Before I moved to Tucson, I thought there were four seasons. Since living here, I’ve learned there are five. Fall, winter, spring, summer, and the North American Monsoon.
I also used to think summer started at the end of May. However, we’re already facing our first 90+ºF (32+ºC) day next week.
Soon we will become nocturnal desert dwellers, emerging at night or before dawn for our socially distant jogging. Eventually, it will be too hot even for this, and we will have to estivate.
Also, the University just announced its furlough plan on Friday, which will impact many of our People. This may have far reaching impacts, possibly extending even to our blog operations.
The Blog Board of Regents will have to weigh in.
Because of all this, your Song of the Day is “Summertime Sadness” by Lana del Rey.
Of course, the definitive version is the dance remix by Cedric Gervais:
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.
Translated: Hello Mr. Store Owner. Please sell my puppy some ORANGE Cheetos. NOT RED ONES because they’re too spicy. In her collar she has $20. Warning: If you don’t take care of my puppy she’ll bite… Attention: the neighbor in front.
Eventually those ran into the same problem: reposts.
Translated: see first image.
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:
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.
Do not have a good time.
Warning: Instagram influencer.
Cool dudes posting up here prohibited.
Eventually, I decided on the following motif for DIY textile crafts in the age of COVID-19:
Wash your hands, wear a mask, don’t touch anything, and stay home if you can!
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?
Mask design adapted from this YouTube video with extra-large elastic hair ties for ear-loops and a stiff piece of baling wire for over-nose fit. (It really helps with glasses fogging!)
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
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:
Photo by Laird Close
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.
Fortunately, we are led by a submariner, so we’ll resurface in May.
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…
“Ain’t no rest for the wicked” by Cage the Elephant
