Author: Jared Males

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.

The burros made me think of this.

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.

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.

Another busy day on Cerro Manqui.

Clio came up to start getting ready. Katie will begin drawing a vacuum and start the cool down process tomorrow.

Most of today was spent shaking out our new 2000 Hz capability. As of tonight, thanks to Mario and Alfio, we have successfully closed the loop (with 0 gain) at 2000 Hz! It’s on.

To do the zero-gain closed-loop testing we had to string a temporary network fiber between buildings, since sine parts of MagAO are not yet on the telescope. This necessitated some improvised safety management (fibers are delicate).

Vizzy spent the day doing Vizcacha things.

Kelsey saw a Guanaco up close and took these great pics.

After the secondary was installed yesterday, we ended up going to bed with a bad fiber running to the secondary. So the first order of business was to fix that this morning. All Done.

Take it away Otis: