Author: Jared Males

T.J., Alycia, and Kate left us yesterday. Vanessa was supposed to be here, but her flight was delayed. So, it was down to Laird, Katie, and Jared to carry on the MagAO mission tonight.

Our day started early. We had to get up before dinner to do some maintenance on our shell wind monitor. This is a little anemometer attached right at the edge of the secondary mirror to tell us if the winds get too high. One flaw with our current device is that it is battery powered and the batteries only last about 10 days. So the crew tipped the telescope over for us, and Laird and Katie climbed up to replace the batteries.

After that bit of periodic maintenance was taken care of, we headed back down the hill for our usual breakfast.

After that we headed right back up, and closed the loop. Our minimum number of planets detected tonight is 1 (100% confidence). The maximum number is 4, with a most likely value of 2. Stay tuned.

Tonight was a little bit more interesting than usual, since we got to enjoy a total lunar eclipse. We knew we were in for a special night when we saw the moon rise over the Andes on our walk up to the telescope after dinner

With only 3 of us to operate MagAO, Clio2, and VisAO, plus Ernan our telescope operator, we had to watch the eclipse in shifts, leaving one person inside the control room to come holler if something went wrong.

Laird worked hard to get some nice shots of the dark moon.

When the moon is full here, the mountain top is really really bright.

MagAO also obtained world-wide coverage of the eclipse. Well-planned, I say.

On our walk up at sunset, the Moon and Sun were 180 degrees apart in the sky. On our walk down at sunrise, they had nearly exactly swapped positions. Mornings here can be stunningly beautiful.

You might remember that this isn’t the first time we’ve observed an eclipse at LCO.

Here’s the song of the night:

Tonight we are happy to present you with the first release of the official trailer for the MagAO movie, directed by Alycia Weinberger.

Coming soon to a theatre or scientific journal near you.

We’re still here at LCO, observing star after star, seeing disk after disk, maybe a high contrast close separation point source or two, and we aren’t out of cookies yet. Here’s a few more things going on:

Alycia got a good picture of a cute little vizzy at the ASB which she posted the other day. I saw him or her tonight, and I’m sure this is a new animal that we haven’t been seeing before, maybe a young vizzy. In any case, it’s cute.

We are now totally on a night schedule. Here’s Laird, Kate, and T. J., heading down to a late breakfast before bed.

It’s always pretty here, and watching the sunset is our nightly ritual.

This came up last night. Man these guys are cool.

One of MagAO’s specialties is high contrast imaging in the visible using simultaneous differential imaging (SDI). For this run we bought a new H-alpha SDI filter set, and tonight we really put them to use. This image compares our on and off H-alpha PSFs. These are formed from 1 hour of 45 second exposures. No strehl selection or any other shady tricks.

We close tonight with deep thoughts by T. J. Rodigas: “What I’m worried about is human knowledge after the Earth is destroyed . . . we should beam it up to the space station.”

We had another somewhat so-so night. Some high winds made it interesting, but there were few to no clouds and seeing was at least mediocre. But right at 4 am, when we switched targets, seeing blew up to more than 1.5 arcseconds. Sorry DZ — we aren’t doing this on purpose.

There have been several calls for the return of the quotes of the day. Here’s a sample from the last few days:

Jordan: “The problem with this AO system is that it stays closed for so long that it’s hard to find a bathroom break.”

Alfio: “I went there once to take their cheese.” (explaining that he has been to the Baade telescope).

Laird: “You fooled me by taking the data incompetently.” (to T. J.)

Finally, my song for the night is absolutely full of astronomical references. Free MagAO sticker to the first person who emails me a list (no googling, on your honor). In any case, you should listen to this with the volume at 11. Trust me, it’s better that way.

We spent almost the whole night with the loop closed, with a few exceptions. For instance, we had to open the loop during an earthquake! Not a big one, but the floor rumbled and the loop went a little crazy because of the vibrations.

One of the fun things about observing with AO is that we frequently discover that stars listed as singles are doubles, triples, or even quadruples. This happens when we pick a star just to do engineering tests, and we find more stars than we expected. Here’s an example from tonight.

The same horse is still hanging around. He still won’t let me pet him.

We couldn’t do much in the way of photometric standards, but the sky was pretty.

In addition to the quad, we imaged a couple of star fields and clusters. We counted lots of stars on both of our cameras.