The MagAO project once lived in Florence, Italy, for almost a year. It’s where we first got it all working and got to know our Italian teammates. We’re back, this time for the AO4ELT3 (Adaptive Optics for Extremely Large Telescopes 3) conference.
The 3rd AO4ELT conference.
We includes Laird, Phil, Katie, and Jared from Arizona, Derek from Heidelberg, Simone, Armando, Alfio, Enrico, Runa, Marco, Lorenzo, Fernando, Luca, and Paolo from Arcetri. You can also find MagAO friends such as Roberto Biasi from Microgate and Doug Miller and Olivier Guyon from Arizona.
If you are in Florence with us, come see our poster and get your MagAO sticker. We’re only giving them out to readers of the blog! The password is “Vizzy.”
Our poster. Laird and Katie are both giving MagAO talks later this week.
Here are a few views from around Firenze:
The Duomo from the rose garden, just below Piazzale Michelangelo.A replica of David at Piazzale Michelangelo, which has, overwhelmingly, the best view of Florence.Alfio took us to a restaraunt at Piazza Santo Spirito, and we went for full-moon walk along the Arno. This is the Ponte Vecchio, a famous bridge in Florence.
MagAO won’t be back on the telescope for a year. That’s a long time. In the mean time, we have some amazing data to analyze, and we have some upgrades planned (which is why there’s such a long break). We’ll keep you posted as new results come out and our schedule progresses. The adventure isn’t over yet!
Laird, Katie, TJ, and I left LCO today. This was our last view of the telescopes.
Thanks to everyone at LCO for helping us get where we are. The future of MagAO is bright, and we are going to do a lot of fantastic science here.
The western valley below LCO. You can see the sunrise shadow of Magellan.We made a pit stop at the offical MagAO watering hole, the Casino Enjoy in La Serena.A cruise ship gets underway from La Serena. We’ll be back.
Some quotes:
“no, no, no.” — our waitress, wagging her finger at Laird. Apparently you can’t order beer before noon on Sunday in La Serena.
“No! The blog is over. I should be able to say whatever I want.” — Laird
Alycia says I’m spoiled. Fine. But when you’re used to half arcsecond seeing, one arcsecond seeing is a “disaster” (Alfio’s word, not mine).
Seeing blew up right before it was time to do my favorite star.
We did do some good science tonight. The AO system is running fantastically well now that we replaced the troublesome switch BCU, and our two cameras are catching all sorts of diffraction limited circumstellar photons.
On my way up tonight I had to negotiate a Burro herd.
Just standing around, slowing traffic.The babies were making all sorts of noise. They sound just like you’d expect: hee-haw.Mom. She made sure I didn’t get too close.
Vizzy was in his usual spot:
Sleepy.
We had a surprise visitor in the control room tonight:
This little dude was hiding under Katie’s bag. Fun.
Tonights quote:
“When it’s good, it’s very good. The problem is when.” — Alfio, talking about a nameless telescope, somewhere else.
Tonight both Clay and Baade belonged to astronomers from Steward Observatory. Bear down.
Over on the diffraction limited side, we had a great night. We observed some young low-mass companions to stars (later we can argue about labels like “brown dwarf” and “planet” – all I know for sure is that they were all bigger than Pluto). We can do this across a wide wavelength range, using Clio and VisAO simultaneously, letting us probe the atmospheres of these objects in a unique way. We’re all really excited about our results! Stay tuned.
Just after opening, the heart and soul of MagAO hangs in the sky.We did one of Laird’s targets tonight. Here he’s monitoring the data as it comes off Clio.The current MagAO team: Kate,TJ, Runa, Laird, Katie, Alfio, Vanessa, Jared.
Tonight was Vanessa’s last night. Safe travels, and go Bobcats.
Arizona’s Professor Nathan Smith (far right), who is observing on Baade, came across the catwalk for a chat.When we opened we still had the VisAO wollaston in. But that’s not why Katie managed to get two Vizcacha’s on her camera. There are actually two of them!Tonight’s sunset. No flash.
Some quotes from tonight:
“You know why we did it in z prime? Because we’re HOT in z prime.” — Laird (we’re learning to talk like optical astronomers)
“I THINK we are in closed loop” — Alfio (trust me, if he says that, we are)
“That was very heroic.” — Katie (after Alfio closed the loop with approximately 0 photons)
“Apart from the hardware bugs, it was only 3 buttons!” — Alfio
“You could make it say ‘T.J. is amazing’ and it would be the same thing” — T.J.
“If we hated you we wouldn’t make fun of you.” — Kate
“That’s what I keep telling myself.” — Laird
Tonight I saved over 73000 images on one target. That wore me out.
We had a good night – seeing was fairly good all night and we did some good engineering work in the first half. Clio’s prism spectrograph was aligned and focused, and we did some more photometric standard measurements with VisAO. Later we tried out some disk imaging with our wollaston and SDI filters. This required moving the rotator to various angles, which caused all kinds of excitement, including dumping the liquid nitrogen out of Clio’s dewar. That’s ok – the inner dewar stays solid and can last all night – but you have to be careful on the platform when it happens.
Later we did a long observations on a bright star, simultaneously at i’ (0.77 microns) and M’ (4.7 microns). Kind of cool to be doing science at such different wavelengths at the same time.
On the way down we had a close encounter with Vizzy.
We saw vizzy drinking out of a sprinkler hose, and then she hopped up the hill to watch us go by.Tonights sunset was leaning towards green until the last minute.
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“There’s nothing left to dump out of Clio now. I’m coming back in.” — Laird
