Jared Males – Page 9 – Extreme Wavefront Control Lab

MagAO-X 2019B Unpacking Day 12: Traditions

It’s an old MagAO tradition to take selfies for our moms in the mirror that gets you around the bend at the summit. Long story, but it’s also tradition for it to be poop covered unless Alan is here.

don't look back. that is not the way we are going. [Lothbrok, sometime in the past] — The Andes watching the sunset behind me.

Tonight’s song is “I miss the misery” by Halestorm. Since the casual reader of this blog hasn’t signed up for Lizzy Hale with the power on, here’s a “subdued” version of it:

And here’s the knob-at-11 version:

Also, the block editor in WP needs to die.

MagAO-X 2019B Unpacking Day 11: These Kids Can Ball

In the gym today I noticed a bunch of new trophies. Check it out:

This is the clearly the best observatory.

These guys agree:

not absent — And they liked the weather today

but why? — As you can tell, the winds were below 20.

I missed the sunset, but came out of the cleanroom in time to catch this:

Today’s song is Miley Cyrus’s version of Jolene (the Backyard Sessions one).

MagAO-X 2019B Unpacking Day 10: On The Correlation Between Viscachas and Windspeed

As Joseph reported yesterday, we couldn’t find any sign of our viscacha friends and we suspected it was due to the high winds and colder temperatures. Today I was able to gather more evidence. A correlation is seen between the local density of viscachas and the wind speed at their location. The following plot illustrates:

clear as day — A viscacha was present at the cleanroom when I arrived shortly after breakfast. Upon my departure for lunch, no viscachas were found. (times are UTC)

We establish a working threshold of 20 mph for vischacha absence. The nature of this transition is unknown.

It may be necessary to capture one for tests. But if they hold back the wind, this may be problematic. — The vischacha hoping for a calm day. The direction of causality between vischacha absence and high winds has yet to be established. Further study is needed.

It wasn’t all science today. We also fixed some calibration issues with our new setup in the LCO cleanroom. This took some remote help from our real-time software guru.

but it could be a simulation — Olivier Guyon waves to his grad students at Arizona.

Today’s song is “You Could Be Mine” by GNR.

MagAO-X 2019B Unpacking Day 6: Keeping The Loop Closed

Well I forgot to take many pictures today, and I forgot to motivate someone else to write the blog.

We got lots of work done today. Laird and Alex tested the alignment laser system. Kyle perfected a big part of our offloading system (where we send commands to the telescope from when our AO system needs help), and I got some closed-loop testing done. We also all worked on some conference abstracts that are due, and NSF proposals got some attention too.

Here’s a picture of a clean room viscacha:

you can always count on viz — I think she/he was heading over to the library ledge for sunset.

Here’s What is Love by Haddaway:

MagAO-X 2019B Unpacking Day 4: Survival

MagAO-X is alive! After being boxed up, shipped from Tucson to Phoenix to LA (we think — a little fuzzy) to Miami, with a long pause, then to Santiago, braving the dangers of revolution (and customs (and customs strikes!)), and a trip by truck (always touchy, this time with road blocks!), and finally being craned out of its box and carefully reconstituted, we can still close the loop.

Needless to say we are happy, a little bit relieved, and excited to get our new instrument on the Magellan Clay Telescope.

Of course, it doesn’t always go exactly as planned. As the Captain said, “It never goes smooth. How come it never goes smooth?”