Author: Katie Morzinski

MagAO 2018A Day 0: Cool Clio Code

Well I’m here. My trip ended up being 27 hours and it was great to get here and sleep and wake up to a delicious telescope breakfast:

Strong tea, dos juevos fritos, oatmeal, fresh squeezed strawberry juice, and 2 major astronomical telescopes closed up to sleep for the day.
[Image description: Photo of 2 telescope domes on the top of the mountain, with a breakfast chair and some half-drinken tea and juice in the foreground]

I found this fine literature in the desk drawer in my room, left from a previous inhabitant:

Literature in my room (not left by me).
[Image description: The fine literature includes The Economist, Physics Today, and an ApJ paper by the author]

Today we worked hard on cooling and code. Clio code, AO code, DigiPort code. The mountain internet was down for about 4 hours. Laird arrived safely and the mystery guest got stranded in Santiago and will be here hopefully tomorrow.

Code and Clio cooldown day
[Image description: A collage of Jared working on AO code, Paul Skyping with Katie on Clio code, Jared and Laird by the NAS, and Katie with Clio]

I did manage to get Clio down to almost 77 K in one day! Clio drank his liquid nitrogen very well today.

The blue line is the outer dewar that I started filling first, at 10am. The red line is the inner dewar, that I started filling after lunch, when the outer dewar got below 150 K.
[Image description: A line plot with a red and a blue curve, showing the temperature dropping. The x axis is time in minutes and the y axis is temperature in Kelvin. Both dewars start flat at the ambient temperature, around 295 K. The curves drop exponentially, but the outer dewar drops at a faster rate than the inner dewar. There is a point of inflection in the inner dewar curve, at the point where the outer dewar got below 150 K. This is where I started filling the inner dewar too; before that it was only cooling passively. Both curves asymptote to around the temperature of liquid nitrogen, 77 K.]

And here’s the Clio cooldown plot in “XKCD” style. You don’t even have to import anything, it’s already included in matplotlib, it’s just one extra line: “plt.xkcd()”.
[Image description: The same line plot as above, only I decided to put the x-axis in hours, and I used the “XKCD” style in MatPlotLib so that it looks like my plot was hand-drawn by Randall Munroe]

And we saw a herd of 5 guanacos running along the hillside as we were heading back up after lunch:

Herd of guanacos
[Image description: Guanacos on a hillside in Chile. They are kind of like llamas. They are pretty far away in the picture.]

Today’s song:

[Song/image description: “Come” by Jain]


[Song/image description: cover of “Come” by Esteban and Laura]

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:

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.]

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 🙂

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.

  1. There must be a post every day
  2. Each daily post must include a song of the day
  3. 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:

Hedwig’s perch at the Owlery

Not the last “wildlife” sighting:

Burros – and is that a horse?

Not the last hike:

Katie, Jared, and Laird on the hike

Not the last copper mine:

Vein of copper we saw on the hike

Not the last forest:

Forest on the hike

Not the last trash heap:

Start at the trash heap, hike down from there … next time we’ll find the petroglyphs

Not the last breakfast:

Goodbye breakfast

Not the last Andes:

The Andes in winter from a plane

Not the last LATAM club:

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:

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!

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:

Hedwig surveys her territory.
Hedwig does a little dance on the all-sky cam.
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.
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”.
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.
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.

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!

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: