Author: Jared Males

According to the blog, we were working the night shift for 36 nights (see Povilas, the blog can be useful). That means we’re almost completely nocturnal at this point, and not doing so well at this “awake during normal hours” thing. We have an overnight flight from Santiago to Dallas tomorrow night — it may be a long one.

MagAO is all packed up and ready for its ~6 month rest. It’s well deserved — we really made the system work hard this time.

As we used to say in the Navy, just a wake-up to go. We leave at 10 am, and then it’s time to celebrate.

We only have 1 more night of observing left. Can you believe it? And after all that, the last two nights are mine and Katie’s to do with as we please. We have a nice informal queue worked out between us. It goes something like: seeing 0.5″ or better, we do the impossible stuff, better than 0.7″ we do the hard stuff, and after that the stuff we won’t do any other time. Tonight was a just go for the impossible kind of night – half arcsecond seeing, no winds, and not a cloud in the sky.

I hope our favorite mountain peak has one more of those in store for us tonight. There’s plenty of impossible in the sky.

We’ll be in Tucson by the next time empanada Sunday comes around. I still had one leftover last night.

This was our night:

We were closed for the first 7 or so hours of the night. I got some software maintenance done, and at one point I went out into the dome to see what was going on. I found Laird and Katie with their heads inside the instrument.

We finally got to open at about 3 am. In this GIF the red dot is us (Clay) and the blue dot is Baade. We opened at the same time and, it looks like we’re running away from the clouds.

Because of the clouds we had to find very bright stars. When we pointed at Betelgeuse, Alberto (our Telescope Operator) turned to us and said “do you have a finding chart?”. That’s a joke — on faint stars you often have to work out which star of two or three is your target. As you can see, there was only one star in this case.

Amazingly, the sky finally really started to clear at sunrise. After breakfast, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. The next result is the only photometric image we took tonight.

Here you can see the result of all the moist (for here) air that blew over us tonight.

I guess I don’t really feel one with the wind and sky, but the past is in the past.

You also might see me cry.

This is my 3rd thanksgiving in 4 spent with MagAO somewhere other than home [note: that may be hint about understanding of the word “home”]. 3 years ago I had “thanksgiving” in Florence with my Mom and Dad and Laird. 2 years ago we were here at LCO duing our first-light commissioning run.

This is a much more down-to-business MagAO thanksgiving. Graeme Salter is here for a couple of nights using MagAO. His first night was pretty good – medium winds, clear skies, and roughly median seeing. The AO system played nice most of the night and I think we took some good data.

Alycia left today, and has the joy of traveling on Thanksgiving. Hope she makes it home without too much hassle! Laird is traveling today too, on his way back down for the home stretch.

It’s thanksgiving, but we probably won’t be up in time for dinner — plus it’s a big meal right after waking up. So we celebrated thanksgiving this morning after sunrise.

Katie tried to get a good spread going, in the Thanksgiving tradition of variety.

I went with two eggs over easy (dos huevos fritas), which I laid on some ham slices and melted cheese, and topped with a little Tobasco.

The instrument scientist also declared that since it’s thanksgiving, she should have pie for breakfast. Who are we to argue?

Here’s some music to listen to while you sit and ponder your reasons to be thankful.

We had another good night. Some thin/patchy/high clouds blew in after about 2 am, but we were on a bright star and really didn’t notice. It was “Empanada Sunday”, and we all had empanadas for our night lunches. The most exciting part of my day was getting to see Vizzy at the clean room on my walk up to the telescope. I skipped dinner (too soon after waking up for that much food) so I went up earlier than usual. And one of our friends was hanging out. It’s been really skittish the two times I’ve seen it, but I moved slowly enough to get some good pictures.

There are really many fewer Viscachas around compared to our previous visits. This wikipedia article says they do not hibernate, but they are “prone to wide swings in population due to adverse weather conditions.” It is spring down here, so maybe the winter was hard.

There may not be a spider shortage here though. I think we can apply a thumbrule that says the number of live giant terrifying spiders in your immediate vicinity that you can’t see is 10^2 to 10^3 times the number of dead giant terrifying spiders you can see.

Luckily I think they’re too big to get under our doors. There are some gaps in the wall behind our gas heaters though, and I don’t know about the vents over our beds. Sleep tight everybody, and remember “Gilthoniel A Elbereth!” might help (but I think you have to pronounce it right).

We’ve been having some fantastic sunsets. Sunset is a bit of an event – the observers at both Clay and Baade gather on their respective ends of the catwalk along with our telescope operators to watch the proceedings. The first of many cups of coffee is sipped, yarns are spun about glorious green-flashes of yesterday, and much hypothesizing occurs about the optimum conditions for the elusive flash.

Did you know AC/DC has a new album coming out in 4 days? This should get you ready for it.