Author: Jared Males

Today was the 365th day I’ve spent at Las Campanas Observatory. You only have to go back to May 18th, 2012 to find the first. So 16.7% of my life has been on this mountain over the last 6 years.

It was an interesting 1-year day too. Of course, it was Empanada Sunday. According to my records, my average length of stay has ben 21 days, so ~3 Empanada Sunday’s per visit X 17 visits = 51 total Empanada Sundays in my life so far. Here’s what just one looks like:

My longest stay here has been 44 days. That was what I call the “Death Run”. Late May and early June, telescope open for 13+ hr a night, horrific winds, 5 weeks straight of observing. When Katie reminisces (not fondly) about it, she says “you could sleep, eat, or shower. Pick 1.” Well, to commemorate that on mine and LCO’s 1 year anniversary, here’s a picture from the wind gauge tonight:

We managed to open a couple of times. But when we did it was pretty crappy

Ahhhhh. It’s nice to finally not have clouds to fight with. We also have been getting some of that patented LCO 0.5″ seeing.

This is what we’ve been dealing with:

We finally got to see the Southern Sky in all its glory:

Hedwig visits every couple of nights:

Tonight was Clio’s last night of the run.

You might hear this song played by the Los Alamos Big Band on special occasions:

Bing Crosby died on my birthday. My Mom blames me.

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

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

Whelp.

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.

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:

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

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

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

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.