Author: Katie Morzinski
2016A Day 6: Samoa Pyramids
Tonight we noticed that our pyramid pupils look like Samoa(R) Girl Scout (R) cookies that Laird brought on behalf of his daughter:
We started the night with some ASM issues that prompted us to send up the bat-signal to our Italian colleagues:
Walking down the hill this morning, we saw fog in the valley and a hawk practicing hunting vizcachas:
Even if we don’t have specific song rules, yesterday’s song made me think of this one, which is amazing:
2016A Day 3: Loop is closed
Today was a 7am breakfast to 7am dawn kind of day. Mario Matteo and his team finished their M2FS run with some calibrations, Juan and the crew pulled M2FS and the f/11, Juan et al. installed our NAS and ASM, we cabled the ASM and NAS, and finally we went on sky, closed the loop, Povilas et al. tested the guider, and we tried out the eyepiece as well as VisAO extragalactic observations. It was a very good, very long day!
Here are Pato and the crew helping Laird and I cable the ASM — it involves laying cables in the tray along the spider — you can see it in the Clio pupil images, this spider is a bit thicker with all the electronics, communications, and cooling lines we have to run to our ASM:
The new VisAO field stop designed by UA/MagAO grad student Ya-Lin Wu has been deployed:
And here we are doing some extragalactic AO at 4am in the control room:
Song of the day:
2016A Day 2: Clio’s so cool
I feel so much better after getting 8 hours of sleep in a bed! That red-eye is brutal. But now I’ve had a full day of good food after good sleep, Clio is chilling, and things are good. Today…
…I cooled Clio with Victor’s help:
…Jared and Laird worked on the NAS and Laird moved the ASM:
…Truly Nolen killed all the things:
…Jared plugged in the radios because now that we are here he has someone to talk to:
I’m really into this song:
2015B Summary
We made it back home! The strike ended the day we flew out so we didn’t end up riding the bus from La Serena to Santiago, but thanks to Nelda for arranging that so that we were sure to get there either way. And thanks to Juan Gallardo and the rest of the crew for their careful work removing the ASM and the Nas from the Clay in 1 day so that we could get home in time for the holidays! After 32 hours of travel and 4 airplanes, 2 buses, 5 taxis, and 1 tram, we are happy to be safe and sound in Tucson. And here’s what I got to enjoy after jump-starting my car, eating, showering, and napping:
We had 25 nights of MagAO+VisAO+Clio and 3 nights of MagAO+VisAO+PhaseCam. It was a good run for the 25 MagAO+VisAO+Clio nights which involved planets, disks, and other exciting science; and fun for us to see a new instrument mounted behind MagAO and playing well with VisAO for the 3 nights testing the GMT AGWS prototype PhaseCam. Amali Vaz and Kim Ward-Duong came from Arizona and ASU to help out, and we had observers from Arizona, Carnegie, Chile, Harvard, Michigan, and Stanford.
A lot happened this run! Amali won the first MagAO blog prize; Our paper by Sallum, Follette, et al. on the discovery of hydrogen accretion onto proto-planet LkCa 15 b was published; Our paper Morzinski et al. on the first empirical measurement of the energy of young super-Jupiter beta Pic b went from accepted to proofs to published; MagAO results were featured on the home page of the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute; Jared’s new collaborators came for a visit (more on that later); and we managed to stay happy and healthy thanks to the great staff at LCO and El Pino!
For the song of the day, we started with You’ll Never Leave Harlan Alive:
and ended with Pequeña serenata nocturna de Mozart, primer movimiento (Allegro):
Thanks to all our great bloggers this run for playing the song-of-the-day game!
And finally, thanks to NSF, NASA, NExScI Sagan, and UA for supporting our instrument and work, and all our family and friends at home who help take care of our Tucson-side lives while we are away for 5+ weeks at a time. Happy holidays and best wishes for 2016.