Author: Jared Males

Now that we have 3.3V where we’re supposed to have 3.3V, and we’re using good fiber cables, everything is easy. It was also a nice night, with stable (if not always good) seeing. This is much more relaxing than some earlier nights. It also means there isn’t much to write about.

These next two pictures were taken about 10 minutes apart.

Well things finally got back to normal tonight at LCO. Not a cloud in the sky, seeing was 0.5 arcseconds most of the night, T.J. fell asleep in the control room, and most importantly – our good friend Miss Viz was hanging out at the clean room today! We haven’t seen any Viscachas on their usual roosts, but one was there today.

As I said, tonight we got the absolutely perfect observing conditions we’ve come to expect from LCO.

The great conditions have led to some really nice results. Here’s a 47% Strehl ratio image at z’ (that means it’s really good).

We also did some work at H-alpha. Here’s a nice H-alpha jet coming from a young binary star system. FWHM in this image is 30 milli-arcseconds. That’s from stacking 15 second exposures.

At the end of a great night, we saw a gorgeous sunrise over the Andes. Here’s a shot of the MagAO ASM, Clay, and Baade right before we closed up.

I don’t think these have been on the blog yet this run.

So, the last week has been pretty rough from an observing perspective. The clouds and bad seeing means a lot of stress and frustration. I think this video captures what it’s like sometimes in the control room during nights like we’ve had up until now.

Here’s the song of the day. I’m guessing this is going to be a staple at McKale center this year.

We were clouded out for the first half of the night. Once we got open, we started out observing “Runa’s Star”. Runa picked his star as a set up target during our commissioning run 2 years ago. He also deserves credit for designing one side of our MagAO coffee mugs.

Once the clouds cleared we got to work.

On a submarine they say you don’t really start learning how the reactor plant works until you stand your first watch by yourself. It’s kind of the same thing for us, this is our first run without Alfio here to clean up our messes. Tonight was fun. We pushed MagAO into some new territory, at least for the three of us. Before and after, and once the dust settled, we did some really cool things.

The night started by replacing the Clio vacuum pump down in the bowels of the telescope.

We did some astrometric calibrations.

This is the image that almost broke MagAO

Still a bit cloudy, which continues to make for gorgeous skies at sunset

And finally a Viscacha pic. Can you believe this is the first one?

Since this is day 7, I present, out of many well qualified candidates, the following as the quote of our first week. It’s Laird describing how he operates the AO system: “part of the problem is I can’t actually read any of these numbers. I just click on shapes.”

It’s true. I’m pretty sure that if I made a warning pop up that said “You are about to destroy MagAO — Ok — Cancel” he would click Ok as long as it was in the right place.

Here’s your song of the day. Enjoy.

The big story over the last 30 hours has been our atmospheric dispersion corrector, or ADC. When you look at a star through the atmosphere, it will be “dispersed” into a rainbow, meaning that the different wavelengths of light (colors) will land at different spots on the camera. But if you have an ADC, it takes out this dispersion. The ADC is two prisms which have to be rotated in opposite directions in a fairly precise way. Well, ours stopped being precise, or maybe it was just random. Opinions vary. We spent the last half of last night taking pieces of it apart and testing various theories. We didn’t get anywhere, but after a long-day’s sleep, Laird had a plan. To keep a long story from getting longer, one of the two rotating prisms tends to get jammed up in one part of its range of motion. We now have a workaround in place for this, with a bunch of software hacks to enforce some new rules. So, problem solved! Just like that.

To put that in perspective, when I went to bed yesterday morning I was pretty sure we had to pull MagAO off the telescope and tear apart the ADC. It’s good to be wrong about some things.

Losing some time to the ADC troubleshooting hasn’t been too hard to take, because we’ve had some cloudy nights.

Here are some more pictures of the mounting and cabling from yesterday.

MagAO’s favorite Chef is on this week. Here’s an example of why we love Hector so much.

I found some more flowers today.

Clouds suck. They should never come near any observatory where I have time. But, they make for nice pictures.

There’s a lot of pressure for us instrumenteers in the days before a run, especially such a long one. We have many people coming to visit us and use MagAO, and we need to have the system in top form when they get here. I think we did it — MagAO is ready to go. But, needless to say, we worked pretty damn hard the last couple of days.