Home of MagAO and MagAO-X.
That was quick. The NAS is all packed up, powered-off, dust covers on, etc. In case you were worried, I poked my head into the clean room and the shell is in one piece.
This guy was walking along with me after lunch:
This flower is hanging on precariously by the path to the hotel
I think I caught one of the pooping culprits in the act today
After yesterday’s excitement with the motor changeout, today was a boring old software day. VisAO now has a fully realtime operating system, which should make our telemetry more reliable. I also have overscan working on the CCD47, or at least the pixels are coming off the detector. I still have some work to do to get the data saved correctly. Overscan (for bias correction) wasn’t a priority because we thought we’d always be looking at bright targets, where taking shutter darks wouldn’t be very expensive at high frame rates. But Kate Follette insists on looking at faint things with VisAO, and with longer exposure times having bias pixels will help our efficiency a bunch.
Now, I’m almost out of here, and it wouldn’t be a visit to LCO without at least one selfie in the poop-covered mirror.
I went over the back side to see if I could find any wild viscachas. I found a mom and baby vizzy:
Today Povilas and I changed our recalcitrant Y-stage motor, which is responsible for moving the W-Unit (pyramid and VisAO) in the (usually) up direction. This means it fights gravity for most of its miserable existence, and, well, was giving up.
The problem is that the motor and its brake are always supporting the unit, even when powered off, so if we just unbolted it the whole project would be over. So step 1 was to create one of the highest-tech components of the MagAO system delivered to date:
Then we carefully lowered the W-Unit down until its full weight was on the wood. It took a little adjusting to get it squared up:
After all that, it was a simple matter of unscrewing a few bolts and plugging in the new motor. Alas, there was little improvement. Our next step is to upgrade to a higher power motor. This will take a little more software work to configure it, but it should otherwise be pretty easy. Our biggest concern in all of this has been changing the motor, which we now know how to do.
Now it’s time for your daily Viscacha and Sunset:
This keeps happening to me. Last time it was Harvard. Today the Arizona Wildcats went to Ann Arbor to play the Michigan Wolverines in men’s basketball. So of course, there was a Michigan instrument parked right next to the MagAO NAS in the Aux Building. In this picture you can see part of the “Michigan/Magellan Fiber System”, or M2FS.
I could only watch on espn.com, but it was a great game, going down to the last 2 seconds. Arizona won 72-70. A tough road win for the newly minted #1 team in the country. Bear down.
When I wasn’t frantically refreshing my browser, I got some work done. I think we have a plan for how to change out our infamous Y-stage motor, and have a support block being made to order. I also got our atmospheric dispersion corrector (ADC) control software debugged (I think — I thought that before too), and started upgrading the VisAO control computer software. More on that tomorrow.
I had never seen liquid nitrogen being delivered to the summit. I’m moderately impressed that this truck made it up to the top.
There are 3 century plants (agave) with really tall flower stalks around the lodge. Here’s one reaching for the sky:
MagAO is back at LCO, or, well, at least I am to do some maintenance. We have a bunch of improvements to make, and a few bugs to sort out too, and we don’t want to save them until a few days before our next run.
Before I get to the wildlife, did you add your name to the petition yet? Now is your chance to weigh in on what to name the first planet discovered by MagAO. Go here to see what it’s all about.
Well, Vizzy is alive and well. Here he/she is, obviously happy to see me:
The sky has been beautiful today. Here’s the LCO lodge, the GMT site, and La Silla Observatory in the background, at sunset tonight.
