Jared Males – Page 51 – Extreme Wavefront Control Lab

Unpacking Day 2

We kept at it on our 2nd day (our 1st full day). Today we unpacked the NAS, installed the guider in the NAS (for the first time), unpacked and tested our computers, and after dinner we unpacked and inspected the WFS. Some pix:

prepping_nas — Here we are about to lift the NAS out of its box, the whole team is making sure nothing goes wrong.

nas_down_to_cart — Lowering the NAS down onto its cart.

spacer_reinstall — The spacer ring goes back onto the NAS after the guider is installed.

juan_nas — Juan finishes tipping the NAS with the crane.

inspecting_wfs — Laird and Jared inspecting the WFS immediately after opening the shipping box. Everything looks good. Before anyone asks, yes the T/T mirror is still attached to its stage.

SAMSUNG — A rare view of the back of the WFS with no cables. CCD 39 at left, CCD 47 at right.

MagAO Arrives at Las Campanas: Unpacking Day 1

Today, for the first time, all of the MagAO system was on the same continent, and even in the same building. On top of that, after a 50 hour odyssey Laird, Victor, and Jared arrived at LCO to begin unpacking. MagAO is officially at Magellan! Here are some pictures from today.

Meanwhile, somewhere between Tucson and La Serena:

customs_victory — Victor and Jared pose after defeating Chilean customs with way too many parts of MagAO in our luggage.

And finally at the top of the mountain:

blasting — We witnessed a blast for the GMT.

backup_transport — Here we see the backup transport system, standing by outside our dorm rooms just in case.

clay_at_night — Our future home, the Clay Telescope, is the one at left opening at sunset.

venus — Venus over LCO. By the way, the stars are weird down here.

PI_dropntells — Laird celebrates the fact that none of the drop-n-tells tripped on the outer box. This means that the shell was handled very carefully on its trip from Italy.

Victor and Alan unbolting the top of the outer box.

askmelater — Jared expresses his opinion about something. Ask me later - it probably doesn't matter. Update 4 days later: it didn't matter.

tripped_5g — We only tripped 2 of 3 5g drop-n-tells on the inner box. This is a great sign that our delicate shell was treated well on its journey.

crano_ops — Here we're moving the inner box. Jared is operating the crane, and Laird is guiding the load.

victor_guides — Victor guides the inner box and its delicate contents down. The foam behind him was on top of the inner box.

At the end of our first day the inner box was safely stowed in the clean room, and we have started unpacking our electronics. A big first day.

Shipping Update: NAS on the Ground!

The NAS and all the W-unit and VisAO electronics landed in Chile early on Tuesday morning. The first part of MagAO has now arrived in Chile!

Our other big news is that the ASM – meaning the thin shell itself and the ‘unit’, which means the reference body and attached electronics – has left Arcetri and is on the way to the airport in Firenze. This process will take a few days for customs etc. The pictures below, courtesy of Armando Riccardi, show the final stages of packing the ASM and loading it on a truck.

small_box_crane_move — Our mirror is swinging through the air! This is the "small box", containing the 85cm wide by 1.5mm thick thin shell of our adaptive secondary mirror.

large_box_crane_truck — The "large box" being loaded on to the truck. The "small box", shown above, is packed inside this box. This system is carefully designed to protect our delicate mirror during the flight.

unit_wrapped — Here we see the reference body and electronics being readied for packing in their shipping box.

Cleared To Ship!

After our pre-ship review, we had a few things to fix – the only difficult one was a misbehaving actuator in the ASM. These have all been dealt with, and after a final review by the director we today received permission to ship the Magellan AO system to Chile.

LCO here we come!

Some packing pictures courtesy of Carmelo Arcidiacono:

Carmello_MeasuringBoxHeight_small — Carmelo measuring the height of the packing box, resourcefully with his inseam.

systemboxed — The W-Unit (WFS and VisAO Camera) in its wooden shipping crate. The gray crates behind contain the system electronics.

nascrane — The NAS being lowered into its shipping crate.

enrico — Time to put the lid on. How many Watts RMS?

The Shutter in Closed Loop Action

The Magellan AO VisAO camera includes a novel system for performing “frame selection”, which is the technique of using only periods of good seeing and/or AO correction in the final science image. Traditional “lucky imaging” does this by reading short exposures and selecting in post processing. In our system, we use measurements of Strehl ratio in real time and open and close the shutter based on those measurements. This video shows our shutter working with the AO loop closed in the Solar tower in Arcetri, Italy. It was taken during the week after our pre-ship review.

The Strehl time series is derived from our custom wavefront reconstructor (calculations are done on a GPU). During this testing the shutter decisions were based only on the most recent Strehl measurement, meaning that we did not use any predictive algorithms. Note the fleeting moments of a clear Airy pattern as the shutter finds the highest peaks in the Strehl ratio time series.

The real question is: does it do any good? We’re still analyzing all the data we took, but for now this demonstration is an important step showing that our telemetry and hardware systems can do real-time frame selection.