Home of MagAO and MagAO-X.
Richard caught a glimpse of the grumpy old man, one of the two Viscachas who live over the clean room. When last we saw them, they had just been caught breaking and entering the ASB to steal bananas, and the last update I got was “the problem has been dealt with”. I was worried! But the VisAO mascot appears safe, sound, and as grumpy as ever.
The invasion of LCO has begun. A scouting party consisting of Manny Montoya and Richard Sosa arrived this weekend and began unpacking the Clio2 infrared camera. Here is their report:
Day 1: “Clio was unpacked yesterday morning and we confirmed that nothing was damaged in shipping. Clio was put on the vacuum pump and we confirmed that we had not lost vacuum. The electronics rack and other stuff was unpacked and accounted for. The electronics rack cabling was tied down a little more securely since this was not possible before it left Tucson, and we also confirmed that nothing had broken during shipping. One thing that did get a little tweaked was the monitor and keyboard support to rack were bent. We straightened them out and put nuts behind it to make it more secure. The rack was then plugged into Clio and the computer, temp. controller, motor control were all tested, checking both the physical conection and through the runclio command on the gui. We then plugged into the network, it was not working so Emilio helped us with the vlan connection.”
Day2: “This morning we took the ring up to the telescope and confirmed that it fit on the MagAO NAS. We also checked the flower box to window measurements, we still have to check these with Clio to confirm there are no collision points, but the ring did fit. After the ring was confirmed to fit, we took it back down and put Clio2 and its cart together. This afternoon we are moving everthing into the clean room to prepare for cooling of Clio2 tommorow.”
Stay tuned for more MagAO action.
Preparations continue for the invasion of LCO. When we’re not sitting around arguing about clouds and chemistry in an exoplanet atmosphere, we’re discussing how to replace a relief valve without draining our cooling system. Some of this week’s worries included: how are we going to get all of this data home?
We also have to start getting safe, for safety’s sake. The NAS weighs 1800 lbs (at least that’s what Alan wrote on it with a Sharpie), and that might hurt if we drop it, so those of us who work in the dome have to have steel toed shoes.
Now that tel
escope proposals are submitted we return to our regularly scheduled programming. Our first order of business is to belatedly congratulate Dr. Derek Kopon, the Magellan AO Project’s first PhD. Derek is off to Heidelberg to help with the LINC-NIRVANA interferometer, but he’ll still be working on MagAO.
We also welcome our newest team member, Ya-Lin Wu. Ya-Lin is a first year graduate student at Steward and is helping us develop data pipelines to manage the huge amount of 1s and 0s we produce on a nightly basis.
We head back to LCO to prepare for first light in exactly one month. Time to start paying attention again.
Days without a motherboard failure: 53
While the NAS was mounted on the telescope we took a quick set of readnoise measurements with the CCD39. Here are the results. The only major caveat is that the telescope was not tracking, so we didn’t test whether the drives have any impact. Otherwise, this is the most realistic set of RON measurements we have taken to date. We are very happy with the results, especially the 156kHz 3.8 electrons. This number essentially sets the limit to how faint our guide star can be, so keeping it low is important.
| Pixel Rate (kHz) | Frame Rate (fps) | RON (e-) |
| 156 | 80 | 3.8 |
| 400 | 197 | 5.8 |
| 900 | 893 | 8.4 |
| 2500 | 1053 | 10.2 |
Note: these are determined using the actual gains from Scimeasure, rather than assuming 0.5. This can cause as much as an 8% difference.