Author: Jared Males

MagAO-X is proving to be a complicated beast. Just when we think we’re making progress at taming it, we find another thing that doesn’t quite work yet — or is just plain failing.

Sometimes we need help from our collaborators working on similar AO systems. We’ve been getting really nice performance, but with a touch of instability that has made it difficult to keep that performance for long periods of time. We use the CACAO software developed by Olivier Guyon for the SCExAO system. Olivier has been working with us all along to make MagAO-X go fast, and today I got up early to dive into the details to figure out what has been causing these subtle stability issues.

To test things out, Olivier was running experiments on SCExAO in Hawaii while I was doing the same on MagAO-X. It looks like we succeeded! We are much happier with the new calibrations we took this afternoon.

The bigger assist came from our friends on the MAPS project. We’ve been suffering from a failing rotator on our atmospheric dispersion corrector (ADC). This little motorized device rotates a prism to keep the Earth’s atmosphere from going all rainbow on us.

Knowing that MAPS is using the same rotator — and importantly are not currently looking up at stars — we sent up the ole’ bat signal to see if they could get one to us. Oli Durney (who is the optical engineer for MagAO-X!) sprang into action and tore apart MAPS’ ADC and got the stage to FedEx. From there it went to Jeb Bailey in Santa Barbara, who just happened to be coming to LCO 48 hours later. (Jeb is himself part of the MagAO-X team, though that’s not why he came this time).

So we got the replacement stage delivered last night, and today did the replacement.

Once we got the instrument buttoned back up and our new calibration applied, we went back to work doing coronagraphy at H-alpha looking for planets.

Here’s a video of some parts of MagAO-X working. Woofer, tweeter, WFS at top left. At bottom and from left are the H-alpha channel, continuum channel, and then our LOWFS camera which is capturing light rejected by the coronagraph.

Logan figured out how to get Vizcachas to be our substitute Easter Bunnies. they’re going great.

It finally feels like we’re starting to settle in here. We have begun doing hours-long observations of science targets for observers, and that means we can actually take a breath, catch up on email, and bond with our friends at LCO.

While having our dinner we were graced by our friend the Burro who likes pets.

Sebastiaan had to negotiate passage to dinner.

And Logan got her first nose scritches in.

Sebastiaan then had to pay the toll to get by.

And Avalon made friends too.

Our telescope operator Hernán Nuñez ( a hero of MagAO runs past ) told us that he thinks these guys have basically been abandon up here for a couple of years. This one, at least, clearly trusts and even likes humans, so it doesn’t seem like they’ve been wild their whole lives. Our friend might be a little lonely.

After our fun dinner party with the Burro, I walked up to the telescope for the first time since we went on sky. On the way up I saw our friend Povilas — It’s great catching up with old friends after such a long absence.

The night started with some VIS-X work by Sebastiaan.

Where’s Sebastiaan? He’s in this photo working on MagAO-X.

We started work on a nice bright star, part of Logan’s program. This was a great chance to put our high-speed low-drag coronagraphic mode to work. In the below image you can see the usual MagAO-X control panels. The lower right desktop shows the simultaneous images with a coronagraph disk occulting the star so we can look for companions. The 4 spots forming a cross are made by our deformable mirror as fiducials for alignment and photometry. The right-most image is our “low order wavefront sensor” camera, which is imaging light reflected from the coronagraph mask (the thing making the dark spot in the center of the other two images). We use that light to keep the spot centered at high speed (in this case 600 Hz). Fully understanding and optimizing this mode of observing is the key to my main science goal for MagAO-X, so it’s really exciting to see us getting started on it with a real star.

Here’s a close up view. Here the “satellite speckles” have green lines drawn between them, and the coronagraph is centered on the cross.

While we worked inside on our tiny little field of view, the great big outside sky was putting on quite a show:

In the desert. A horse with no name. I can still remember my name. But the day of the week is already gone.

This picture is to show you that some work happened today:

The following images are just filler:

The big MagAO-X news is that Logan and Avalon arrived today! All three of our teams have successfully made it to LCO with no problems at SCL. If you squint down in the valley you can see the dust trail of their van, which we noticed while eating dinner outside.

Now for the big news of the day. I have a new friend!!!!!!! On my way for a run, I strolled out of room just as one of the burros came through two of the dorms and started down the path ahead of me.

Once I started to catch up, he turned around. I think maybe he realized I was between him and his family, but he also didn’t mind much. In fact, he put his head down, relaxed his ears, and took a couple of steps towards me: which the farm kid in me recognized as classic horse for “hi, it’s ok to pet me”. I did not misinterpret:

Though the body language is the same, unlike the horses I know, burros do not appear to like their ears scritched. But face, nose, and chin are fine.

I then heard a clip clop behind me and realized it wasn’t just us:

You’ll recognize our friend the lovely Backup Burrito. She realized it was me and kept on trucking lest I put her back to work.

About 20 minutes later I passed them when I was running back up the hill from the bodega. The adults just looked at me briefly and kept going. But Backup Burrito stopped and acted like she was trying to work up the courage to smell my hand. But not yet.

My day started with a classic LCO breakfast.

After that we ran up the hill and cabled our 2040 actuator MEMS DM. We got it on the first try! We are getting better at this procedure.

After that, we turned the cleanroom over to our Bubbled comrades. Laird and Justin put in a loooong day of aligning the optics. We sat up in the library and watched. It’s sort of like a medical procedure drama.

We found this book in the library, which we might need if any REAL problems come up.

After taking the above photo and circling around Justin, I started down the path to begin my walk up. Then I noticed a sliver of moon hanging over the valley. Then the following ensued:

Joseph got an up close and personal Vizcacha interaction.

The reference to bananas in the slack convo is to this blog post from the MagAO-Classic Age of Legends. We have a long history of shenanigans with the cleanroom vizcacha family.

The post-sunset show was extravagant tonight.

Changing up the sound tonight for the song of the day. I think this is the best of the “new” Metallica, as good as the old classics.

We hit a pretty major roadblock today. Due to the sky high fuel prices around the globe, Las Campanas Observatory has had to drastically reduce use of most forms of energy, including electricity for cranes, propane for forklifts, and gas for trucks, except as needed for nighttime operations. So we essentially have no power when the sun is up.

Luckily, as we always do on the MagAO-X and LCO teams, we had a contingency plan. This is, of course, the burros who hang around the mountain top. The young lady above was our assigned crane and forklift motor for the day. It took a little longer than normal, but in the end we managed to get MagAO-X unpacked.

Yesterday Sebastiaan mentioned our misbehaving graphics cards (GPUs). When we turned the electronics on, 0/4 GPUs that we use for our super-fast real-time computations were alive. There is not much in common between these 4 devices in terms of where/how they are installed, so it seemed extremely unlikely that they all just quit on us. So after none of us getting much sleep, in part due to racing minds trying to figure out what it could be, we divided our duties today so Joseph could troubleshoot while Sebastiaan and I worked with the crew on unpacking.

In the end it was two different problems. One of them just needed a stern talking to (nerd code for we took it out and put it back in, and it worked). The other 3 were more complicated. We use a PCIe expansion system, which lets us attach more crap to our computers. The backplane of that failed, but luckily we had a backup burrito for this too, and once it was put into service we now have all 4 GPUs working.

When we went up to the top we saw a vulture soaring on thermals. It was coming right over us, and we could hear a whistling sound from its feathers.

The best news of the day was our friend Vizzy the cleanroom vizcacha making an appearance. This was when I knew the GPUs would be ok.

The song of the day accurately reflects my sentiments after what was a damn stressful 24 hours.