Home of MagAO and MagAO-X.
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.
Katie arrived safe and sound, just in time for dinner. During the day: more preparations, mostly working on our new toys. We installed the new field stop, but only after Laird drew all over it with a Sharpie.
Oscar helped us countersink some bolts, and Laird tested out the mount for our new camera.
I’ve been obsessing about read noise in our wavefront sensor camera. This isn’t a new thing, some of our most epic “sea stories” revolve around troubleshooting this camera. That was all solved a while ago, but now we are trying to get it running at 2000 Hz. So this song is about noise.
The fact that I can’t find a youtube entry of the album version of this song makes me feel “not fresh”.
Mark Phillips commented, upon seeing me at lunch, that us AOistas always look “so fresh when you get here.” That implies that he has seen me look “not fresh”. It’s fair.
Laird made it today, and Katie is in the air.
We’re hard at work getting ready. This time, we have also begun preparing for “MagAO-2K”. This is an NSF funded project which will improve performance of MagAO. You’ll be hearing lots more about it in the coming days, weeks, and months. For now, I’m working on getting our wavefront sensor camera tuned for running at 2000 frames per second. We’re also installing a new field stop stage for VisAO, and we have a new very high speed camera that we are going to use on this run to measure vibrations.
Here’s my first sunset picture of 2016A:
Today’s video is very astronomical, and even looks like it was filmed at a digital LCO. The coolest part, however, is the exploding GMT.
Yep, it’s that time again. If you’re thinking we just left, you’re right. We just barely had more time at home than we usually spend here.
The drive up:
Some work got done:
It’s my turn to set the rules. We’re going back to basics. The only requirement is that any Day X post must have a song of the day, no other rules.
We might make it. Alycia has one night left, and our next and last observer arrived today (get ready for something different — more to come).
The winds were finally a bit calmer tonight, and seeing was bouncing off 0.5″ for a while — but we still ended up with some clouds after midnight. Nothing too bad, but still a little frustrating.
Two days ago we had a song about a miracle. Here’s another one of sorts — though Johnny would disagree.
I saw the CDB live at the South Dakota State Fair. This was the encore, during Johnny’s solo the old man thrashed on a golden fiddle for 20 minutes.