Author: Katie Morzinski

We got to open for a few hours tonight, when the winds were only 30 mph:

[Update at the end of the night]: Winds eventually came back down, and we got another 4 or 5 hours of science done. Hurray!

So instead of talking about the wind, let’s talk about our latest PhD*:
Vanessa Bailey, first discover-er of a new planet using MagAO, has successfully defended her PhD dissertation today in Arizona! Here is HD 106906 b discovered by Vanessa using Clio:

Since so many of her friends and colleagues around the world wanted to watch it, she and Amali Vaz set up remote streaming of the talk. Her dissertation is titled: “Adaptive Optics for Directly Imaging Planetary Systems”, and Jared and I woke up in the middle of the day to watch it:

And here’s the video:

It looks like there was much rejoicing in Tucson:

Quote:
Jared: That’s a lot of pictures of Vanessa, especially since she refuses to come on MagAO runs lately (even if she does help remotely).

Here’s the song of the day for Dr. Vanessa P. Bailey:

Cover:

Note that Vanessa is the 2nd graduate of Brookings High School, South Dakota to earn a PhD from the University of Arizona Department of Astronomy using (in part) MagAO images of exoplanets. Article from the Brookings Register:

*Pending submitting her revisions 🙂

OK, I’ve had enough winter. Look at all these clouds!

And the winds, and still the clouds!

So we didn’t even open tonight, at all, ever.

Well, at least that meant it was a good time to fix Clio. So I’ve been aligning the camera by hand lately, but not anymore!

Here was us last week… Pato Pinto helped us by soldering a jumper to bypass the broken motor so that we could move the other ones with the gui from the warmth of the control room, and only had to go out to the platform to move the field stop:

Thanks to Jenny Greene who delivered the necessary tools to us today, Jared and I went out to the cold platform tonight to tear into Clio once more. We replaced the broken motor controller with a working one, including setting up the dip switches and adding thermal paste:

Before and after:

So … now it works!

Good night!

Song of the day:

Taylor Swift liked this song so much she did 2 covers — here’s a few people who followed suit:

Today was T.J.’s first night, which means the start of good solid breaks for Jared and me. It was pretty cloudy which made for a quiet night with no disturbances:

Since it was my first break in a long time, my brain was mainly up for a lot of youtubing of Namibian folk songs. If you are also spending your weekend waiting for the clouds to clear, enjoy this long playlist of beautiful music from Namibia:

First song of the day:
!Nosa !Oes Ge Nesa /translated “It’s a quiet night there are no disturbances”

Cover:

(Also stick around for the fun song “Sponono” at the end, I love that one!)

The person who posted this to Youtube claims it is also called Sponono, but it’s not the one (above) that I know as Sponono. It’s still a nice one. Perhaps our Nama-speaking readers can help us with the title of this one:

Third song of the day:
Tuaza Kokure

No covers to be found, and I listed long and hard — I love this one. The second song in the Tuaza Kokure video is a cover for the…

…Fourth song of the day:
Dumelang ma Africa

Fifth song of the day:
Tate Wetu

Update: Covers are required if they can be found:

Sixth song of the day:

I don’t remember how to spell the title so I couldn’t find a cover — but I love this one.

Seventh song of the day:
Sipiri

Cover according to the 2015A Blog Rules:

Final song of the day — also no covers:
#Nabara #Na

A beautiful peaceful one to end on. Love the language and the singing. Good night!

Tonight went smoothly… for 2015A. We were doing some of the MagAO Key Project which are the types of observations the system is optimized for, including pointing mostly South out of the wind, and taking deep high-contrast imaging data. Still a bit of weather… but overall quite a calm smooth night in the control room. Mauricio made sure we had chocolate cake with our plates of dinner for our midnight lunch and the telescope stayed pointing, Jared made sure the loop kept closed and VisAO kept running, and I made sure Clio saved all the right photons in all the right places.

The song of the day:

The cover of the day:

Remember Jared’s Trouble post from a few days ago? He offered a free MagAO sticker to the first person to email what was wrong with Fig. 1. We got a few submissions that noticed the repaired fiber cable — actually that was from a couple years ago — read Marco’s hilarious post about how we repaired it in a garlic-powered session. But no, the problem this time was the LC4 fiber connection was not communicating. Well, have no fear, MagAO’s favorite sister Anna saves the day. Not only did she email us to identify the problem, but she fixed it too! Now that is some initiative right there! A true engineer! Thanks Anna!!!

Related to Anna’s fix, Jared decided it was a good day to tear apart the computer that supervises all the processes going back and forth to the adaptive secondary:

He took out some RAM — apparently there were a few too many GOATS causing the Trouble — and tonight we had a much more stable AO loop!!

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LCO, sometimes you make me feel like I’m the only girl in the world.

As Rihanna says:

And LCO says back:

I was not expecting the majority of the top Youtube hits to be men/boys rather than women/girls covering this song… huh. Well, OK, Daughtry, when are you going to cover this?