Author: Jared Males

We opened our blackout curtains to a cloud-free sky yesterday evening. And then we had a long relaxing night in 0.5″ +/- 0.1″ seeing. We feel much better about life this morning.

After 26 days of continuous MagAO, we have a few corrections and clarifications to make:

First of all, I did not change my code. We are FTEs of action, lies do not become us.

Second, Francois Menard insists that he was misquoted. I agree that he only took the telescope to 30.6 degrees elevation, not thirty point zero zero zero zero zero zero one. He also writes “You guys are the best. (you can quote me on this too!)”

A third area where the record is a bit spotty is the infamous graph of familial love by Kate. Several relevant correspondants have chimed in:

– Both Anna Morzinski (Katie’s Sister) and Josh Males (Jared’s Brother) report that they consume their MagAO news mainly via Feedly, which likely doesn’t show up on our site hits. That explains the low number of hits (5) from Nebraska, perhaps, and argues that the Morzinskis deserve a bit more credit. It does lead to the question of who else in Seattle is reading.

– On the other hand, it is not clear that Jerry Morzinski (Katie’s dad) has read to the end of a single post to date.

– Futher on the subject of the Morzinski family dedication to MagAO, we received (indirectly) an apparently very passionate objection to the entire Arizona count being credited to Laird. Katie’s brother Mike Morzinski and family (who live in Tucson) should also have been credited with a significant fraction of those hits. I also suspect that Buell Jannuzi can’t go more than a day without checking on us. In fact, it is no longer clear that Laird even remembers us, let alone looks at this blog.

– [redacted] also expressed some concern about [redacted] privacy being violated. I assure you that no personally identifiable information is reported to us, only the number of hits. It’s too bad, selling that stuff might be a good way to fund MagAO.

– It appears that the Brutlags have no excuses. They just don’t care.

Alycia arrived today, and is ready to push MagAO around for the next several nights. Other than misquotes and inter-family squabbling, the only real problem we had tonight was complete loss of internet for several hours. It’s amazing how many little things that affects. Computers started running out of memory (I thought Macs just worked?), we couldn’t check star catalogs, etc. A fun game to play is how do you use VoIP phones to report that your internet doesn’t work?

Finally, you should know that there aren’t really any limits on MagAO’s availability. Here we show the loop closed (300 modes, 1 kHz, full gains) with the Sun up. Maybe we haven’t even stopped yet . . .

Long boring night tonight, sitting around waiting for clouds to clear. We started out ok, but after about 2 hours the clouds rolled in. We closed for several hours, and then opened but couldn’t get anything done with extinction jumping between 0 and more than 5 mags.

The only other noteworthy event was that we changed the batteries in the wind monitor, which means another week has gone by. The wind monitor continues to report 0 m/s, correctly.

We had high hopes for tonight after seeing 0.34″ seeing last night. You should know that’s an upper limit – it was from one of the guiders, which can’t make images much smaller than that. So here’s a great song, which fits the disappointed clouded out mood. “This world is only gonna break your heart.”

And here’s an awesome cover of Wicked Game by Daughtry.

So the last two or three nights we’ve been using MagAO at its geometric limits. By that I mean the various angles and rotations and cable contortions that the exciting science targets required. There was a conversation like this last night (accuracy not 100%):

Francois: “What’s the elevation limit?”

Jared: “Thirty degrees.”

Francois: “So I can go to thirty point zero zero zero zero zero zero one?”

Katie: “It’s not really a goal.”

Tonight Jordan flipped our system upside down about 25 times. It’s designed to do this, of course, but it makes for lots of fun keeping all of the precise alignment from primary mirror to secondary mirror, and down the PyWFS optics. Kate did a fantastic job keeping up with all of the camera lens re-alignments and axis changes on the pyramid. Still though, after a couple of nights of defending MagAO from marauding observers I feel a little like Captain Jack:

We forgot to post this last night. Here’s Francois Menard and Jos de Boer with the MagAO team.

And Jordan hard at work with Clio.

And our usual assortment of day-in-the-life pretty pictures.

I had some good metal picked out for tonight, but I think we need to just relax a little. Here you go.

That’s better.

We had an action packed night, with many more targets than we’ve been observing so far on this run. The AO system wasn’t on its best behaviour, but we have learned to recognize most of its bad moods quickly and we can usually slap it back into shape right away.

Kate Follette is here, ready to help take up some of the operations load. Our visiting observers tonight were Hector Canovas and Adam Hardy from Universidad de Valparaiso. Here’s a shot of the bleary eyed “aoistas” this morning right before we quit, minus Katie who’s behind the camera, and minus Kate who went to bed too early to get her picture took.

In Kate’s defense, she made it to the half-way point after 24 hours of travel from Tucson.

Most of the targets we looked at for our new friends Hector and Adam were faint and red. When we set up the system for such targets we need to have a good guess how many photons per second the pyramid wavefront sensor (PyWFS – following the obviously correct conventions of Guyon 2006) will get. This can be tricky because our PyWFS has a very wide and very red pass band, something like R+I. So if you use the R magnitude on an M5 star, you’ll set up to run slower and with fewer modes than you need too. It’s worse if you give us the V magnitude. So tonight I whipped up a set of synthetic color corrections, and compared them to our PyWFS’s own estimates.

UPDATE: A day later, we have investigated why the R band colors were weird in the first version of these plots. We are now using a self-consistent set of VRI magnitudes, from the USNO UCAC4 catalog, transformed from APASS gri (AB). I think we can now declare the MagAO WFS pass band done. I’ve updated the next two plots to the latest, most correct version.

Here’s a fun set of bookends on the night. We took flats at evening and at morning twilight. During this, you can see a really cool pattern on the PyWFS. You can also see the secondary mounting structure lit up by the sun. See the difference?

Here’s a just-after-dawn shot to the west, towards the Pacific Ocean.

Though you might think this was about the ASM supports being too reflective, the song of the day is for Veteran’s Day.

Our T.O. for the last week, Jorge, has dubbed us “the aoista operation”. Tonight was pretty calm – no major technical problems, a few scientific discoveries, and a pretty relaxed night. The clouds rolled in a couple of hours before dawn, so we closed out with some minor engineering tasks.

Tonight was TJ’s last night. So long. Kate is (possibly) arriving today, and tonight is the first night for our Chilean observers. We’ll have some new faces on the blog this week.

This is not the greatest blog post in the world.

Nay. We are but men.