Some light clouds at sunset, but low winds. Looking good (for 2015A) for Amanda and Atom from MIT, to look at various Solar System bodies that tend to be right into the wind: We got to look to the North and East tonight because the wind was finally below our limit! Top: mid-ish night; Bottom: dawn-ish.
The internet went down but we can run everything internally just fine, so it just meant no Facebooking or emailing our families, so we carried on. (How are we still blogging? It seems the commercial internet was down but not the “Internet 2” which carries the .edu traffic so we can still get to the blog hosted on / even if we can’t get to many other sites.)
A small earthquake hit, the loop opened, we all looked around, then got back on target and closed the loop: Top — the earthquake caused the forces on our deformable mirror to ramp up (see the steep climb on the right half of the “Peak Mirror Force” plot), then the loop opened and the shell RIPd, and I force-enabled the TSS (see big red button and fake “500 m/s” wind reading) for safety — I felt it coming. Bottom: It was a 5.2 quake near Vallenar.
Then the X stage controller started acting up, and we had to call it a night. I’m going to get some shuteye here while Jared works on it for a bit with Alfio (remotely from Florence).
Update a couple hours later: X stage motor controller replaced, seems to be working. We’ll start tonight with a bunch of tests, but let’s hope that solved the problem.
From the very start of the evening: We met these burros on our way up to change the batteries in the wind monitor.
The infamous wind monitor: This exciting picture is the wind monitor
We got to open for a few hours tonight, when the winds were only 30 mph: T.J. got some science done tonight in the brief burst of sub-35-mph winds we had from around sunset to 11pm.
[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: Discovery image of HD 106906 b in the thermal infrared (4µm wavelength) from MagAO/Clio2, processed to remove the bright light from its host star, HD 106906 A. The planet is more than 20 times farther away from HD 106906 A than Neptune is from our Sun.
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:
Here are some screen grabs from Vanessa’s defense — Jared and I were watching from LCO and really enjoyed her excellent presentation. That’s her planet*, HD 106906 b, at bottom.
And here’s the video:
It looks like there was much rejoicing in Tucson: Vanessa attended the graduation ceremony (top) because she figured there was a good chance her defense would go well today. It did, as you can tell by the face her advisor Phil is making (bottom, left).
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: The 2 (so far) graduates of Brookings High School, South Dakota who have earned a PhD from the Unviersity of Arizona Department of Astronomy. Article by the Brookings Register.
OK, I’ve had enough winter. Look at all these clouds! Cloudy clouds, clouded view
And the winds, and still the clouds! Cloudy and windy
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! Now TJ and I don’t have to align the pupil images by hand 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: Pato Pinto last week soldering the jumper for the broken motor
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: Jared and I put the new motor controller in Clio
Before and after: Left: Before / Right: After
So … now it works! Here it is working… see I can put in arbitrary field stops from the gui, such as the slit!
Good night! Ahoy there
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: Cloudy clouds are clouding the stars
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…
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.
A 3-course dinner including soup and chocolate cake!
