Author: Jared Males

MagAO-X 2025B Day 21: Today is Tomorrow

Phil: Do you know what day it is?
Rita: No, what?
Phil: Today is tomorrow. It happened.

— Groundhog Day (1993)

This will be my 571st night at LCO (and this is my 270th blog post).

I feel like one always gets into a rhythm on a long observing run. It might take a while — with MagAO-X we always start with a frantic lab period, installing the latest crazy upgrades and tuning the instrument up. Then there’s “the day”, where we go 24 hours all at once to move up to the telescope. That helps with the transition, since you’re so tired after that you can’t help but sleep at 8 am. Then after about a week your body starts to adjust, and you can sleep a little later into the afternoon. One night turns into another, and you start to wonder if you’ve ever had a different day. But now we get to go find out what those different days are like.

Part of the crew departed this morning. The rest of us tomorrow.

MagAO-X works because of our great team. Thanks everybody for the hard work. And thanks to our great observers who bring us such interesting projects and challenging observations. See you next time.

As has become our normal practice, we have left MagAO-X set up for remote operations in the LCO cleanroom. This time it’s a little different, since we put it in the corner to keep the tent clear for another instrument. Fits just fine over there.

Of course we couldn’t just leave. There’s always something to work on.

We have exciting new things planned for next semester, so exciting we may have to change the way the blog works!

The bird-poop selfie is an ancient tradition, harkening back to the age of legends.
The sky looks clear — but those clouds are closer than they appear.

Fun Fact: Imbolc is the old Gaelic name for what became Saint Bridget’s day, and is a seasonal festival marking the turning of Winter into Spring. The ancient goddess Brigid was welcomed into homes at Imbolc with hopes for a quick end to Winter and a warm Spring. Part of this festival included watching for animals to emerge, and to see if the hag Cailleach arranges for good weather so she can gather lots of firewood for the long remaining winter ahead. Does that sound familiar? Well, that just might be where modern Groundhog Day comes from.

And here’s a song about Bridget.

This is a good lullaby

This song has been on a MAPS run before. The artist, Celia Farran, was just in Tucson for the Celtic Festival — but we didn’t find out about it until it was too late.

MagAO-X 2025A Day 22: I am a Meat Popsicle

Another MagAO-X run in the books. Overall a successful one too. We got lots of new stuff working, and had several very good nights with some exciting discoveries. Great work folks. Now get to work on your data and maybe you’ll get a PhD.

This was one of the few times, however, that I’m feeling personally let down by Cerro Manqui. Our mountain usually comes through for me, just when it’s time to do my observations the skies clear and the stars still. But this time I only got one really good shot at my target (out of four planned observations), and the infamous last night included my time. I guess this is the problem with doing the things that require everything to be perfect — that’s hard to do.

As has been noted, the animals were pretty entertaining the last few weeks.

The Fox and Magellan
Cleanroom Vizzies were hit or miss this run, but on our last work day one made an appearance.
Burrows up to no good.

The addition of a cat is a major development. I really want to know the story — I assume it involves an epic journey.

It looked like she was headed towards the Bodega.
These aren’t condors, they’re people.
Look what I found at the summit. #10-32 rack screws.
One last sunset.

Now that we routinely leave MagAO-X here and set up for remote experiments, it has become traditional for me to put in a goodbye photo so we can remember how we left it.

This time there’s a twist. I set up a webcam on our workstation pointed at MagAO-X. At least when the lights are on it will give us a little view of home away from home.

Time to start working on the next sticker

I watched Fifth Element on the plane ride down. It contains a great way to describe an Empanada.

MagAO-X Engineering Run 2024B Day 7: a goodbye and a see you later

We’re on our way home, leaving behind a fixed, upgraded, and working MagAO-X. Ready to go for 2024B.

A Goodbye

While we were there they had just finished stripping parts from the famous “NAS” from the venerable MagAO. They loaded it up to take it down the hill to the bodega, where it will be taken apart and scrapped.

Thanks for all the memories.

The NAS was never useless
Some mechanico humor

A See You Later

Been seeing this flashback inducing metro-blue forecast for a couple days:

And it was rolling in as we loaded up the van:

But MagAO-X is safe in the cleanroom, waiting its next shot at the telescope.

See you later

Mysteries For Next Time

The current drama (for us, anyway) is that they have (again) done away with the agua con gas. It does produce a lot of plastic waste, but it was maybe the most discussed amenity by members of the MagAO-X traveling circus.

It appears that the solution is these “soda guns”. But none of use were brave enough to try them out. So next time then.

What will happen next?

The other mystery involves the goat herd that was roaming, and shitting, all over the mountain. First, a reminder that goats are cute

yes, that’s someone’s room.

So either the goats have a dog, or this dog has goats.

Walking up the dog gave me a good barking, and then herded the goats away from me.

Now we have questions about this dog’s life.

The dog was always with the goats
And if you got too close would come over to let you know that the goats are off limits
Not unfriendly, tail wagging and a good-natured ears-up look
until you made the wrong move

So here’s the question: how does the dog stay alive? We hear that maybe there is a camp nearby. But how does it work? Does the dog herd the goats there once a day? Or does the dog have to wait until the goats decide to go back? Is there a signal?

Walk, not Run

It was a gorgeous day in Santiago. Jay and I took our time and just walked from place to place. It’s the little things.

The succulent wall was as stunning as ever — it always looks extra special when the sun is out.

Lab Rules

For the last god damn time, bring a god damn flashlight when you go to an observatory. We work in the dark. It’s what we do. Your cell phone does not count. When everyone has to share the PI’s flashlight . . .

And a new one. And it’s kind of a big deal, because in over a decade we’ve never had a rule about the blog rules other than whoever posts the first post of a run gets to set them. But from now on, your rules must not set a limit on the number of days in the run. In hind sight it’s just a classic Murphy’s Law blunder. (TBC, I liked these rules, it was fun to look up songs by decades — I was surprised by where a few landed. I just didn’t think about the ramifications until the day we started rescheduling flights and I remembered the ? in the rules . . .)

So here’s a song from the 2020’s. Hoping our last flight to Tuscon goes through because if it doesn’t I don’t know what we’ll do — other than blame the blog rules.

MagAO-X Engineering Run 2024B Day 1: No Longer A Couple

One of the big goals for this visit to LCO was to troubleshoot a coupled pair of actuators on our precious 2040 actuator “tweeter” deformable mirror (DM). Being coupled meant that when we poked actuator 498, actuator 650 moved (not 498). Actuator 650 also moved when we poked 650. We first noticed this problem after shipping MagAO-X in March, when we ran a post-cabling function test. However, digging through our archives we found that it showed up back in November, 2023, but we just didn’t notice.

Now our tweeter is expensive. So we don’t like it when things go wrong, and it makes messing with it really stressful. But having those two actuators acting up means MagAO-X didn’t work perfectly, so we had to do what we can to fix it. We deferred it until after our March and April runs to give us time to plan and do it right.

We can all breathe a sigh of relief: with only minimal shenanigans we got it fixed. After testing various potential cabling problems, we found that a circuit board just needed to be replaced. We had a spare, popped it in, and the couple had split up and gone back to behaving normally.

And we got that done in time for Empanada Sunday:

Empanadas are just a little bit better fresh, compared to at midnight.

After lunch we got onto the next set of tasks, which included disassembling a rack shelf so we can get better airflow.

The shelf in question is actually Jay’s baby. He designed the hold-down system for the components on it. That also means he had to take it apart and put it back together.

We’re also upgrading the Instrument Control Computer (ICC) to go faster and do more stuff. We like to liquid cool our CPUs and GPUs. Normally we rig that up in Tucson, but we couldn’t get all of the components from our usual supplier in time, so we shipped what we had (and found some substitutes on Amazon!) and are doing some clean room plumbing.

An NVIDIA RTX 4090 in the middle of having a water cooling block attached to it. The shiny square in the middle is the business end.

Jay has also been leading the assembly and testing of new ICC. Other than the liquid cooling parts, it was fully working in Tucson before we took it apart to ship it down here. We’re getting it all back together.

Jay hard at work screwing ICC components to the custom rack mount.

Even after our delayed departure, we are making good time thanks to the relatively easy fix to the tweeter. I haven’t had enough running on this trip yet, so I took some time before dinner to go circle around the 100″.

Start of run, heading to the 100″ telescope which is down and left from Magellan.
The view back from the 100″. I’m surprised this came out, it was so windy I couldn’t hold my phone still.
From 1966.

MagAO-X Maintenance 2024-1 Day 2: In-N-Out

Caught the 0830 transport down this morning. Irony of ironies, this may have been the most stunningly clear blue Chile-wide sky I’ve ever seen. Caveat: I’m usually coming off a weeks-long night-schedule average 4 or 5 hrs of sleep, so not usually awake for any of this trip.

Not a cloud in the sky at sunrise, but a few on the ground.
Last view of the telescopes (until next time)
First view of the ocean. About here is where your skin breathes again.
The forms must be observed. Even after such a short stay, this is the stuff.
The La Serena / Coquimbo shoreline. Should have gone to the beach.
The Andes look very imposing when you can see them.
Challenge: find Vera C. Rubin!
The SCL succulent wall looked gorgeous with all the sunlight.
A closeup.
Song of the day.