“Maria makes the mountains sound like folks were up there dyin'”
We’ve already used up some of the best wind songs, and we’re just getting started. I saw at least one gust of 64 mph on our wind gage up here at Clay. The LCO weather page doesn’t go that high:
Winds at Magellan were off the chart (it only goes to 50) several times tonight.
Down at the 100″ DuPont telescope, they were getting hammered by high 60s (mph) for hours. We still haven’t reached the MagAO record. Maybe tomorrow.
It was screaming at DuPont tonight. Mauricio called to check on them, and they had to put weights behind their doors to keep them shut.
I made this recording in the dome tonight while winds were over 50 (it’s not your computer, the lights were off).
The sky at sunset, as Katie was heading up to sit around and do nothing all night. Click for the full cloudiness.Tonight’s dessert was Sopaipilla, which Mauricio says Chilean grandmothers make when it rains. It hasn’t rained yet . . .
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.
I saw the clean room vizzies on my way up. They look like they aren’t speaking.A nice panorama at sunrise. The sun is peaking around Baade, and that’s Las Campanas itself behind the lodge.
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.
Dr. Morzinski gets old school, aligning the field stop by hand on the platform.Mauricio brought us a welcome treat: some spicy snacks including this chile flavored Inka Corn.The marine layer crept into the valley during the night
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?
I think this explains why Kate was able to stay awake on her first night.
Passed the Burros on my way up tonight.
We’ve never seen the white burro before, but I’m pretty sure I recognize some of the others. How does this whole thing work?MagAO sunrise.Magellan sunrise from the Babcock lounge.
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.
Sunrise, with the moon, into the wind.
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.
