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.
Here’s what the control room looks like from the middle of a calm nightKatie worked on Clio’s FITS headers. If you look closely she’s editing the c code that runs Clio.A lone burro was seen after dinnerNo burrows at the top today. But they were there earlier.
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.
I pretended to be Yuri tonight.T. J. closed the loop for himself.
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.
Miss Viz, one of the clean room Viscachas was spotted for the first time on this run.
As I said, tonight we got the absolutely perfect observing conditions we’ve come to expect from LCO.
Finally, a cloud-less sunset.The ASM as we opened for what turned out to be an amazing night.
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 took these images tonight. At left is with an ND filter to prevent saturating. At right is a no-ND deep exposure, where you can see the spider arms and other high-contrast details. The junk in the center is CCD bleeding. Click for more pixels.
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.
An H-alpha jet imaged with MagAO’s VisAO camera in SDI mode. Click for more pixels.
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.
A sunrise shot of the MagAO secondary at the top of Cerro Manqui. Anna, you can click for the high-res version.
I don’t think these have been on the blog yet this run.
Some more nice flowers,
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.
Runa Briguglio created our “Keep Calm and Close the Loop” graphic. It looks great on our personalized mugs.
Once the clouds cleared we got to work.
Trapezium A, B, and E all on our 8″x8″ VisAO detector (7 stars total)Too bad this almost ruined our nightThe MagAO team took a sunset selfie tonightSunset was pretty amazing. This is looking back east towards the Andes.Our pre-observing supperFar field: A nice panorama of the observatory. Near field: the instrument scientist of MagAO.
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.
