Author: Jared Males

It was clear tonight, which was nice after last night. But seeing was pretty bad (for LCO), and the winds kicked up again. We’ve had a few days respite from these winter gusts coming from the NE, but now we are again huddling with our back to them, pointing to the SW.

This seems appropriate.

The wind was blowing and the stars were twinkling hard tonight. We still got some science done, but it was less fun than we’re used to. Also, we only planned some troubleshooting — we didn’t actually do any tonight.

Here’s an action shot of the instrument scientist aligning Clio at sunset. This is temporarily a very manual process due to our dead motor controller. We’re happy to say that the replacement is on its way, so Katie only has to do this a few more times.

Since Vizzy and Alberto posted some Mariah the other day, here’s my response. Maria is making sure we remember her name on this run — take it from us, she really does blow the stars around.

Just in case you aren’t in the know, Mariah Carey was named after this song.

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.