Katie Morzinski – Page 10 – Extreme Wavefront Control Lab

MagAO 2018A Blog Rules

Hello MagAO fans! We’re back with the 2018A run. My trip started out with a swim workout in honor of the flag of Chile:

Thanks guys! — Master’s swimming gave me a great send-off workout this morning.
[Image description: Collage: An 8-lane, 25-yard “short course” competition swimming pool with a swimmer and coach getting ready to start the workout. Below it, a swim coach standing by her workout, which is written on a white board, and the white board is standing up against a deck chair.]

Viva la piscina — Chilean Flag Workout. I got off to a good start with the blue sky with white star for unity, and swam hard in the white snow of Andes, but I only made it partway through the red bloodshed for freedom before the hour was up and it was time to get going to the airport. It was a great swim and I learned about Chile’s flag!
[Image description: A close-up of the white board with the workout on it. The workout has 3 phases, first a pre-set with fins, then the first part of the main set is a ladder on fairly fast intervals, then the body of the main set is a sequence of 50s and 100s on varying intervals. The 3 phases of the workout are drawn as the 3 main colors in the flag of Chile. And the meaning of the Chilean flag colors are written in between the sets.]

Chilean flag research and workout development and presentation by Coach Janna at Ventana Master’s Swimming 🙂

I hope — A lovely day for a swim and then a 27-hour journey from Tucson to LCO.
[Image description: Another view of the competition pool, with the starting blocks in the foreground and the Catalina mountains in the background. A swimmer is swimming, the coach is engaging with the camera, and another swimmer is resting.]

Now the MagAO team is in various stages of travel. Time for the blog rules for 2018A.

There must be a post every day
Each daily post must include a song of the day
As well as the original song of the day, a cover version must be posted

[Song/Image description: The Chilean national anthem, with lyrics in Spanish and English written on the screen, and the Chilean flag in the background]

[Song/Image description: A pianist covers the Chilean national anthem]

2017B Day 14: Not the last blog post

Laird’s blog post yesterday was the last blog post, he said. But today was the day we departed LCO, so usually today is the last blog post. However, he also numbered it Day 15 but the previous day was Day 13. We’ll chalk that up to switching from a night schedule to a day schedule over the course of 6 hours (whereas I took a leisurely 30 hours to switch over… meaning I am still napping during the day, up during the night, and not really sure when the Sun is up or down). So anyway, here’s a blog post on our last day, but it is not the last blog post — that was Day 15. Got it?

Not the last sunset at the Owlery:

Expecto Patronum — Hedwig’s perch at the Owlery

Not the last “wildlife” sighting:

Not the last hike:

AO4ELT — Katie, Jared, and Laird on the hike

Not the last copper mine:

No petroglyphs though — Vein of copper we saw on the hike

Not the last forest:

Not the last trash heap:

One's trash is another's treasure — Start at the trash heap, hike down from there … next time we’ll find the petroglyphs

Not the last breakfast:

Not the last Andes:

Just before the big turbulence — The Andes in winter from a plane

Not the last LATAM club:

On the way home — Jared and Laird (and I) enjoy the LATAM club before our next flight

Not the last song of the day:

2017B Day 12: Arcseconds Chocolates Owls Earthquakes

A blog post mostly in pictures.

From yesterday:

Beware the EARTHQUAKE STAR — Dave shows Alycia and me how to find the local Chilean site for earthquakes that are too small for the USGS earthquake mapper. Foreground: Dos Huevos Fritos y Jugo de Frez. Bottom: Two earthquakes, two nights apart, at different solar and sidereal times… both caused when we locked on the same star.

Tonight was the last MagAO night of 2017B. The night was split between Matias Diaz observing for Blake Pantoja, and Amelia Bayo with her student Daniela Grandon. Mauricio Martinez brought us a giant chocolate bar as a welcome to the Turno and the End of Run gift. Thanks Mauricio! It was great working with him, Matias, Amelia, and Daniela tonight. Even though there were some thin clouds, we were doing mostly astrometry and the seeing was good, so it was a great last night!

Thanks Mauricio! — Daniela (left) and Amelia (right) smile as they operate Clio. Notice the giant Toblerone bar on the shelf above them. Below: The contents of the giant Toblerone bar.

When Amelia Bayo first got here, I was reading a paper about the Virtual Observatory by A. Bayo. So I asked her, “Are you A. Bayo?” (At first my English-accent ears heard her name as “Emilia”, but I knew “Bayo” was on the telescope schedule for tonight.) And she is! So it was great, because while I gave her a little tutorial on running Clio, she gave me a little tutorial on using the Virtual Observatory! 🙂

We were so happy that Hedwig came back tonight:

Steely eyes. — Hedwig surveys her territory.

Mira como bailo el pajaro! — Hedwig does a little dance on the all-sky cam.

And also tonight finally started to look like a Magellan night! — This plot is for Alycia to show her that the Clay seeing tracked the Baade seeing pretty well tonight, even with our non-flat ASM it its best attempt at open-loop flat.

It's a Trap. — We looked at Theta1 Ori B again. This image is to save on the blog so I can find it next time we do Trapezium for astrometric calibration. It is the guider image to help us lock on the right star,
“B”.

The End — End of night. End of run. Top: I came here to collect data… on owls. Middle: Clay at the end. Bottom: A full parking lot to remove MagAO from Clay.

Miz Viz — Jhen got this great picture of a Wild Vizcacha this afternoon. It was great having her help on this run. She goes back today. Thanks Jhen!

Loop is open.

Dome is closed.

End of night.

End of run.

This is the best — extremely accurate, educational, and fun!

If someone reads this before I wake up and has some spare time and doesn’t mind going down to the basement, would you please turn off the Clio pump? Thanks!

Update by Jared: If someone reads this after waking up, I went down into the bowels of Clay, into the deep dark tunnel, and I think I turned the pump off. But while I was bent over the pump, the door slammed behind me. It was probably gravity, but I didn’t take any chances and just ran for it. I’m not going back down there to check, so we’ll just have to see if the pump is off next time we come back.

2017B Day 3: So cold even Clio is trying to get warm

Kate and her student Clare arrived safely today. Their first night is tomorrow night but tonight they helped with trouble-shooting and ran VisAO.

At the end of last night, I was thinking, “Well, that went pretty smoothly, we got on-sky so fast, tonight we’ll finish our engineering early.” Hah.

Today Juan woke Laird up in the afternoon to come help with the ASM cooling pump, which the crew had to replace because when we powered it up yesterday, it was making strange sounds and on its last legs. But getting the new pump working with the proper pressure was not easy, and it took Juan, Laird, and the crew until a couple hours after supper.

Then we went on sky and closed the loop again. But the rotator stuck again as it had yesterday, so we finally decided we had to drag Pato and Felipe out of bed to come trouble-shoot that issue as their work during the day hadn’t yet solved the problem. They were able to fix it… and even said they suspected we would have to call them at night, since they knew that hadn’t been able to reproduce the problem during the day.

Laird, Jared, and Kate spent a couple hours getting the new SDI+ mode to work with the proper offsets and with the rotator to successfully place the star on the VisAO detector.

Meanwhile, about this time I noticed that Clio had warmed up from 54 K to about 67 K. Pretty alarming. So I went out on to the platform to investigate, and noticed the cork was missing. I surmised it had popped off while the instrument was upside down for the rotator tests, about an hour earlier. Oops. So I got out a spare cork (thanks Manny!) and popped it in, and came in and checked the temperature… good, it was dropping! Kate and Clare accompanied me down to the loud scary pump room to make sure the Clio pump itself was ok (since it was pumping on dome air for an hour or so) and it seemed fine.

Lost: one rubber cork. If found, please return to: 933 N. Cherry Ave., C/O Katie — The new cork at the end of the hose (upper right) for the vacuum pump that lowers the pressure to bring the 77 K liquid nitrogen down to 55 K solid nitrogen

But then I noticed, an hour or so later, Clio was warming up again. Again I checked on the pump (Clare kept me company again), but it seemed fine still. And everything on the platform looked ok. So I surmised that we must have dumped a lot of nitrogen in the initial instrument flip during the rotator trouble-shooting, so Jared came out with me to fill Clio with LN in the middle of the night. Then I put the vacuum pump back on and monitored the temperatures again… lo and behold now the detector temperature was dropping nicely!

But I haven't figured out what that little temperature drop is between when the cork popped out and I think all is well — Temperature vs. time for the Clio optics and detector (in K), as well as the heater level (in percentage), since yesterday. X-axis is in hours.

Clare and I were talking about swimming today. Here’s the 2012 US Olympic swimmers, I love this video:

2017B Day 2: On Sky!

In a new world record, the crew installed the ASM, the Nas, and Clio all in one day. After dinner we finished connecting and cabling everything. We went on sky and closed the loop around midnight. Clio is still getting down to a cool 55 K (-218* C or -360* F). It started out at 287 K (14* C or 57* F) and it was a long cold day for me yesterday:

From 57*F to -360*F — Cooling down Clio. I am acclimated to temperatures like the 38* C (101* F) in Tucson yesterday, so I was wearing all of my wool and down to try to stay warm as I spent the day in a 56* F (14* C) room with a 77 K liquid.

Laird worked all day today with the crew, with Jared and I joining later so that we could sleep a bit during the day to be up all night. Pato Jones helped Jared and Laird cable the Nas, turn on the guider, and balance the rotator:

A picture of Pato before he has the last of his wisdom surgically removed — Here Pato and Jared are during cabling of the Nas. Good thing Pato is wearing his hard hat.

We had some trouble shooting to do after getting on sky and closing the loop. This included the Clio motors, nodding, rotating, and at the end of the night the ASM was complaining because it was too cold, so we were trying to let it warm up. We also had problems with X11 windows being too slow on one of the default computers in the Clay control room “Guanaco”, so we switched to a computer of our own:

Where's Jared's head? I can't see it — Jared at the new AO work station with high-speed X forwarding. Meanwhile, Hernan edits the night report to notify the day crew of the rotator issues.

With the loop closed and before I tried to change any filters, I managed to measure the focus position in one Clio filter, 3.3um:

BAYSIDEZ=34.5mm — Closed loop image of a bright star at 3.3um with Clio, and a good focus curve

Well, we’re happy to have gotten on-sky in the fastest time ever, so we will leave it at that and head down to a delicious LCO breakfast:

Dos juevos fritos por favor — Breakfast at LCO: Fresh squeezed orange juice, strong tea with heated milk, oatmeal with heated milk, and two fried eggs with avocado