Author: Jared Males

MagAO-X 2026A Day 32: UUUUU_

The poop-covered mirror selfie, with MagAO-X driving by.

As Katie reports, we had a smooth and efficient MagAO-X removal — even though Sebastiaan and Parker collected the very last photons of the run. Everything went great, that is, until we turned the computers back on in the cleanroom. At this point we found that the data storage system on the Instrument Control Computer (ICC) had essentially melted down, apparently it got car sick. We need that working to be able to test cabling results, so instead of getting all the way to a working lab setup in 1 day (our standard) we had to pause for a night of RAID rebuilding.

Lots of good friends hanging around.

So this morning we finished restoring the ICC data array, moved the important bits back onto it from our (just barely finished in time) fresh backup, and got to work. Parker and Katie cabled the DMs, and we had only one problem which was an actually failed “samtec” insert (the cheapest and easiest to replace piece of our DM systems). After replacing that we had the loop closed and got to work.

In addition to the IR camera packup, we also removed the experimental baffle tubes so we can make “professional” versions, and knocked out a few other odds-and-ends tasks to clean up.

The sunset from the gym. The green flash was amazing!
There was a herd of horses (and at least one mule) to negotiate with on the run. Parker almost didn’t make it.

After a dinner break, and some nice sunset jogging, we ended the night with some ADC experiments. It’s a long story, but something changed a few years ago. Katie has tried a bunch of things, which mostly just confused everyone. After a consultation with Laird, and digging through his small warehouse of optics down here, we installed a wedge to de-wedge another wedge, with encouraging results. As always, the permanent answer involves $, really $$$, but now we know what to do.

Those are some straight speckles. IYKYK.

With apologies, the color of the day is inspired by a real problem: the foxes are starting to become, let’s say, noticeable for the wrong reasons.

I’ll bet it’s been a while since this has been on the blog. My advice: crank it and dance like you’re 18 mos old:

she actually tries to do the horsey dance, not quite there though.

MagAO-X 2026A Day 17: And Nothing Else Matters

I heard you guys are finally leaving?

Well here we go, on our way home. Wow this run felt long, even though we only had 7 nights. The first group of us got here 10 days early, though as is typical we mostly sat around waiting for a shipment to arrive.

This captures how it always feels when we careen back down the mountain, hoping to find a sign of our old civilization somewhere ahead.

In truth we did an unreal amount of work. From overhauling our instrument’s glycol cooling to fixing all the vibrations to installing a new infrared camera, this has been action packed. And it all works!

A big accomplishment was all the people who got their driver’s license on this run.

Our last day/night was not without excitement. Over the last two nights our AO Operators Computer (AOC) has been randomly freezing up. My little buddy (read as either GPT-5 or Joesph, your choice) had lots of ideas. After a dawn reboot it was still spewing disk errors when I woke up this afernoon, so we decided to do some troubleshooting.

I feel like there is always a wrong choice made about “do it right, move it and have full access” vs. “touch as little as possible so you don’t break it more”. You never know until you’re done.

In the end we didn’t actually learn anything. We did stop the freezes, but not the disk errors, so we have fewer ideas than when we started.

At least the computer came back up and is operational except for a [_UUU] we have to fix before we leave.

The official group photo. We’re missing Miles (who left a few days before) and Laird (who I left a few minutes before).
MagAO-X will be here for you even after we’re gone.

Here’s the craziest part: this isn’t even the end of the run. We have 13 more nights coming up, but we’ll be driving MagAO-X from the friendly confines of Steward Observatory. Another adventure begins.

The color of day is a moonlit-sky-blue

The song of the day is Nothing Else Matters by Metallica

This makes a good lullaby (except for the yeah-yeah! part)

MagAO-X 2026A Day 3: Deadlock Funlock

Multi-threaded software is hard. You get all these different processes trying to access the same place in memory, and if they do it at the same time weird things happen. We have ways to stop these “data races” with tools like “atomics” and “mutexes” (mutices? plural of mutex for mutual exclusion) — but these add a new fun bug called “deadlock” when different threads try to lock the same mutex. So I’ve been spending lots of quality time with my new third best friend GPT-Codex. We make about 20 steps forward for every step back, but it’s in the time it used to take me to take about 1 step forward. Winning.

Miles has been hard at work getting his new polarization components installed.
Here we’re using a bright red laser to chase the beam path through the instrument.

Sebastiaan and Adam arrived from Leiden today. Sebastiaan is already complaining about having to do EFC.

The door to the lodge was being guarded this afternoon. In a very friendly fashion.

A nice sunset from my room tonight.

The color of the day is HeNe laser red.

The song of the day is The Emptiness Machine by Linkin Park:

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.