Author: Jared Males

2016A Day 1: This and That

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.

Everyone here agrees that Sharpie does almost no good. But it must look like we did the right thing.

Oscar helped us countersink some bolts, and Laird tested out the mount for our new camera.

Our new super whamodyne electron multiplying CCD camera.
Clay getting ready for some M2FS observing.

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”.

2016A Day 0: Fresh On Arrival

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:

Sunset on the future

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.

2016A Day -1: Already Back

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:

The burros tried to stop us on the drive up.

Some work got done:

Two towers have gone up on the GMT site. I hear they will be used for weather monitoring and to record the construction.
Thanks to Gabriel Martin, Clio is already pumping down.
We’re set up in the Aux.

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.

2015B Day 29: Home Stretch

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.

The blue camera shows clouds on the horizong
The red camera shows them overhead too
Here’s Alycia taking her own VisAO data.
A wide shot of MagAO in the dome.
Tonight’s sunset, photo by Alycia

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.

2015B Day 23: Ain’t Never Gonna Stop

Except when corrupt databases and/or fiber communication problems force us to do a hard reboot of the whole system, and there’s not enough time before sunrise to make it worth bringing it all back up again. Then we stop, even with stars in our eyes.

In keeping with tonight’s outrageous claims on astro-ph, we observed an Earth-sized object around a very nearby star. See Skemer and Close, 2011 for more info.

That’s Sirius B, a.k.a. The Pup, companion to Sirius, the Dog Star. Sirius is the wall of white on the left half, from us basically melting the guider CCD. You can see B along the spider spike. It is in fact Earth-sized! Even a bit smaller!
We’ve reached the point in the run where we don’t go to dinner any more. Don Hector noticed tonight, and sent plates up for Katie and me. Gracias Hector!

Since Katie just went with “not US-based” as her connection last night, I’ll just go with “Foreigner” and one of the all time classics.

If I could play guitar, I’d be in a rock band (I forgot to mention that I’ve seen Danzig live — front row right on the rail the whole show. He gave my best friend a high five.) If I could hit a curve ball I’d be chasing my cup of coffee still. The Navy wouldn’t promise me enough sea time on a fast attack, too many boring options. So I’m an astronomer now I guess. Still not sure what I’ll be when I grow up, but there’s still that one guitar.