Author: Jared Males

MagAO 2018A Day 6: The Return of Magellanicus

The all-sky Magellanic Horned Owl (Bubo Magellanicus) has made its first appearance of the run.

Hedwig’s back! Surveying her territory…
Hedwig in blue (the one above is in red).
Do the clouds bother you?
What does she see out there? She (ok, maybe it’s a he) left just after this sequence. Hope the hunting was good.
Tonight’s sun set. Those clouds got here evenutally.

R.I.P. Dolores. This cover is a tribute to her (she was supposed to sing the song with them), and it absolutely rocks:

MagAO 2018A Day 5: Cloudy Empire

Whelp.

Clouds blowing one way
Clouds blowing the other way
Clouds all around

Obviously no astronomifying was done tonight. Team Clio got lots of work done. I took a GTL day (I only did 2 of the 3, you guess which).

Here’s a gorgeous song by Iron Maiden, with a fitting title. It’s an interesting story too.

Good metal is basically just classical music played angry.

MagAO 2018A Day 2: Shell Set w/ All 64 bits!

The ASM and NAS are on the telescope, but, alas, we aren’t quite ready to go on sky. The big news is that, with our usual indispensable help from Alfio Puglisi, we managed to turn on and control the adaptive secondary mirror using our brand new 64 bit computers. Welcome to 2003 or so MagAO! For those of you that didn’t stay up all night, Alfio fixed the Housekeeper_gui bug, and we closed the loop on read-noise with 1e-4 gains. Everything appears to be working.

Here’s the ASM being installed:

Laird and Andrew cabled the ASM today.

The theme of this run is modernization. The work on Clio continues:

Phil and Katie hard at work on the Clio modernization.

Last time we were here, it was very green, almost lush. Not so much now.

LCO has returned to its brown and dry self.

But there’s still plenty of life around the mountain.

A tree at the Babcock Lounge.
A tree and century plant at the Babcock Lounge.
There are still flowers making a living here.
A different yellow flower coming through this brushy thingy.
We’ve seen these guys before.
These purplely pods look like they were once pretty too.
Flowers past their prime, but they must have been gorgeous.
No actual animal pictures today, but here is evidence that the Zorros are about.
Life, and flowers, grow wherever they can and everyone just lets them.
Tonight’s sunset.

Since I started my changeover to the night schedule, I went to bed and didn’t get up until lunch. I slept for more than 13 hours.

R.I.P. Avicii.

MagAO 2018A Day -1: Strike On The Way In

LATAM airline employees are striking. Luckily it didn’t affect my flight, but Katie had to take a different one (that wasn’t why she was late to dinner, that was an unrelated bus problem). Laird is now on a completely different airline, probably will get lost at sea. And our surprise mystery guest is completely hosed. So you’ll have to wait to find out who that is after he finishes the hike from Santiago.

This morning’s sunrise.
This is Patchy.

Song of the Day:

A better version:

Congratulations Dr. Wu — MagAO’s newest Ph.D.!

MagAO’s own Ya-Lin Wu defended his Ph.D. dissertation and is now Dr. Wu! Congrats Ya-Lin!

Dr. Wu and his happy advisor.

Ya-Lin has used MagAO to study planet formation in many ways, most recently combining VisAO data with ALMA data to study circum-planetary disks. Check out all of his papers on our Publications page.

Ya-Lin is now on his way to the University of Texas at Austin as a 51 Peg b fellow. Way to go.