Home of MagAO and MagAO-X.
The “advance team” arrived at LCO today to begin preparations for MagAO commissioning run #2. Alan, Tyson, and Jared made the long overnight journey from the USA, accompanied by Povilas and Mark Phillips who were returning from the Magellan SAC meeting.
After a delicious LCO supper I went up and looked everything over. Here are some of the important things I checked:
And of course, I took a stroll around the mountain to see how things are without us.
Hi MagAO fans, it’s been a while since we’ve updated our blog. After we recovered from our month on the mountain, and got through Christmas, New Years, and the start of the new school year, the team has jumped into processing all the fantastic data we got from MagAO, Clio, and VisAO.
In one month, we’ll be back at LCO doing our thing. It’s a little shorter run this time, but still more than three weeks.
While you wait for us to get back to work, you can get your cutting edge high-res/high-contrast science fix at the LBTI blog. There you can see how MagAO teammates Phil Hinz, Vanessa Bailey and Andy Skemer are doing at Mt. Graham in Arizona.
We’re off the mountain! Laird, Katie, Jared and TJ finished putting MagAO to bed yesterday, and made the journey down to La Serena. We spent one night there, and with Laird’s folks took some time off to celebrate.
We have a long overnight flight to Dallas ahead of us, but we’re almost home.
Some quotes from the last couple of days:
“Can you guys stop talking?” – Katie (to Laird and Jared)
“I gotta admit, I like strawberry margaritas…yes, I want a margarita, but do you have strawberry? Damn. Ok, just give me the fruit.” – Laird
“We all have these subtle emotional IQs, and because we’re astronomers we’re all a little screwed up.” – Laird
“Laird is a bright boy.” – Jared, quoting Tibor, a friend of Laird’s dad and occasional MagAO fellow traveler.
“LCO is a great place, if you’re into guys, right Katie?” – Laird
“What are you doing in my room?!?! I’m El Presidante!” – Laird (the maids at Casino Enjoy can be . . . persistent)
“Between scotch and fruit cups there are many layers. And one of them is raspberry mojito.” – Katie
“It’s ok. I’m American.” – TJ, to a policewoman.
“Bear Down!” – random stranger, to TJ and his A jacket.
This is my least favorite part: packing everthing up, getting organized, finding all of our lost allen wrenches, and taking a zip-tie inventory.
The ASM came off the telescope yesterday, and rode down the hill first thing this morning.
The last major operation was to unbolt and crane the NAS off the telescope.
Once the NAS came off, we got a look at the W-Unit for the first time in a few weeks. Here’s our wollaston beamsplitter, which helped deliver some amazing SDI science at visible wavelengths.
Kate, who is using the VisAO SDI mode to study disks around young stars, had never actually seen the fully assembled instrument before. Here’s a picture of me and Kate after a quick tour of the components she’s been operating the last few nights.
We also cleaned up some of our, shall we say, less rigorous engineering solutions.
Laird’s folks happened to wander by today (why are you surprised? it’s not like we’re on a mountain top in a remote area of South America or anything). As is his wont, Laird put them to work settling the ASM into the clean room. I hear they helped flip it back to zenith. Perhaps even more appreciated was a chocalate fix for certain members of the team who didn’t plan very well.
Quote of the day:
“We should come up with something that looks less like garbage. I mean, it’s well decorated garbage. But.” – Povilas Polunas.
After the dome closed at sunrise we shutdown VisAO, Clio2, and the ASM. Here are the big moments.
(Don’t get the wrong idea. We all actually love Clio – it just became the scapegoat for any and all problems that occurred in the last month.)
It is indeed time to go home.