Author: Katie Morzinski

2015A Day 13: Happy Mother’s Day!

To the Various Mothers!

Tonight started out cloudy and we had some difficult times.

So here are some pictures for our various mothers:

Laird and Jared at El Pino, on our way up here
Here was Jared searching through the cabinet for a spare motherboard last week
Moon rise last week
Last week we had a bird in the clean room… here it is in the vestibule as we were trying to chase it out. Later, Juan and Nelson patched up the hole and no more birds got in the clean room.

There was a big rain storm in northern Chile in March. The grass is green and growing on this typically brown mountain. Here are Yuri Beletsky’s beautiful photos:

LCO Green 1 by Yuri Beletsky

LCO Green 2 by Yuri Beletsky

And my photo:

The Baade telescope with rye grass growing along the path, and a river eroded into the path too

Quotes from last week:
Asking the observer on Baade about her night:
“How was your night?” -Katie
“Good, but we lost two hours to a FIRE issue.” -Gwen
“A fire issue?!?!?” -Katie
“Not fire, FIRE — Folded-port InfraRed Echellette!” -Gwen

Our new rain protocol is to put the moon screen at 82% to cover the shell:
“So that’s waterproof?” -Laird
“Well it’s the most waterproof spot…” -Povilas
“Actually Clio’s probably quite water proof. It would probably float.” -Laird

Night lunches:
“They wanted to know if we wanted empanadas… I think I just ordered us 14 sandwiches and ALL of the empanadas they currently have…” -Jared

Vizzy
Vizzies

This song has been on the blog before but it’s a really wonderful song and perfect for today:

The performance that made it popular:

The original writers:

Beautiful:

Powerful:

We think the moms will like this one:

The hipster version — Farmdale: country before it was cool:

2015A Day 11: Pretty Hurts

The word of the day is windy. Tonight was so windy we could barely open. From the night report by TO Mauricio Martinez:
3.- 23:40 UT High winds for MagAO, Closed. /MMa
4.- 01:56 UT Opened. /MMa
5.- 02:18 UT High winds for MagAO, Closed. /MMa
6.- 03:59 UT Opened, SH Conemode enabled, with better sky condition, better EL SH performed better. /MMa
7.- 06:08 UT High winds for MagAO, Closed. /MMa

And what does that look like?

5am High Winds Clay

We kept trying to peek through the wind anyway:

Here you can see all the “sucker troughs” that kept us awake and hopeful throughout the night

Well after all the work last week and this week to travel here, tear Clio apart, put Clio back together again — we finally have some pretty images on Clio. This is the new Brackett Gamma filter:

Our new Brackett Gamma filter has a nice 74-mas PSF and no obvious inherent filter ghosts. It’s pretty, but it sure hurt with sleeplessness to get it that pretty!

And some pretty plots of the pumpdown and cooldown last week:

Clio pump down — Minutes vs. pressure on 3 places on the pump — the final steep drop in pressure is when I started cooling.

Clio cool down — Minutes vs. inner and outer dewar temperature.

But it takes a lot of work to get Clio that pretty, and it takes its toll:

Pretty Hurts: A representative picture.

I’ve been this sleepy too:

Jared, Sebastien, Matt, Mauricio… and the representative clean room bird.

Meanwhile, Laird attached more Arizona gear to the Nas before he left today:

Laird is licensed to drive MagAO.

Beyonce knows how it is:

As do Chloe and Halle:

2015A Day 4: Almost our turn on Clay

Laird and I buttoned up Clio and Gabriel and I started pumping it down.

Jared finished tuning the new X motor and installed it:

Jared holds the old X-motor and points at the newly installed new, bigger & better X motor.

And Laird and Jared are testing the motors in the NAS:

Here are Laird and Jared testing the motors in the NAS.

Johanna Teske is observing on Clay/MIKE tonight — see her blog post at Las Campanas Belles. It’s our turn, starting tomorrow night.

Johanna Teske (UA PhD 2014) is observing on Clay tonight, with TO Hugo Rivera.

Quote of the day:
“I know what they’re saying, but I don’t actually understand the words. Mainly because I don’t speak Spanish.” –Laird, after the meeting to walk through the procedure for mounting the ASM (our adaptive secondary mirror) and NAS (our Nasmyth ring with VisAO and the AO system inside it and Clio outside it), which will happen tomorrow. The meeting was in Spanish (although the written procedure is in English, which Juan Gallardo was projecting on the screen for those of us who don’t speak Spanish).

Well I’m doing this a bit backwards, but this is the song of the day:

which is a cover of the following 3 songs:


2015A Day 3: Boom Clap Clio

Ah Las Campanas The Bells. And here are the Belles of Las Campanas:

The Belles of Las Campanas, today. 🙂 Gwen Rudie, Jackie Faherty, Johanna Teske, Katie Morzinski

Our friends Jackie Faherty and Johanna Teske are observing on Clay tonight. We got to give them some various tours and they documented it on Twitter — follow the links of their names for their MagAO Tweets!

Long successful day. We finished all the Clio things. Thanks to all our support on email and Skype! Tomorrow we button Clio up and pump it down. Today involved a lot of good hard work by Laird, Jared, Manny, Juan, me… We inserted the new Brackett Gamma filter, removed some thermal mass from various parts of Clio, fit the APPs in, and documented lots of things. Here we go!

The filter wheels — we inserted the Br Gamma filter through the port (left), and put the blank in the open side in the wheel on the right.
The new vector-apodizing phase plates (right) in the pupil wheel (left).

My animal sighting was a pack of mules, at lunchtime and after supper:

A herd of burros! They don’t seem to like the car, or the cell phone camera.
I see you!
Our first blogged full sunset of 2015A!

And this song…

…so we can hear the cover:

Multiwavelength Observations of NaSt1 (WR 122): Equatorial Mass Loss and X-rays from an Interacting Wolf-Rayet Binary

Upper panels: MagAO Ks , L’ , and M’ images of NaSt1 in false color. The images are 2.7 arcsec square in angular size and oriented in detector coordinates. Lower panels: the Ks-band image of NaSt1 with logarithmic intensity contours (left) and the HST [N II] narrowband image with the Ks contours overlaid (right). An ellipsoid of extended Ks emission is clearly resolved, and is approximately aligned with the major axis of the optical nebula. The lower images are oriented with north up and east toward the left.
Abstract: NaSt1 is a peculiar emission-line star embedded in an extended nebula of optical [N II] emission with a compact dusty core. This object has been characterized as a Wolf-Rayet (WR) star cloaked in an opaque nebula of material that shows signs of advanced nuclear processing in the core of a massive star. To discern the morphology of the [N II] nebula we performed narrowband imaging using the Hubble Space Telescope. The images reveal that the nebula has a disk-like geometry, composed of a bright central ellipsoid surrounded by a larger clumpy ring. Near-infrared imaging with Magellan AO resolved a compact ellipsoid of Ks-band emission aligned with the larger [N II] nebula. The source is more compact at L’ and M’, so we suspect the Ks-band emission result of neutral helium emission from the inner stellar wind scattered outward by reflection off of cool dust in the nebula. Observations with the Chandra X-ray Observatory have revealed a hard X-ray point source at the core of the nebula that is consistent with WR stars and massive binaries where powerful stellar winds collide and make X-rays. We suggest that NaSt1 is a WR binary embedded in an equatorial outflow that formed as the result of non-conservative mass transfer (the transfer is not completely efficient, and some material is lost from the binary system through the outer Lagrange points). NaSt1 thus appears to be a rare and important example of a stripped-envelope WR forming through binary interaction.

Mauerhan, J., et al. “Multiwavelength Observations of NaSt1 (WR 122): Equatorial Mass Loss and X-rays from an Interacting Wolf-Rayet Binary”

MNRAS 450, 3, 2551; arxiv preprint