Jared Males – Page 10 – Extreme Wavefront Control Lab

MagAO-X 2019B Unpacking Day 4: Survival

MagAO-X is alive! After being boxed up, shipped from Tucson to Phoenix to LA (we think — a little fuzzy) to Miami, with a long pause, then to Santiago, braving the dangers of revolution (and customs (and customs strikes!)), and a trip by truck (always touchy, this time with road blocks!), and finally being craned out of its box and carefully reconstituted, we can still close the loop.

Needless to say we are happy, a little bit relieved, and excited to get our new instrument on the Magellan Clay Telescope.

Of course, it doesn’t always go exactly as planned. As the Captain said, “It never goes smooth. How come it never goes smooth?”

why did you gronk on it so hard Jared? — A clear example of this phenomenon is when we had to roll our electronics rack out of the clean room so Nelson and Emilio could cut off a stripped 3/8-16 bolt. The Aluminium L-bracket you see there is part of the earthquake restraint system, which, as Amali pointed out last night, is always a thing here.

Buell, can I haz crane in my cleanroom plz? — A pano of the cleanroom when we were just getting started this morning. That’s Kyle checking on the DM humidity before turning it on.

So here’s the big moment when we finally knew that we didn’t f it all up:

And here you can see our vAPP coronagraphs looking good in a deep exposure:

more than 1 second! — vAPPs looking eXtreme. Laird wants you to know that there are no optical ghosts in the dark hole. Maybe the eye doctor has a little work to do though.

MagAO-X will one day own the night, but it is not this day — Moonrise over the Andes on my hike up.

hey! it's already got cracks in it — Laird and Alex watching tonight’s sunset. Photo by Kyle, I’d already given up — obvious non-green-flash night. That’s our electronics shipping crate, btw.

Tonight’s song is “Wanted Dead or Alive”, by Bon Jovi:

MagAO-X 2019B Unpacking Day 0: The Arrival

MagAO-X is now at Las Campanas Observatory! The truck finally made it up the hill at about 3 pm, and we got all of our boxes safely off.

if you have to point out your detection it's low S/N — The truck appears!

blue is our wavelength preference — This is an “air ride” truck. Look at all of our stuff!

soon — MagAO-X with ultimate destination in view.

should have done a before and after grey count — The big box coming off — I was pretty nervous during this step…

Things are pretty busy, with MagAO-C and now MagAO-X unpacking. There are lots more cool pictures, but not enough time to post them.

vizzy with a view — I spotted a viscacha hanging out on the ASB upper level.

I am bound by the blog rules to give you Brass Monkey, by The Beastie Boys.

MagAO-X 2019B Unpacking Day -1: Almost There

Well we made it through customs, and are on a truck. We expect delivery of MagAO-X to LCO around 2 pm local time tomorrow afternoon.

Otherwise, it was all MagAO-C all the time.

spy cam — I learned about the dome camera today. You can see Katie and Alex at the lower right, they’re working on Clio’s cables.

no snuggles — A cuddly looking vizcacha. They are almost tame this year.

never the same again — If the drive goes smoothly tomorrow (which given recent luck, keep your fingers crossed), this is the last sunset at LCO without MagAO-X (for a while).

If you’ve ever been to an NBA game, you’ll recognize this song. If MagAO-X arrives safely, I plan to make Laird, Kyle, and Alex perform this dance to celebrate.

MagAO-X 2019B Unpacking Day -2 (-1?): Santiago!

MagAO-X arrived in Santiago yesterday! There’s even a chance that it gets to LCO tomorrow. My plan has been to call “Day 0” the day it actually arrives, so maybe we have to reset the blog counter.

Alex v2 and Kyle arrive today. Other than Jared and Laird worrying about it, no MagAO-X work was done today.

So here’s another sunset panorama.

from outside the rail — This one is from the back deck of the lodge.

The goats are a new thing for us. We always see them on the drive, but only lower down. They poop everywhere.

The last several days of being unable to get any information about where our precious cargo was has been pretty maddening. It’s 2019 … almost 2020! One expects to not go 5 days without a status update. Not to put too fine a point on it, but I knew that it had officially arrived from our friends here hours before they updated their system.

The song of the day is Gaga’s Telephone. The blog standards committee won’t let me post the official one, so hopefully this works for you.