Author: Joseph Long

This evening Dr. Matías Díaz, a support astronomer here at Las Campanas Observatory, helped us take a next-level team photo.

Of course, we have more people in our group than pictured, and by the time we visit again in 2024A (!) we’ll probably have even more new members. By then I will have decamped for the Flatiron Center for Computational Astrophysics in New York, but it’s famously hard to see stars there. Maybe they’ll invite me back.

It’s our last night on sky, which is always bittersweet. Tomorrow’s a long day of removing from the telescope. So, what have we got to show for the past 22 days?

• 14 terabytes of high-contrast astronomical data (and counting)
• a new observing mode that keeps light where it should be, allowing us to pass these savings on to the consumer (shout-out to Ms. Lowfs)
• a handle on our induced DM ✨sparkles✨, which will let us unravel the profound mysteries of pyramids (thanks Eden McSparkles)
• a lot of improvements to VIS-X (gaan met de banaan, Dr. Haffert)
• one new extreme-AO-fed instrument (shout-out to Noah & the Ex-Kids, opening for Weezer on tour this summer)

We’re about to commission our knife-edge coronagraph, but this blog post can’t wait. It’s time for the prospective students to choose their Ph.D. institutions, and we must put our best foot (feet?) forward.

Song of the Day

I went to a liberal arts college, which makes some people assume I didn’t study physics or something. In fact, astronomy is one of the quadrivium of artes liberales, and my college had a Department of Mathematics and Astronomy before it had a physics one. It’s physics now, though. So there.

Still, a smaller student body and more flexibility in courses of study meant some interesting cross-pollination between departments. One of my classmates in Advanced Intro Astronomy was named Maurissa, and she was actually a music major. She took astronomy with us, but she also had a band, did stuff with electronics, and was in a Balinese gamelan ensemble. Anyway, she was the one who introduced me to Brian Jonestown Massacre, the above psych-rock band with good vibes.

Bonus Song of the Evening

Sometimes you don’t need something musically interesting, and swoopy synths suffice. Anyway, the blog title reminded me, and after all—we are almost home.

MagAO-X threw a bit of a tantrum today, but Jared got it calmed down before sunset. Ever since Eden gave it a swift zapatazo, the operator workstation has been moody and fractious. Compounding our difficulties, one of the rack computers was on the fritz at the same time.

Jared says that in the world of Navy nuclear power, you don’t conduct drills for two simultaneous faults. That means what happened today is simply not allowed in the Navy, which should reassure us all. (I have informed our instrument computers that we will be adopting this same policy going forward.)

Tonight Alycia Weinberger, the forever young Las Campanas Frequent Flyer, is obtaining more disk imagery. Conditions have been passable, though I hear past midnight things started getting good. Stay tuned.

At this point even the newest graduate students have become adept at driving the AO system. Still, they mustn’t get complacent, because we continue to add more complexity in order that more things may go right.

For example, I am hiding in the rec room trying to refactor Lookyloo, the “quicklook” script that has grown additional responsibilities. Not coincidentally, I’m going through my headache meds faster than the chocolate-covered espresso beans. (Does anyone know what Excedrin is sold as in Chile?)

The goal is to bundle up the relevant image archives and system telemetry files that encompass an ‘observation’ and stuff them into a single unit for uploading to the CyVerse Data Store back in North America. CyVerse operates scientific computing infrastructure in connection with the University of Arizona, meaning we have a hotline to their head honcho for our data hoarding. The idea here is that our highly compressed data formats will use the limited bandwidth between continents more efficiently, allowing us to “rehydrate” the observations into more conventional formats upon demand.

Fortunately, CyVerse has no relation to Facebook’s Metaverse, and we will not be issuing NFTs of our observations. (For archive-browsing readers of the future: NFTs were a bubble/pump-and-dump scam of the early 2020s, with JPEGs taking the role of tulips.)

In further news from the software side, we ran our first all-Python MagAO-X device last night! My PurePyINDI2 library successfully allowed us to command Sebastiaan’s VIS-X camera from the same interfaces we use for scripting and interacting with the rest of MagAO-X.

Of course, that doesn’t look like anything, so here is a picture of a guanaco:

Technically, it was our second PurePyINDI2 device, as Maggie-o-X had already been taunting the observers through Jared’s add-on speaker for the operator workstation. Its repertoire includes:

• “Beep boop bop” when activating Low Order Wavefront Sensing, with or without Ms. Lowfs in attendance.
• “Gaan met die banaan” when taking exposures with VIS-X, our most Dutch camera.
• “P.I. is asleep. I am the P.I. now.” (among other choices) when nothing alert-worthy happens for 15 minutes.

It alerts on more useful criteria, as well, like changing targets and AO loop events. But those messages are strictly business.

Being out of the critical path for operations tonight means I have taken the chance to do some (lower-tech) astrophotography. It turns out that the image processing on an iPhone can wring detail out of moonless nights, as long as you have a tripod and some patience.

I have speculated that “computational photography” boffins will eventually forward-model the whole sky and paint the stars in after the fact. Recently, it was revealed that Samsung has taken this conspiracy theory as a product suggestion for their latest phones.

Once our image processing is allowed to make up details that aren’t there, I predict we’re going to find loads of planets.

Song of the Day

There were never any ‘good old days’. They are today, they are tomorrow! It’s a stupid thing we say, cursing tomorrow with sorrow.

The world’s foremost Gypsy Punks were also my first ever show as a wee teenager in Atlanta, Georgia. I didn’t know much about live music, but a Ukrainian dude capering around the stage and emptying a bottle of red wine on the pit seemed pretty punk rock to me.

Lead singer Eugene Hütz also had a starring role as Alex in the movie adaptation of Everything is Illuminated. They even worked the band in in this one scene:

Day 8 saw the arrival of two colleagues and one hefty tarantula.

Despite having to negotiate the Atlanta airport with speed, they made their connection to Santiago, where they obtained their Mountain Names: Iden and Jackke.

Nobody captured the exact moment they alighted from their servicio especial van, and they’re extremely asleep right now, so you’ll have to trust us: they’re here.

Today we crammed in quite a lot of science and engineering before shutting the instrument down for the night before its Friday morning trip up to the telescope platform. We also wrap it up to prevent heating and intrusion by dust.

Anyway, all that means: tomorrow we’re doing the thing! This means we wake up for breakfast, make approximately 100 trips back and forth between the summit and the almost-summit where the cleanroom is, plug a lot of things into other things, and then do astronomy until it’s time for breakfast again.

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As the only graduate student present who has been on a MagAO Classic run, it fell to me to implement the speech-synthesis ops concept that Jared has long coveted for MagAO-X. (Only so many people can crowd around MegaDesk, but everyone in the control room can hear “loop is closed.”)

Speech synthesis has changed a lot since Jared was a grad student, and professional-grade deep-learning models are surprisingly good these days. Of course, the budget for this was $0.00, so I used OpenTTS. OpenTTS lets you sample a wide variety of synthesis packages with a common API, and I had the container running on AOC (that’s our Adaptive optics Operator Computer) in a few minutes.

The next challenge was to hold auditions. For my auditions I imagined some things MagAO-X might want to say, and gave them to the various models: “Target changed. High-order loop closed. Data saving started. Loop is open. Smoke ’em if you got ’em.”

The previous-generation models were there for comparison, and sounded like absolute butt:

On the plus side, espeak was one of the only included engines with a non-US/non-UK English voice:

Island vibes aside, the synthesis was just not that good. I kept looking. This MaryTTS voice seemed all right:

Just one small problem: Maggieo-X is clearly not male. This voice clearly is. That simply won’t do. How about this from Larynx?

Not bad. But are we sure Maggieo speaks English?

I also ran the Dutch voices past Sebastiaan Haffert, local Dutchman:

Verdict?
“They’re all… very Flemish.”
“Is that bad?”
“No, they’re just very… soft.”

It’s true. The characteristic throaty “g” of the true Dutchman was let down by these synthetic voices. Just click the speaker icon on here to have Google’s model read the same to you. See?

Anyway, auditions continue, but I have a pretty good idea of who will be narrating our ops tomorrow night. Until then,

Song of the Day

Okay, maybe when I posted Bring Me To Life and then Jared had Korn it started a bit of a nu metal trend, but in the end it doesn’t really matter.

I don’t play many video games, mainly because I am usually in the business of telling computers what to do, and therefore really resent them telling me what to do. One recent exception was Sayonara Wild Hearts, which is incredible. More of an album-length interactive music video than a “game,” I guess, but anything that includes:

• firing heart-shaped projectiles
• from your motorcycle
• at a three-headed robot dog
• as a metaphor for overcoming heartbreak
• (narrated by Queen Latifah)

has to be good. And, of course, the music complements the v i b e s perfectly. (And is strongly inspired by CHVRCHES, no doubt.)

For some reason, nobody’s taken the unadulterated audio and overlaid it on gameplay for a ready-made music video, but if you can ignore the dings and bleeps this should give you some of the flavor.

Bonus Tarantula

Content warning: incredible arachnid. Click to tarantulate.

This little guy took up residence on Avalon’s door this evening, requiring XKID xpert Noah Swimmer to remove him.

This blog post was titled—somewhat optimistically—earlier today, but rest assured, dear reader: MagAO-X is even more alive now than when I wrote that. There is a polemic I could write about the Linux kernel’s casual attitude toward hardware support, but the short version is: we got everything reinstalled and connected and closed the loop in lab this evening on 1,564 modes.

As you may have heard, our Instrument Control Computer was supposed to get a software remodel, but instead ended up with the equivalent of a spit-shine and a new coat of paint. (One can imagine worse outcomes.) The best efforts of our hardware partners to provide Linux support were no match for Linux itself, which continues to defeat all comers in its ability to break software that once worked.

On the plus side, I hear the new way to write drivers is, like, super convenient. Shame about all those old drivers y’all have.

The highlight of the day (other than the loop closing thing) was the arrival of Eva and Lardy:

This afternoon a van disgorged a Professor Lardy Clos (optomechanics lead, natty dresser) and Eva Maklaod, soon-to-be-Ph.D. student in the XWCL.

It was a bit disappointing to spend all that effort on the computer upgrade and then roll it all back, but getting here early means I’ve run out my quarantine days already. And that means I’m allowed in to the dining room to dispense cappuccinos from the fancy machine, and that is an outcome worth celebrating on its own.

The third most exciting thing to happen today was spotting this neat bug:

Song of the Day

A review of the blog archives (blargchives?) revealed that nobody had ever used 2000s classic “Bring Me To Life” by Evanescence as a blog post Song of the Day before. (Jared didn’t believe me.)

Required Song Context Per Rule 2023A§5(c): It is hard to pinpoint when I became aware of this masterpiece. To date myself (and/or upset my elders) I was a melodramatic 13 year old when it came out. That alone is reason enough to resonate with the subject matter. (Wikipedia research reveals the songwriter was 19 when it was written, which tracks.)

Per the blog rules I should explain a memorable occasion when the song was played, but “being 13” might not cut it. Instead, I offer the following important facts:

• “Bring Me To Life” reached #5 on the Billboard Hot 100, but #1 on the US Alternative chart. (And was the number one song of the year in the Australian Rock charts, what the heck.)
• The sudden dude energy that kicks in at 2:50 in the song was apparently due to record executives being too chicken to release a song with female lead vocals and heavy guitars. I always thought it was incongruous and now that all makes sense.
• I have just learned that it served as the official theme song for WWE’s 2003 No Way Out event, a totally normal stop on the route to international fame.