Author: Katie Morzinski

Last night we lost ~5 hours to the X-stage problem. Tonight we lost about an hour (of perfect weather and amazing seeing) due to the BCUs locking up and the shell doing that thing where it panics. Yet we still squeezed in some good data for our own projects. Was Vanessa Bailey here? She has the distinction of doing the most with the least bit of MagAO, as far as I can recall. On two separate occasions she had a half night with MagAO and lost most of her time due to instrument problems. Once it was the “wait for AO” problem that took us about 3/4 of her half-night to diagnose, and once — was it the Clio motor failure? They’re all starting to blur together… …yet she still managed to get data on her top targets in just 1 hour and discover a planet with some of her bare-minimum MagAO time. Well, now she’s graduated and moved on to GPI, but MagAO still misses her, and tries to bring some of that Vanessa essence back to the telescope…

MagAO is happiest when it has the most photons. It must be all that radiation pressure that keeps the mirror flat…right? When we opened the loop for the last time tonight, we were looking at the 2nd brightest star in the sky. Here’s the nice flat wavefront on the pyramid pupils:

Um, well I am not a fan of the noise and shouting in yesterday’s song of the day… All I can think of is another song with shouting… and also Shakira!:

Jackie and the DTM Tweeps have been putting up signs about Tweeting #LifeAtLCO.

We are closed due to crappy clouds here at Magellan. So we had a little coffee party and chatted. #lifeatlco pic.twitter.com/0sc08dAcMU

— Jackie Faherty (@jfaherty) November 24, 2015

MagAO doesn’t Tweet (yet) [“Loop is open. Shell RIP. #LifeAtLCO”] but today it’s time for a lifestyle post:

And with TJ here to run all 3 cameras at once, Jared and I get a nice break #LifeAtLCO

Yesterday’s song was from Maverick. Here is the Maverick choir singing Amazing Grace. It’s pretty swinging and there are a lot of great singers in there. Enjoy!

Well, we hope you enjoyed yesterday’s blog post as much as we did! Amali’s clever and amusing artistry prompted us to develop the first-ever MagAO blog prize, and a new category of Award Winning Posts (at right). Here we present the 2015B MagAO Blog Award to Amali Vaz for her creation entitled A Post That Cannot Words:

Well, we did have a bit of excitement, with the ship trying to give out on us, but Jared is not one to give up the ship, so he got to work on his RAID-1 array and the AO supervisor computer was none the wiser:

And we opened at sunset and had a good night for TJ:

Mr. Psy Boone Bean worked out an issue with some J-band image elongation we had at the start of the night, which was related to aligning the camera, and not homing the camera lens:

And we had a great night of good seeing and beautiful PSFs. Amali is on the next transport out of here — thanks for keeping the loop happy and the blog amusing! Safe travels and see you in Tucson!

For some reason, Men At Work singing about Down Under reminds me of Toto singing of Africa:

We give thanks for the stars coming out and the wind dropping down a bit, enough to get Trapezium in the North:

And my first Thanksgiving dinner was a few weeks ago when my folks were visiting:

Thankful astronomers:

I really hope all those papi’s let JLo go:

Well another night like last night. Amali got here today and she started up AO and also learned how to operate Clio. And then we sat here like this:

And this:

Sadly this means we didn’t get much of our engineering done. Oh El Nino…

Another song dancing in the streets: This one to cheer you up after seeing all those clouds and high winds: