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:
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.
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.
Olivier Guyon waves to his grad students at Arizona.
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:
I think she/he was heading over to the library ledge for sunset.
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.
A clear example of this phenomenon is when we had to roll our electronics rack out of the clean room so Nelson and Emilio could cut off a stripped 3/8-16 bolt. The Aluminium L-bracket you see there is part of the earthquake restraint system, which, as Amali pointed out last night, is always a thing here.A pano of the cleanroom when we were just getting started this morning. That’s Kyle checking on the DM humidity before turning it on.
So here’s the big moment when we finally knew that we didn’t f it all up:
And here you can see our vAPP coronagraphs looking good in a deep exposure:
vAPPs looking eXtreme. Laird wants you to know that there are no optical ghosts in the dark hole. Maybe the eye doctor has a little work to do though.Moonrise over the Andes on my hike up.Laird and Alex watching tonight’s sunset. Photo by Kyle, I’d already given up — obvious non-green-flash night. That’s our electronics shipping crate, btw.
Tonight’s song is “Wanted Dead or Alive”, by Bon Jovi:
MagAO-X is now at Las Campanas Observatory! The truck finally made it up the hill at about 3 pm, and we got all of our boxes safely off.
The truck appears!Approaching the saddle.Coming up the hill towards the cleanroom!This is an “air ride” truck. Look at all of our stuff!MagAO-X with ultimate destination in view.The big box coming off — I was pretty nervous during this step…
Things are pretty busy, with MagAO-C and now MagAO-X unpacking. There are lots more cool pictures, but not enough time to post them.
I spotted a viscacha hanging out on the ASB upper level.
I am bound by the blog rules to give you Brass Monkey, by The Beastie Boys.
Well we made it through customs, and are on a truck. We expect delivery of MagAO-X to LCO around 2 pm local time tomorrow afternoon.
Otherwise, it was all MagAO-C all the time.
I learned about the dome camera today. You can see Katie and Alex at the lower right, they’re working on Clio’s cables.A cuddly looking vizcacha. They are almost tame this year.If the drive goes smoothly tomorrow (which given recent luck, keep your fingers crossed), this is the last sunset at LCO without MagAO-X (for a while).
If you’ve ever been to an NBA game, you’ll recognize this song. If MagAO-X arrives safely, I plan to make Laird, Kyle, and Alex perform this dance to celebrate.
