Home of MagAO and MagAO-X.
Just before starting our science observations tonight, we discovered a major bug in the Clio software.
Well played, Professor Hinz. Well played.
“That looks like a spider.” — TJ
“You can see the bad pixels through the spider.” — Laird
“This is the most in-focus image I’ve seen on Clio.” — Alfio
Postedit:
The fun continued… the culprits are our LBTI friends!
Oh, and speaking of our LBTI friends, check out the LBTI Exozodi-Exoplanet Common Hunt’s new website.
Under certain conditions, such as high winds or observing faint stars, it is advantageous to use the shortest exposure times (~20 msec) of the VisAO camera and perform Lucky imaging. This technique is based on first selecting only the best images in a sequence of short exposures, and then shifting-and-adding (SAA) the results. This process can be computationaly intensive. As such, we have implemented a pipeline for the VisAO camera which is based on Google’s Youtube service. First a sequence of frames is uploaded to YouTube. If SAA can be beneficial, YouTube will offer to fix it, stating that the video is “shaky”. Here we present a comparative analysis of this pipeline.
Before:
After:
As you can see, significant improvement is achieved!
Future work:
The next phase of implementing this data reduction pipeline will include direct framegrabber-to-Google uploading, preventing any need for local storage. This will be helpful in limiting the need for MagAO project personnel to cause so many problems at LCO.
Today is Alfio’s birthday.
As you can see in the above picture, we have a new minimum-force basis set to try (thanks Fernando!). As soon as we get everything lined up, we’ll test it on the CRO.
Speaking of the CRO, yesterday was crazy. So crazy that none of us had much energy left (at 1am) to write a long ‘splainy blog post. So here’s a little more about what was going on. The CRO is a tiny mirror inside a cup, which has a pinhole on the top. The CRO is suspended at the focus of the ASM, and we send light from an artifical star inside the W-unit up to the secondary, which focuses it into the pinhole, and the CRO reflects it back to the secondary exactly as it came in. CRO stands for Calibration Return Optic (note: it is NOT a retro-reflector! (right Alan?)), both C-R-O and Crow are considered correct pronunciations.
The CRO pinhole is very small, so we have to have it exactly on the optical axis of the telescope. To align it, we use two crosses, one at the W-unit itself, and one on the back of the CRO. The real magic, thanks to Armando and company, is to use a digital camera with a wide focus range to first focus on the W-unit cross, then on the CRO cross, and move the camera until the two crosses line up. From there we move the CRO itself until the reflection from the CRO is lined up with the crosses.
So, step 1 is: Make crosses. In Katie’s post yesterday you saw how the cross was made on the back of the CRO. We also had to re-make the cross on the W-unit. Armando made one using some wire and a rubber band to keep it tight, but the rubber band disintegrated over the last few months. For some reason, it fell to me to attempt to re-create some fine Italian craftsmanship:
Step 2 is: Line up the CRO secondary and instrument axis using the cross at the instrument and the mark on the bottom of the CRO.
Step 3 is: move the CRO (this time by moving the secondary vane-ends) so that the reflection of the measuring camera itself. off the secondary, is centered on the crosses.
Step 4: blog it
Done.
Today we finished the Clio cool-down, and after lunch moved Clio from the Aux and mounted it (her?) on the telescope.
After Clio was on, the grad students kept working.
After dinner, we proceeded with aligning the system for CRO tests.
A herd of burros came to the watering hole close to the lodge today.
We missed sunset tonight, but we never miss a Vizzy photo-op.
Quotes:
Laird: “If we don’t get good suckage, it’s not going to work.”
Laird: “It’s like yoga”
Povilas: “It’s like hot yoga!”
Laird: “I often get a little confused about what’s hot and what’s not.”
Vanessa: “I only took 4 pictures today. I wasn’t very productive” (the blog is our #1 priority)
The MagAO team got a lot bigger today. Laird, Katie, Alfio, Marco, and Vanessa arrived at LCO today. Marco took some pictures after they all met up in Santiago.
Katie sat in the front of the bus, so she took some pictures of the drive.
No rest for the weary. After dinner we charged up the mountain to get to work.
We also set a record today, with the arrival of Vanessa:
And finally, though we couldn’t watch it, we note the outcome of the battle of the Aux building:
Congratulations to the Harvard NCAA men’s basketball team, who today upset #3 New Mexico (as the #14 seed – wow!). This makes things in the Aux building at LCO a little interesting:
#6 Arizona and #14 Harvard square off tomorrow afternoon. Bear Down!
The Clay primary mirror got a bath this morning:
Here is the rinse in action:
The next stage of washing is a gentle blotting with sponges. The Aluminum is on the front, and any remaining dust particles or other bits of junk could easily scratch the surface if you wipe.
Here’s the action version:
