Author: Jared Males

Tonight was a good night: so good that we got to the screensaver on the AO control workstation. That means we went long periods of time without having to adjust anything.

Speaking of screensavers, what is going on here?

Passed the Burros on my way up tonight.

We’re starting to obsess over sleep.

You’re never going to believe this, but our night started out with troubleshooting. More about the details later, but for now I’ll just note that we have a sign in the control room saying “MagAO has not troubleshot anything for X hrs”. Yeah hours, not days.

But the big story tonight is wind. And not even that much wind, considering recent weather.

As Kate pointed out yesterday, she’s now working for GPI. I think it may be time to consider the possibility that she is now actively trying to sabotage MagAO under orders from Bruce Macintosh (published evidence).

Any time the winds get high (20 mph), we start taking precautions. One concern is contamination of the gap, that is dust could get in between our thin shell and the reference body. In very high winds (say 25 to 30 mph), we start to worry about physically damaging the shell. The telescope limit is 35 mph in any case. This time of year, winds here can be pretty high, and in fact we see winds higher than 25 mph just about every night.

So when this happens, our observers generally accept the rules with good grace, decide on a backup target out of the wind (which usually means to the South), and we keep going for as long as we can. This isn’t good enough for Kate. Tonight, we were observing her highest priority target, which was about 30 degrees off a stiff wind which started to rise above 20. Now I’m really motivated by Kate’s science, and wanted to get good data on this target, so I kept my weather eye on the wind rose, and waited to see if it was just a temporary increase. But alas, the wind steadied out above 20, so I opened the loop and we swung to 180. Now about 5 minutes later, the wind came down a few mph. Our rule is that there can be no gusts above the limit for 15 minutes before we’ll point back into the wind. So this is what the control room was like:

“one minute” — Kate Follette (making sure I knew how long wind had been below 20 mph)

“two minutes” — Kate Follette

“three minutes” — Kate Follette

“four minutes” — Kate Follette

At this point, there was a 20.1 mph gust, which reset the clock. So the rest of these are straight lies.

“five minutes” — Kate Follette

“six minutes” — Kate Follette

“seven minutes” — Kate Follette

“eight minutes” — Kate Follette

“nine minutes” — Kate Follette

“ten minutes” — Kate Follette

“eleven minutes” — Kate Follette

At this point I went downstairs to get some coffee. When I came back she’d somehow talked Katie (and Laird remotely) into pointing back to the North. Granted, I had managed to fight her off for long enough that the target was now on the other side of the wind and moving away.

Well we survived another night of LCO winter observing, and this was all really in good fun. The fact that we’re still laughing and teasing each other is a good sign, and we’re not going crazy yet. The night did actually end a little early as winds started heading to 35 mph — nobody argued with that.

“Why do you hate science?!?!” — Kate Follette, to me. Actually pounding her fists on the VisAO desk.

“Don’t let him re-point. And don’t make up any more rules.” — Kate Follette, to Katie, as she was heading downstairs.

“Some part of me knows it was the right decision.” — Kate Follette.

“Winter *is* coming.” — Laird Close, trying to console Kate.

Mal Reynolds about sums it up:

Here we go.

So to kick things off, we got a good shake from a nearby 5.1 magnitude earthquake. For perspective, it was big enough that it woke me up rattling things in my room, but it didn’t wake Katie up right next door. That would probably take at least a 6.

Earthquakes make us nervous, because our delicate thin shell is at the top of a large tuning fork telescope, which means even a gentle shake like this one could give it a good rattle.

That’s important context for when the ASM electronics decided to be slow to wake up at sunset. Now, of course, our first thoughts were “the Earthquake!”.

Once we let the secondary think about it for a bit while we talked things over with Enrico “How Many Watts RMS?” Pinna and Guido Brusa (thanks for the help guys!), it eventually came up and behaved itself for the rest of the night. I think it’s because we told it that we would sick Anna on it again . . .

But of course, the clouds rolled in. So we spent lots of the night ducking in and out of “sucker holes”, which is highly technical astronomer speak for when you fool yourself into trying because “this one might last for a while.”

We did get a break from the clouds, though, when the network went down. As recently as two nights ago I declared “I think I’ve found all the places we use the domain name servers.” Umm, I was wrong.

Dr. Kate Follette, one member of the greatest class of PhD students Steward Observatory has ever had, arrived today and started her GAPplanetS observing program. [Notes: Kushal and Kyle, you guys need to get it together, it’s 2015, you could at least join Myspace. Also, this is not a MagAO endorsement of any of the advertisements on Kate’s website. You’ve been warned.]

We finally went more than 2 hours without troubleshooting something later in the night, and took a really nice deep astrometric calibration on Baade’s Window:

We’ve seen our friends at the cleanroom quite a bit. They seem happy.

I like seeing scorpions and other critters right outside a door, because that’s clear evidence that they could never ever ever get inside, where we keep our shoes, and where our beds are.

Sunsets like this never really get old, no matter how much work they mean for us poor AO operators.

“we have been threatened by the zombies…” — Roberto Biasi (referring to software zombies)

“I think I’m going to cry.” — Kate Follette (it was scorpion related)

“yikes that is close!” — Laird’s reaction to news of the earthquake.

To be honest, this run is starting to feel like an epic battle and at this point I don’t think we’d be surprised if real zombies showed up. I’m sure we’d find a way to keep the loop closed.

So Francois Menard finally left, and everything got better. We had our first clear, calm, good-seeing night of the run.

That being said, we had a communications problem with the ASM last night that probably can’t be blamed on the weather. As always happens, such events happen after midnight on Saturday in Florence. It is also worth noting that we end up performing fairly major interventions as soon as Laird goes home. Anyway, Katie and I got up after about 5 hours of sleep to run some tests with advice from Italy. After a couple of hours of testing with the help of the LCO day crew, everything seemed to be fine and so we grabbed another hour or so of sleep.

Winds did pick up again right before dawn, and right now it’s averaging around 30 mph with some gusts to 35 mph. But for about 11 straight hours, everything was MagAO-like!

Our troubleshooting two nights ago started here:

And in the afternoon included this:

One of the amazing things about LCO is how well they take care of us. The Chefs noticed that Katie and I didn’t show up for dinner (we were napping!), and sent plates up for us. Our TO Mauricio also made sure we had plenty of empanadas. Thanks everybody!

No green flash, but it was nice to see a clear-sky sunset.

Mauricio, just after we opened for the night: We have a problem (every head whips around). . .oh, it’s empanada related.

Katie: there are so many empanadas down there I can’t tell which is which

This is the 300th blog post. ~40 posts per run adds up quick.

The word of the day is wasabi. They served sushi tonight, which was great, but for some reason several people (all of whom should have known better) thought the thick green paste was just a harmless spread and applied it accordingly. It was somewhat amusing. Also, our wasabi pea supply is holding up just fine.

I’m keeping this short so that Jerry Morzinski doesn’t have to read a long post on his birthday. Also, no random graphs.