Author: Jared Males

2015A Day 18: How Come It Never Goes Smooth?

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.

The 5.1 mag earthquake was just off the coast, and gave LCO a gentle but noticeable shaking.

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.]

Kate took up her seat as the VisAO operator as soon as she arrived.

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:

Everyone’s favorite high-contrast astrometric field: Baade’s Window in z’ with VisAO. How many stars do you see?

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

A rare shot of socializing cleanroom viscachas. Nice to see them getting along.

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.

Almost made it in, but Katie stepped on it. By accident.

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

I’ve lost track of which night this was, but they pretty much all have looked like this.

“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.

2015A Day 14: Trouble

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:

Free MagAO sticker to the first person who emails me what is wrong in this picture.

And in the afternoon included this:

The secondary checked out ok today. We aren’t completely sure what our problem was.

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!

Thanks guys!

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

A sunset selfie, looking happy because we finally had good weather.

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

2015A Day 12: Laird Misses Us

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.

A gorgeous sunset. I didn’t get a picture tonight, but it was a great green flash.
A vizzy relaxing.

Eyepiece Observing With MagAO

Welcome APOD and Sky and Telescope readers. This post was written while MagAO was mounted on the Clay 6.5 m telescope, and we post daily updates throughout the run on the main page. You can also find out about some of our scientific results using the In The News and Results pages.

You can also read about our eyepiece observations in a post by Tom Beal at the Arizona Daily Star.

On our first night on-sky in 2015A, our infrared camera Clio wasn’t quite ready to mount on the telescope. We also needed to test operating the AO system with a different camera, since there are several new instrument concepts in the works (Clio’s entrance window is the dichroic which sends light to the Pyramid and VisAO). The result of these fortunate circumstances is that we mounted the eyepiece for the very first time.

Laird presents the MagAO eyepiece. It is mounted where Clio normally goes.

The night started out poorly. It was cloudy, a guider communications cable failed deep inside the telescope, and one of VisAO’s hard drives failed.

Our first night started out cloudy. (Picture by Yuri Beletsky, click for larger image)

The telescope staff went to work on the cable, and Jared tore apart the VisAO electronics. Meanwhile, Laird was doing some last minute alignment checks on the eyepiece. At around midnight, all the problems were fixed and the sky magically began to clear.

Once we opened, we immediately pointed at alpha Centauri A which is a very bright star and so makes a good alignment target. Working out on the platform in near freezing temperatures, we moved the MagAO Pyramid wavefront sensor around until it was aligned to the star with the eyepiece dichroic.

Eyepiece alignment was done on the platform. At left is a cellphone image of alpha Cen A&B imaged on a card through the eyepiece. At right is the simultaneous image on the VisAO camera (on a laptop screen on the platform). These are open-loop images (before we turned on the AO).

Then, on the first try, we closed the loop at 1000 Hz controlling 300 modes.

Proof that the loop was closed while we were observing.

At that point, we were observing the alpha Centauri system at the diffraction limit of a 6.5 meter telescope! Luckily the moon was out, giving Yuri Beletsky plenty of light to document the whole thing.

Laird Close, the MagAO PI, observes alpha Cen at the diffraction limit of the 6.5 meter Clay telescope. The inset shows an image recorded with VisAO, MagAO’s visible wavelength science camera, at nearly the same wavelength (i’). Reports from all observers indicate that it looks just like this through the eyepiece! (Photo by Yuri Beletsky, click for larger image)

The eyepiece had a very red filter installed, passing wavelengths longer than 685 nm. This means the sharpest details in the image were as small as 22 milli-arcseconds. We’re pretty sure that this is the highest angular resolution image ever formed on a human retina. We compared what we saw to images recorded on the VisAO science camera at nearly the same wavelength, and it was very gratifying to see the similarities.

Katie tried her hand at drawing the image. You can see the 22-milliarcsecond core of A, the control radius around A, the chromatically elongated speckles, some atmospheric dispersion is evident, and you can see that anisoplanatism is affecting the image of B.
Jared, Katie, and Laird pose next to the eyepiece. Katie is holding The Book. (Photo by Yuri Beletsky, click for bigger version)

During the night, 9 people looked through the eyepiece. These astronomers are the inaugural members of an exclusive club: “L’Ordine degli Astronomi al Limite di Diffrazione” (The Order of Astronomers at the Limit of Diffraction). In this moonlit timelapse you can see most of them take their turn.

Special thanks to Yuri Beletsky for documenting this great night.

2015A Day 7: All Up And Running

This will again be a short and sweet post. For those of you familiar with how the MagAO blog really works, I just want to say that this is not a cover for some major problem that we don’t want to talk about. We’re all just exhausted after the last week of getting the system ready. Seriously, everything is working really well.

Vizzy looks like we all feel.
Gilles and I saw a nice green flash at sunset

Clio is finally mounted on the telescope. Katie might actually sleep now.

Here’s Katie hooking up cables on a freshly mounted Clio.
Clio has never had enough LN2 to eat. It keeps demanding more and more.

Matt Kenworthy and Gilles Otten arrived from Leiden University today to help us commission the new vector apodizing phase plate (vAPP) coronagraphs. The big news from tonight is that they all survived cooldown, and appear to be working very very well. Congrats to Gilles, Frans, and Matt!

Matt Kenworthy, Gilles Otten, Laird, Katie, and Jared, pose with a beautiful pupil image through one of our new vAPPs. Hooray! They survived and appear to work well.

Tonight was pretty windy, and seeing wasn’t that great. It’s actually howling outside my room right now. Ordinarily this wouldn’t be a problem, but Laird is still here so we have to follow the rules.