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
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.
