I was home in Tucson for about 5 minutes after the last run. So I only managed to get all of my laundry done all at once just in time to pack for this trip. Upon doing so, I discovered that I was missing some socks. This happens to all of us, dryers being constructed the way they are, and I normally don’t expend much energy on it.
However, this time one of the lost was a brand new wool sock I bought especially for LCO, and I knew I was headed into this:
So I was disappointed to lose my new sock that I’d gotten to wear once or twice on the last run (and an older one too), and worried about potential for cold feets.
But then I did my first round of laundry, and had the bright idea to look in the cupboards above the washing machine… AND I FOUND MY SOCKS YOU GUYS!!!!!
Only problem is now I have a two mismatched single socks on two different continents.
Thanks to whichever denizen of LCO took the time to stow my socks for me.
We had an impromptu birthday celebration for Logan tonight, organized by Eden. Singing, dancing, homemade card, and fruit snacks for all.
Happy Birthday Logan!
Laird has been busy packing up the venerable MagAO ASM, getting ready to send it on its way to its new life at the LBT. I booted up the old control computer for MagAO-C, and it came right back to life.
Lots of nostalgia in this pic!
Being weathered out has some advantages. Olivier made us a new toy, which lets us look at the timing of our system in 3D. This movie shows the response of the MagAO-X wavefront sensor to a deformable mirror (DM) poke as a function of time. Key fun feature: the DM actuators move in a raster pattern, and it takes about 100 microseconds for the whole DM to move. You can see that in this movie.
purple stylings by JosephThe clouds have made for some nice views with interesting relief highlighted all around us
Best 15 minutes of the day was plugging in the MagAO computers and remembering how it all worked, seeing them boot again, figuring out how to remember the password, and logging in to see an old friend.
When the door to the Babcock lodge is held open by wind blowing through, you know the domes aren’t open. (that’s a day time pic, but you know what I mean)
Luckily Jay and I were snug in the cleanroom almost all day, getting MagAO-X setup for some alignment and calibration work. We started right after breakfast with Juan and Felix and Miguel, and got MagAO-X craned onto its air legs. We then spent the rest of the day connecting stuff.
View from asternAll the cables are cabledShortly after dinner we had a fully cabled and working instrument
At the end of the day we had the loop closed and the nice PSFs. Tomorrow we get to work on repeatable alignment procedures and more robust calibrations.
My favorite 15 minutes was after connecting the last cable for the 2K DM, and running the tests to verify that each actuator was functioning, and having it work on the first try – no re-cabling needed. The 1K worked on the first try too, but it always does.
The song of the day is “Act of Approach” by The Dead South.
Offloading is a major, but sometimes under-appreciated, part of an AO system. It makes sense when you really think about what we’re doing. The moving part of the Magellan Clay Telescope weighs more than 100 tons (I don’t know the exact number, but that is the OOM that has stuck in my head from somebody telling me that once). But what we actually do for a living is wiggle tiny little pieces of silicon with a few atoms of gold or silver on top, in response to massless particles streaming through the atmosphere, all in a quest to achieve nanometer or better control over the universe. Over time the little wiggles turn into big wiggles, and we have to send them to the next bigger thing. We call this offloading, and in MagAO-X there’s a whole chain of it from our coronagaph deformable mirror to our pyramid+tweeter DM system (where the real magic happens) to our woofer, and from there to the telescope itself. Inside those main control loops there are other control loops that are adding steps to the dance. Loops on loops. There’s a certain absurdity to our little concerns getting dumped onto the majestic Clay telescope and pushing it around.
A way to analogize offloading: imagine flying to the other side of the world to a remote mountain top, being given a bunch of urgent tasks (some of which are impossible but nobody knew that until you failed), then suddenly switching to a night schedule, sleeping for 4 or 5 hrs a day (not night) for two weeks straight, and then suddenly switching to a day schedule so you can undo everything you spent the last two weeks doing. You can imagine that you’ll build up a little … stress… that’s hard to hold and you need to … offload it. Well it’s time to hit the ol’ dump button. You might not hear from us for a while.
Maybe as long as six weeks.
The last sunset.
So that’s it. MagAO-X is off the telescope after a truly amazing run. We’ve really hit our stride as a productive scientific instrument. I lost track of how many new things about the universe we discovered on this run, and #nospoilers anyway. At the same time I am leaving, as always, a little frustrated by the ways in which MagAO-X isn’t yet perfect, not yet meeting my expectations. Every new discovery comes with a lesson for how to do it better next time.
An image of Crux and Alpha & Beta Centauri rising over the Babcock Lodge at Las Campanas Observatory
Without a doubt the best thing about this project is that it is fun. The fun started with MagAO, and a long running tradition on this blog is the “quotes of the day”. It comes and goes, even during this run. Back “in the day” it became a problem because we realized people were just saying things hoping to get famous. Later on, it got us kicked of the Steward front page (still banned AFAICT, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯). As a reader, you should know that some fraction of the quotes have always been just straight made up. The lessons are that the quote log can be used for good, for evil, and sometimes it gets things done. Well, so anyway, here’s a PI-curated selection of quotes from this run. #overheard
“The control room is likely to be completely overrun. Keep calm and make sure you have a chair”
“take that speckles”
“This is a public cheese. Everyone has to use this cheese.”
“Who is Jahlishus?”
“Blog ops is completely unrecognizable. All it is is fucking penguins and Dall-E viscachas.”
“Which is almost a triggering thing for Jared… I’m kind of disappointed he’s not here to hear that”
“Let’s see if I can install zoom before the sun sets”
“Oh. My. God. We’re over 2 arcseconds.” “We’re going to need a bigger plot.” “This is just all sadness…” “I don’t want to go up there to the sadness party”
“When conditions are like this, it feels like nothing works… because nothing works.”
“I have way too many laptops”
“I spent my whole postdoc finishing my Ph.D.”
“If you’re okay I’m going to take a break … for breakfast … what time is it?”
“the units are ‘play around and find out’” (Ed: shortly thereafter the SI unit FAFO was coined)
“We had everything wrong”
“g band is horrible. I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy”
“We deserve strehls better than 20%”
“I’m not doing science, I’m doing AO”
“But I thought AO was easier in the visible?!”
“You see that?” “THAT?!“ “I know.”
“what’s that second speckle???” “…. OH that’s Pi Pup B!”
“Who knew it would actually work?”
“You cannot hit the grad students”
“that is a really large blueberry”
“… ah this is the 4th time I’ve heard about ‘The little guy’, Can I see what you’re talking about?”
“I stared at him and thought ‘Why are you not making my salad’ “
“oh that tingled. oh wait I am electrocuting myself.”
“So the only thing misaligned in your system was the cardboard?”
“except that it imploded during shipping, it works really well!”
“You don’t do that with geese but I didn’t know that at the time”
“I’m stealing fruit for my next couple days of breakfasts. I’ve been stealing a little bit every day. I have a little pile of fruit in my room.”
“Zernike polynomials, you’re my bitch now”
“I found our nuts at Baade! Those Bastards!”
“I appreciate that you’re always working on bullshit when you’re here”
“I love it here”
“I’ll bet you all your empanadas for the rest of the run” “… nothing is worth that”
“More people will read your blog than your PhD”
“Go ahead and take a dump.”
I love stories about a crew. LOTR, Firefly, The Expanse. I found this song through Yellowstone, which on its surface appears to be about one dude/family but I think is more properly understood as a crew story. The song itself sort of captures my mood about our ongoing attempt to achieve the fundamental limits of wavefront control. If it wasn’t hard, it wouldn’t be worth doing. We have a good crew, so we’ll get there.
We finally had an all-night good night. Started with what we call engineering, which means testing new ways of operating the instrument. The big news is that Sebastiaan got his “implicit Electric Field Conjugation” algorithm to work on-sky. This brings MagAO-X almost to its as-planned fully capability. Here’s what that looks like to one of our highly trained operators:
A fully armed and operational MagAO-X station.
Why would one want to conjugate an electric field? Let’s let Sebastiaan explain:
Speckles are why twinkling is bad for science
After the instrument-science experiments, we spent the rest of the night hunting planets. Tonight was almost one of those legendary Cerro Manqui nights that keeps us coming back over and over again. It was essentially 0.5″ seeing all night, but we were plagued by our version of the low-wind effect. However instead of Mickey Mouse, we get the Bouncey House: when the wind drops to 0.0 the telescope gets bored and starts to bounce. It makes our control loop more or less impossible to optimize.
It’s been a busy month in the eXtreme Wavefront Control Lab. The main event was the return of MagAO-X after a long wait for a ride on the mountain without us. Everyone’s favorite ExAO instrument finally showed up right at the beginning of May, which of course meant that we broke out the hard hats and steel toes.
Everyone is always happy to be here.This is the box with the AO Operations Computer (AOC).
The day of the main event started at 0600 when we started working with the mirror lab crew to crane our shipping boxes open. But first we needed the stuff that makes astronomy go:
Jay brought coffee and bagelsThe box must first be unboltedWe got the lid off and before the first rays of sunshine peaked over the loading dock wall.Then we moved on to the electronics rack.Not everybody was awake enough for power tool operation.
MagAO-X has been down below since October, so of course the lab had to be reorganized. You could barely tell that MagAO-X used to live there full time!
This is the HEPA blower we use to apply positive pressure to keep the dust out-ish.One must first tear one’s lab apart before one can put it back together. Our clean room has to be partially disassembled to fit a crane into the lab to finish unloading MagAO-X.A “clean” room doesn’t stay very clean when it just sits on the floor for 6 months.
Maybe the biggest excitement of the whole thing was evidence that we had water leak in to the box. It must have been rained on (we always blame Miami), and we saw water spots on the mylar blanket and some rust on the shipping frame. So we were super anxious until we finally got to unwrap the instrument in the clean clean room:
Regarding the circle, I wouldn’t worry about that little circle.
Once back in the lab, safe and sound, we began the long process of unpacking.
All the things are shrouded in plastic bags to keep them dust free. We call this step “de-baggie-ing”It’s a lot of bagsBag free. But does it work?
For me, the shipment isn’t over until we actually cable the 2040 actuator deformable mirror (I’ll let you work out how many wires it takes to move 2040 actuators . . .) and show that it has survived the trip.
Eden is tightening down a bolt to press the connectors together. It’s a good workout and low stress.
Thanks to the excellent touch of Eden and Sebastiaan we got all the connections made on the first try and sat down and closed the loop.
This is when I start sleeping again.
We were gone long enough that the university’s IT department didn’t recognize us:
Our computers are . . . complicated. When they draw up rules for campus computing systems they just don’t think about 2 kHz real-time control of turbulence and TB/day data rates.
Here is MagAO-X, Phase I, all set up and cabled back in its Tucson home.
But now the fun begins! We’re taking the next year off from the telescope to do some major upgrades, and long overdue repairs. Today we started tearing our MagAO-X apart. The first thing to go is the Pyramid Wavefront Sensor detector, which is on its way back to France for a timing board replacement and to get some (possibly) more sensitive operating modes installed.
Our venerable OCAM-2K EMCCD. This is a key part of what makes MagAO-X go and go fast. But it needs some TLC. Before shipping it, we of course have to drain the glycol from it.
When we head back to LCO for April (or so) 2024 we’ll have 1000 more actuators, new coronagraphs, new LOWFSs, and waaaaaay more software. Maybe fewer github issues too.
Going back into hardware mode is both exciting and a little terrifying. The XWCL will have to stay focused on the tasks at hand and be ready to deal with all the sh$t that won’t work the first time and go about figuring it out. But remember: “having more things just means more things can go right”.
It’s also a time of change in our group. Alex (v2), Joseph, and Avalon have all defended; and Warren is gearing up for his defense in a few weeks. If you’ve been following this blog you know they have all been crucial to the success of MagAO-x and been on many an adventure. The rest of us are now scrambling to scoop up all of their knowledge and make sure we can keep it going without them. We’re also going to miss them!
Here’s a bunch of the XWCL at the usual Friday afternoon spot, celebrating Avalon’s defense, and maybe showing some relief that MagAO-X made it home too.
The song of the day is “Guess Who’s Back” by BEGINNERS & Night Panda. It is, as the kids say, a banger.
Stay tuned for an action packed summer full of travel and conferences, new hardware, probably some more glycol spills, and all of our usual shenanigans.
