Jared Males – Page 15 – Extreme Wavefront Control Lab

2017A Day -1: Blogging Begins

Well, here we go. Laird, Katie, Jared, and Ya-Lin are on our way to LCO. We’ve already not seen our first green flash.

I’m a bit worried though. We’re not even a day into the run and Laird is already exhausted.

Is this a vacation? It's a vacation, isn't it. — Laird didn’t even make it to Dallas before passing out.

So we’re bringing back the old “Telephone Game” rules. As usual, every day must have at least one post, each post-of-the-day must use the 2017A Day X: [title] format, and each of these must include a song of the day. During 2017A each song of the day must be related to the day before’s song. We leave it up to our carefully vetted team of bloggers to decide whether they explicitly state the relationship. There are no other rules (we call this the Hernán rule).

2016B Day 20: No WiFi

I don’t have wifi in my room tonight.

We’re all done, leaving tomorrow.

Song of the day:

Dee-ner Dee-ner Dee-ner Dee-ner,
Dee-ner Dee-ner Dee-ner Dee-ner,
Dee-ner Dee-ner Dee-ner Dee-ner,
Dee-ner Dee Dee Dee.

(the rules say nothing about what form the song must take)

2016B Day 18: Last Night

Well that sucked. We ended our run with a crap night, high winds, higher seeing, and jumping actuators. MagAO comes off in the morning, so that’s it.

and counting . . . — Fellow Sagan Fellows enjoy a MagAO sunset.

we're just getting started — Laird took these pics as we enjoyed our first 2000 times-a-second MagAO images.

vizcalator — Did you know Vizcachas use stairs? Wtf.

still an ass — I saw this little ass just outside my window today.

The burros made me think of this.

2016B Day 14: Day 303

This is my 303rd day spent at LCO. Most of our crew of AOistas have left, it’s down to just Laird, Alfio, Katie, and Jared, with the addition of Kate who joined us tonight.

and then there were 4 — The remaining AOistas

2016B Day 11: I’ve had it with this monkey fighting Viscacha in this Monday to Friday pupil!

Do you remember the Viscacha that sometimes sneaks into our pupils? This is a problem when our mirror is uncalibrated, and the signal it sends to the pyramid wavefront sensor confuses our software. We get dark spots in the pupil (images of the secondary) that often look like our Viscacha friends. They got in back in our first commissioning run (see here and here), and took some Italian magic to deal with.

So today, after a long and frustrating alignment, we got started closing the loop on our calibration source and immediately went to war with the pupil viscachas. Simone was even calling for Truly Nolen at one point.

oh so prettythogonal — A brand new set of system modes.

kill the vizzy — After long discussion, it was conluded that it is a viscacha!

open the dome already — By the end of the night we have successfully closed the loop on 400 modes. Still subtle issues to sort out, but 2000 Hz is just around the corner. Going clockwise from left, we have Fernando, Alfio, Laird, Kelsey, Lauren, Jared, Armando, Simone, and Enrico.

It's nice to have someone who hasn't heard all of your stories before — Kelsey and Lauren have been spending some quality time with their Grand-Advisor.

Lauren: "It's a boy. I've seen its . . ." — Gary Galileo Guanaco is almost tame now. He let us get this close at lunch today. We’ll be riding him soon.

Look out Gary, don't let fame go to your head. — Paparazzi

(with mouth full) can't a guy get some privacy around here? — Gary can’t get away.