. I’m still awake, despite feeling like someone dropped a truck on me, so I might as well ensure the blog gets done. Our dozens of readers are no doubt itching to hear about MagAO-X’s performance on its final on-sky night of 2019B.
I’m happy to report things went pretty smoothly! We observed Trapezium, a set of bright and well studied stars that will give us our astrometric solution (by knowing where they are, we can figure out how far apart and what orientation other stuff is). We observed beta Pictoris for a few hours on either side of transit, obtaining a vAPP + ADI dataset. We started off by optimizing our image quality and took Strehl measurements in a few different filters, resulting in some exceptionally sharp z’ band images of HD 9053:
Kyle worked on focal plane wavefront sensing, following the work of XWCL alumna Dr. Kelsey Miller (now at Leiden Observatory). The basic idea is using a little bit of the star light at the focal plane of your science camera to provide information on the real, honest-to-god wavefront error as experienced by the starlight at all optics downstream of the main wavefront sensor and correcting deformable mirror. In other words, yet another way of pushing light back where it belongs to make the sharpest possible images.
In unadaptive optics news, we captured Sirius A and B on our acquisition camera. Just for fun. Here they are:
Laird and Alex worked the first half of the night, but went to bed earlier so they could supervise the crane maneuvers to remove the MagAO-X optical table and legs. The PFS instrument is taking our place on the Nasmyth platform after lunch, so we need to get everything squared away before then. For my sake, and the sake of the instrument, I’m glad it’s in the hands of people who have had some sleep.
Jared, Olivier, Kyle, and I decabled the electronics rack and the AO Operator Computer, and got them safely stowed away until this afternoon when we’ll get them ready for shipment and/or storage. We rode down the hydraulic lift with our computers and rack of electronics. Someone made a comparison to going down with a ship.
After which, we all agreed it was time to collapse into bed.
Except for Dr. Olivier Guyon, who had to call into a meeting.
I should be sleeping right now, but according to your MagAO-X song of the day there ain’t no rest for the wicked…
MagAO-X 2019B Day 9: Third Light
“Can we stop calling it Nth light?”
Dr. Jared Robert Males
Tonight marked MagAO-X’s return to doing AO on starlight rather than an internal calibration source. The Observatory kindly allowed us to remain in place on the platform, so our return to operations was as simple as turning off the lamp and closing the loop on the first bright star we tried.
…
I’m lying to you, of course. The calibration that had worked so well on night #2 didn’t look nearly as nice when we booted up the system this evening. Alex and Laird had to open up the instrument to make fine adjustments to our pupil image positions. New response matrices had to be taken as well. “But I didn’t change any of this code!” was uttered many times, by many people.
Then we closed loop on a bright star. And it went great. We imaged π Pup and its companion. We even were able to hold on to an Airy ring around the companion! All this, in 1 arcsecond and above seeing (a far cry from Las Campanas Observatory’s trademark 0.5″).
We took the opportunity to record the AO instrument builder’s favorite video: the “now you see it, now you don’t” video.
Of course, capturing this video involved some pretty advanced optics:
Kyle and I drove the twin MagAO-X science cameras tonight. We took some data on pi Pup in various filters for Strehl ratio measurement, measuring the foci in various filters with Maggie’s focus script.
We put in our narrowband and continuum methane filters, which will eventually allow us to perform simultaneous differential imaging of exoplanets and detect methane absorption—something we see in planets closer to home, namely Jupiter. For this, however, they were just the narrowband filter available in the instrument best suited to the below-average seeing. (Shorter wavelengths are harder to correct, and our H-α filter would not have looked too good in the conditions we had.)
Next we looked at a close (0.144″) binary, HIP 38160. This wasn’t intended to be a challenging target in terms of contrast, but we were heartened to see it in the dark hole formed by our vAPP.
We also took an on-sky response matrix. This calibration step provides a mapping between our system’s deformable mirror commands and the resulting signal on our wavefront sensor.
We got some good data tonight, learned a bit more about how the system behaves, and have big plans for tomorrow night. (Of course, we also need to move off the platform immediately following that night, and off the mountain shortly after that. Fortunately for Dr. Males and the limits of good taste in blog titles, we’re not getting past “fourth light” this run.)
Today’s MagAO-X Song of the Day: