Home of MagAO and MagAO-X.
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.
The big news for today is that Laird and Katie cabled, plumbed, and powered-up the ASM. We’ve never done that before without at least one Arcetrian in the room. It all went very smoothly, and the ASM is ready to go on sky!
Our day started with Oscar introducing us to the Cherimoya. It’s a really flavorable sweet fruit. We also had fresh squeezed Cherimoya juice for breakfast.
We started switching over to a night schedule. That means we got up for breakfast at 7:30 and worked until 2 am. We finished out the night testing some new plumbing fixtures for the NAS. At least we’ll sleep in a little this morning.
We should be on-sky tonight. Baby get ready.
MagAO has produced another Ph.D.! Kate successfully defended her dissertation on Thursday, at the very un-Astronomer hour of 9 am. Nevertheless her talk was well attended, and all of that hard work paid off. Congratulations to Dr. Kate Follette, Queen of VisAO SDI.
Now that the fun is over, Laird,Katie, and Jared are heading down to LCO for MagAO’s 2014B science run. Our flight leaves Tucson this afternoon. We get the telescope for 37 nights, and we’ll be down there for 6 weeks. That means you get over 40 blog posts in a row. Lucky!
I’m feeling the need for some motivation. It’s time for us to pull our (steel-toe) boots on, lace ’em up, and earn our pay. Here’s what we’ll be singing as we march up to the telescope every day for the next 6 weeks.