Author: Jared Males

Tonight, Katie and I were escorted to the summit by a hawk and a guanaco.

So we did just two stars tonight, both with planets. These stars are bright, and at the infrared wavelengths where Clio is happy MagAO makes nearly perfect images. It’s nice to let MagAO be MagAO sometimes.

We had a good night going. We think we’ve found a solution to the ASM electronics problem — one of us just has to get out of bed early and warm it up before dinner. That did the trick tonight, no problems since. But we’ve been stuck with a bum guider for the last 3 or 4 hours of the night. We need the guider to find the star, and occasionally to get the telescope in shape. Troubleshooting is in progress at dawn.

The observatory has been patrolled by several, up to 5 at a time, raptors since I’ve been here. This one was sitting on one of the GMTs new poles.

We got a real treat yesterday morning: this hawk was hunting vizzies behind the telescope. Watch how it uses the wind, and listen to the viscachas whistle. They don’t seem too worried though.

This song should be played loudly:

The internet went down in the middle of the night last night, and just came back.

Two nights ago we used a high speed camera, an Andor iXON 897 EMCCD, to measure the vibrations of our system at 2500 Hz (that means we were taking images at 5000 Hz). The camera was mounted where Clio normally goes

Then yesterday, Katie rousted the crew to finally install Clio.

We started tonight off with some eyepiece observing. Of course, since we had visitors, the ASM decided to act up. It seems to be the same problem we had in 2015A — and I hope it will go away by itself just like it did then. In the brief moments we had a working AO system, we managed to induct 9 new members in L’Ordine .

It’s Valentine’s Day!

Keep it funky.