Author: Jared Males

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.

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.