Author: Jared Males

In Residence

Part I: At The Grand Canyon

Drs Males and Morzinski (and a little squirrel) just had the amazing honor of being personally shown around the Grand Canyon by the Grand Canyon Conservancy’s Astronomer in Residence.

An absolutely packed theater at the Grand Canyon Visitor Center.

Said resident astronomer is none other MagAO-X’s own Dr! Logan Pearce. After a pleasant road trip (via Nothern New Mexico) we arrived at the Grand Canyon visitor’s center just in time to catch one of her public talks:

It was really quite like the act everybody had been waiting for finally took the stage!

Logan covered a wide range of astronomy, and the audience’s rapt attention was broken only by their laughs at all the astronomy humor. (well, and a briefly fussy baby)

Of course PDS 70 made an appearance. +1.
We toured the rim trail and visited several of Logan’s favorite spots.

One of the fun facts we learned from the AIR is that the #1 treated injury at the Grand Canyon is squirrel bites.

The other fun fact is that there are no dinosaur bones in the Grand Canyon because the rocks are too old!

Katie, Jared, (squirrel for scale), Todd, Alycia, Logan, and Justin

On our 2nd day we had another fun MagAO-X experience as MagAO-X superstar Dr. Alycia Weinberger and fam joined us. I think Logan even managed to keep it a secret until they were in line at the gate (when I texted Alycia to hurry up!) We had a great time catching up and had a wonderful sunset dinner outside of the Yavapai Tavern.

Logan residing
Logan showing Justin the nearest star.

Logan will be in residence through the end of July. Here’s the schedule of night-sky events which include her talks: https://www.nps.gov/grca/planyourvisit/upcoming-night-sky-events.htm

This is actually from a few days before, but the post-sunset planet show was really amazing for a few days there.

Part II: At LCO

It was implied but never stated: MagAO-X is off the telescope and set up in the clean room for remote ops. Thus endeth our first Nasmyth-West residency on the Clay telescope.

LCO and the Grand Canyon aren’t actually all that different in terms of scenery.

Not much to say other than “big success”. The jury is still out on whether it was actually better for our quality of life — no one cooks for you when you are just working late on campus, and other people expect you to be awake during the day.

Ready.

Song of the day:

The cover band at the Yavapai Tavern played this while we were there. It reminded me of the time I saw John Denver live — and he refused to play this song. Actually shouted “no” back at the crowd. I guess he was sick of it.

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.