Author: Jared Males

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.

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.