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.
The new Clio pump. Juan and Jorge came up after dinner to help hook it up.
We did some astrometric calibrations.
Some old school astrometry.Trapezium on the guider.
This is the image that almost broke MagAO
Our favorite spiral galaxy on the guider.
Still a bit cloudy, which continues to make for gorgeous skies at sunset
Tonight’s panorama.
And finally a Viscacha pic. Can you believe this is the first one?
The first viscacha pic of 2014B. They have been pretty scarce so far.
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.
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.
That image makes me pretty happy. See how the lines (they’re speckles in a very broad pass band) running out from the star are all straight? That means we have the ADC working.
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.
The Babcock Lodge with some cloudsMagellan with clouds. This is a rare sight as far as the MagAO team is concerned.
Here are some more pictures of the mounting and cabling from yesterday.
Laird and Katie hooking up ClioHere’s Laird and me connecting all the cables that let us talk to the system.
MagAO’s favorite Chef is on this week. Here’s an example of why we love Hector so much.
This was dessert at Lunch! You should stop by for dinner some time.
I found some more flowers today.
Some more flowers.
Clouds suck. They should never come near any observatory where I have time. But, they make for nice pictures.
Tonight’s sunset. Click for panorawesome.The MagAO team shows off some of our swag. Note that I’m not looking at the camera, I got distracted by the loop “pausing” and was making sure it came back ok.
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!
Laird and Katie connected the ASM power and communication cables and the cooling lines.This nice display shows our shell in the “RIP” (rest in peace) state. We were happy to see this, as it meant all the electronics were working.
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.
That”s a Cherimoya. In front, that is. That’s Povilas in back.Tonight’s sunset, or just after it.
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.
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.
Kate describing the recent successes at imaging transition disks. Free sticker to the first person who names all the MagAO team members in this picture.Laird delivering the advisor’s toast to Dr. Follette.
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.
This past week the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute (NExSCI) hosted the 2014 Sagan Summer Workshop, which was on Imaging Planets and Disks. Several members of the MagAO team and extended family attended, and presented some of our latest and greatest results. The workshop was held on the campus of Caltech, in Pasadena.
We all learned a lot, and had some fun. Thanks to the whole NExSCI crew for putting on such a great workshop.
Kate wowed the crowd with her H-alpha imagesHere’s Ya-lin, presenting his VisAO results on CT Cha b.Arizona grad student Nick Ballering giving his poster “pop”Arizona grad student Steph Sallum showed some MagAO+Clio2 non-redundant masking results. Her slides were very patriotic.
The real star of the show was Space Shuttle Endeavour, which has retired to the California Science Center. We took Wednesday afternoon off to go see her, and it was amazing.
Space Shuttle Endeavour. A good ship.
At one point while preparing for my thesis defense, I was faced with a conundrum: work on my dissertation or do something else. So what I did was research my academic lineage. It goes something like:
Jared Males –> Laird Close –> Don McCarthy –> Frank Lowe –> (a bunch of nerds at MIT) –> Robert Millikan –> Albert Michelson.
No disrespect to everybody else, but those last two dudes are pretty big deals. Well, since I was at Caltech, I went and paid Dr. Millikan a visit.
Me and my academic great^N grandfather. He has a nobel prize, by the way. So does his advisor.
I also visited the other famous residents of the campus.
