Author: Katie Morzinski

2015A Day 17: Only Girl in the World

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!!!

Anna fixed our trouble!

And here is the original picture — do you see what Anna fixed for us?.

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:

Jared decided today was a good day to tear apart the ASM supervisor computer.

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!!

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

The day crew helped me mount Clio a couple weeks ago while Laird and Jared were sleeping (I’m the one behind the camera).
Here I am operating the AO system while Christian and Francois from the University of Chile take their data, last week.
In the Babcock Lodge having dinner before heading up for the night.

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?

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: