Home of MagAO and MagAO-X.
It was a 3-Sagan day:
We’ve had lots of good food this week:
And tonight at dinner Hector asked us why we hadn’t asked for empanadas in our night-lunch forms — well, we had forgotten it was Sunday! He sent up plenty of empanadas anyway — he takes good care of us! And Alexis made potato chips — what a treat!
We’re doing OK:
Like the groundhog, 2 vizcachas decided to appear today — I guess that means we have 6 more weeks of summer (? since we’re in the southern hemisphere). Actually, it meant that we had a nice welcome to our first night on the telescope in 2017.
We started with some guider engineering, then went on to VisAO engineering. (Clio isn’t mounted yet, but I’m monitoring its temperatures and bias voltage, etc.)
It’s like deja vu all over again… Trapezium! An oft-repeated target.
Alexis is a chef who joined the LCO staff in the past year. He is the one who has been carving the wonderful salad animals. Today he made this amazing ship!
The twisters in yesterday’s song of the day made me think of this song from the Twister soundtrack:
The 2017A MagAO team made it to LCO! It’s beautiful here on the mountain. Hector cooked us a delicious dinner of fish, potatoes, soup, salad, and pudding. I checked on Clio’s vacuum (which Victor started for me on Sunday) and it’s at $10^{-6}$ so it’s looking good to start liquid nitrogen cooling first thing tomorrow morning. Time to catch up on some zzz’s!
Ya-Lin is in the old-but-refurbished “astronomer” dorms. Laird, Jared, and I are in the newer-but-very-far-away dorms with limited wi-fi. These are the dorms that forced Jared to pick the infamous “Dee-ner Dee-ner Dee-ner” song as the song-of-the-day once due to very weak wi-fi. (The difference today is my laptop is doing OK finding a signal but not my phone.) I put my phone outside on the retaining wall because it sees a very small wi-fi signal outside — I’m hoping it will upload the photos I took today to Dropbox so I can download them onto my laptop so I can post them for you in this blog post! So far… so bad. š
Maybe you can imagine the pictures. One is a picture of Jared at the Santiago airport Starbucks (the old one, just around the corner from the new one) with his coffee that says something kind of close to his name on it. Then I took a few pictures of the flowers, ocean, and pine tree at El Pino where we waited for 3 hours in La Serena for the transport up the mountain. Finally, I tried a couple pix of the sunset tonight — very red through a thick haze on the horizon, which is pretty unusual — we’ll see if they turned out.
Well, while we’re waiting for that, here is the song of the day, which is related to yesterday’s song as per the rules:
The MagAO team has made it to Tucson in time for Thanksgiving! And the Gemini Planet Imager team travels seem to be going well too — We ran into Jenny Patience, Julien Rameau, and Ben Gerard of GPIES at the La Serena airport, who were just coming off a 6-night GPI run. Our La Serena-Santiago flight on LAN was delayed by about an hour and a half, but Jenny made her on-time SKY flight, and Julien was staying an extra night in Santiago. Laird, Jared, Ben, and I met up with about 3 others who were all headed to the Santiago-Dallas flight, which at that point was a very tight connection. LAN staff met us as we deplaned in Santiago and had us all wait until we were all together — they they escorted us through the airport. We thought they would escort us to the front of the security line or something — but they just deposited us at the back of the line, saving us no time, and having made the people who got off the plane first wait for those of us who got off the plane last. Jared, Laird, and I barely made the Dallas flight, but LAN didn’t actually have the plane wait for us or do anything to help speed us through the airport. Update: Ben made it on the LAX flight, good! Well, I’m writing this post with the benefit of airport wi-fi which works better than the wi-fi in Jared’s room, so I can include lots of pictures and a more melodious song of the day as we say goodbye to LCO for 2016:
Quote of the day:
“I’m afraid this is the beginning of a very dark time for us all.” –Laird, panicking that we might miss our flight the day before Thanksgiving.
Song of the day (a bit more melodic than Jared’s pick yesterday:)
We went from 2000 Hz to 0 in 1 day: The ASM, the NAS, and Clio all came off the telescope today. That was it; then it was bedtime. Thanks to the technical crew for their hard work getting the Clay switched over in 1 day, and to the humanitarian crew for the delicious dinner and clean bedrooms that awaited us!!
