Author: Jared Males

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.

Things are always exciting here on the MagAO project. But nothing – not earthquakes, viscacha attacks, not even non-orthogonal basis sets – can keep us from doing what we came here to do. Now that we are on-sky, we are taking advantage of the *amazing* 0.5 arcsecond seeing common at LCO to take some nice pictures. Last night we were looking at the Trapezium cluster to calibrate our plate-scales, and we took a few moments to take this image:

We didn’t cheat – no shift and add or other tricks.

After we solved last night’s communication problems, we did some engineering work, specifically getting Coma-offloading to work. I hate rotation matrices. Later, seeing calmed down, and we took some fantastic images. Here’s a screen grab from VisAO working at 0.982 microns. It’s a log stretch, and captures a single 0.28 second frame on a bright star.

And here’s our M-band PSF from tonight:

We tested turning off the Clio pump to reduce vibrations in the 25-milli-arc-second VisAO PSF.  But since the Clio folks were observing at M-band, a 0.5-degree increase in temperature of Clio’s inner dewar caused a 3% increase in their thermal background.  Therefore, we turned the pump back on again, and the sky background settled back down as the detector cooled.  Here’s a curve showing the effect on Clio of turning off and on the pump:

Runa Briguglio, who is here from Florence helping us take care of the shell, suggests that we operate by this guideline:

Some quotes:
“If I’m doing what I think I’m doing, I’m an idiot. Yes! I’m doing what I think I’m doing!” – Glenn Eychaner, who came up the mountain today just to help us debug our TCS-MagAO communications problem. Thanks Glenn!

Tonight started with a hard to understand communications problem between our AO system and the telescope control system (TCS). It’s been working for days, but tonight we started having some messages get dropped. We have to keep the elevation of the telescope above a certain value to keep our delicate mirror safe, and this communications problem was causing us to stop getting elevation often enough. So our mirror RIP-ed, which means rest-in-peace. We don’t know what’s going on, but we hacked our way out of it by changing some timings. Troubleshooting begins again tomorrow after supper – I can’t wait.

After that, we had a very productive night. We looked at a standard star to calibrate our filters, and also looked at some well known clusters of stars to calibrate the plate-scales of our camera. Both cameras also had their foci checked. Kind of boring scientifically, but it’s important that we characterize our new instruments on real stars.

Katie and I were charged by a Viscacaha on our way down the mountain this morning. They’re turning against us.

And as I’m typing this we just got hit with an earthquake:

We also saw a hare this morning, a MagAO first.

“I’m a fan too, not just your families. I miss viscachas.” – Prof. Dan Marrone, captain of the Steward Observatory softball team and MagAO enthusiast.

“Keep calm and carry on.” – Runa Briguglio.