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.
We made it to a closed loop tonight. First we had to deal with a bad cable for the guider, and a failed hard drive in VisAO. I’m too tired to really say much about it. Here are some pictures.
The NAS getting lifted off the cartNelson guides the NAS onto its pins.The cart, with dust covers, heads back to the Aux. We won’t need it for more than a month.Katie fills Clio with liquid nitrogen. Clio is *almost* readyThis is what a computer failure looks like on the Nasmyth platform.Jared putting the finishing touches on VisAO after swapping out a failed disk.Povilas and Laird removed the protective cover and installed the wind monitor.Laird presents the MagAO eyepiece. More on this later.Johanna left us encouraging words. Laird did eat his night lunch. Including the onions.
This is how much distance is between MagAO and being on-sky in 2015.
We wanted to at least be testing the guider tonight, even if not closed-loop AO. But alas, we didn’t quite make it. The last thing we didn’t quite get accomplished was bolting the NAS to the telescope. It’s ready to go though, and we’ll be operating at the diffraction limit soon.
We, by which I mean Katie, did a little more last minute work on Clio today.
MagAO’s Instrument Scientist has been putting in endless hours in the cleanroom making sure Clio is ready to go.Here’s another shot of the instrument scientist instrument scientisting.
Perhaps the biggest news is that our adaptive secondary mirror (ASM) is alive and well. It was mounted on the telescope this morning and tonight we powered it up.
Here’s the ASM coming up to the dome floor yesterday.Look at the beautiful flat shell! The gap is 48-66 microns, unchanged since December. That means no contamination!You have no idea how good this feels. The shell survived and is ready to rock and roll.Let the record reflect: on this date the NAS mounting toolbox had a complete set of ball drivers in both metric and imperial units. Hands off Clio.There has been a minor problem with birds in the cleanroom. This is a reenactment.
Some quotes from today:
“After I’ve been here too long I get kinda giggly.” — Povilas
“The problem with Povilas is that he’s almost always right.” — Laird
“You see Laird, this is why I don’t trust you.” — Povilas
“No, I did NOT ask for double onions!!!!” — Laird
Katie set a new precedent yesterday by posting a cover as the song of the day, but satisfying the 2015 A Blog Rules by posting the song being covered as the cover. See how that works? Well I’m going to follow her lead and start with the covers.
This is a MagAO blog first: the song of the day is by a group of people who have MagAO access — who knows, maybe they have time this semester. Stick around at least through the 3rd solo starting at 3:00, she absolutely KILLS it.
Like any other truly great song, Madonna’s “Like a Prayer” is just as amazing in many very different styles. Here’s a sampling:
And for completeness, here’s the one and only original:
Today was a challenge on two fronts. Katie and Laird spent the day performing surgery on our beloved Clio camera. They’re doing some housekeeping and getting ready to install our new coronagraphs and Brackett gamma filter. It’s always fun to open a dewar and take apart a bunch of filter wheels. I spent the day trying to get our new (higher power) X-stage motor up and running. It should be noted that a significant fraction of the day on each front was spent solving problems that only Jordan Stone cares about.
Perhaps the biggest news is that we had our first Viscacha siting. On our last run they were very skittish, but they’re back to being the lazy sleepy grumps we have come to know and love.
Povilas wins the day for his practical joke. He talked Juan into coming into dinner and telling us that our schedule was wrong and that we are due to be on the telescope a day earlier than planned. Ha ha, good one Povilas.
Here’s Clio heading into the operating room.Clio on the operating table. Think he/she/it will make it?My day was spent cabling and uncabling this motor (and the spare), and tweaking parameters. I think I finally got it tuned up just before bed time.Vizzy 1 and 2. No sign of Grumpy. look at those tails.
Home at last. After our 24 hr delay in Tucson, and listening to all the horror stories from people who had been trying to get to Santiago for several days, as soon as our plane pushed back the pilot cut the engines and we sat on the runway for an hour to let a thunderstorm blow through.
But all’s well that ends well. We made it safe and sound to LCO just in time for dinner tonight. The first steps of preparations are done: dust covers off, some Clio mounting hardware replaced, some organizing, and we checked on the mirror — it survived. Tomorrow the real fun begins, with moving and then opening Clio to add our new coronagraphs and reorganize filters. We also begin work on our new X-stage motor, which is more powerful than the current one.
Larry got some tea at the Santiago airport Starbucks.Here we are in the van, having just departed el Pino on our way to the mountain. It always feels good when you start this last leg.The last glow of sunset.
And from the better safe than sorry department, this is not a cover by Daughtry, but it is a cover by a band opening for Daughtry.
