Author: Katie Morzinski

Clio is a good little camera. It has chip defects, cross-talk, and ghosts on bright stars, but what thermal-IR camera doesn’t? It also has a lot to offer and is very popular as seen by the telescope demand for MagAO/Clio. It has a deep enough well depth to take L-band images in the wide (coarse pixel) camera without saturating on the sky, and is sensitive enough to get good images in J-band, and can do low-resolution spectroscopy, imaging of faint companions, and it records some of the sharpest speckles you’ll ever ADI out thanks to our flat wavefronts being delivered by our AO system! Clio has so many modes — Narrow and Wide cameras, Imaging in 9 filters from 1-5 microns wavelength, Low-resolution spectroscopy across the L-band, Non-Redundant aperture Masking, and Coronagraphy (hopefully to be upgraded soon). We look at wide crowded fields, close-separation companions, disks, and more. Clio has cryogenic motors with 6 filter wheels holding a range of filters, aperture masks, pupil stops, and camera lenses for focal-plane and pupil-plane imaging modes. Clio sends focus commands to the AO system and offsetting commands to the telescope. We can control it with a GUI or scripts, including nods, integrations, subarrays, and filter changes. It has a heater and cooler with a PID controller to keep the chip cold. It is lightweight and shows no flexure, while holding its liquid nitrogen for 24+ hours. Thanks, Clio PI Phil Hinz!

I’ve been taking care of Clio this run, left with detailed instructions from Phil, T.J., and Vanessa, and help from Laird, Jared, and Alfio now too. For the last 2 nights, Arizona grad student Jordan Stone really put Clio through its paces, with me helping him in this effort. It was fun because we are learning more about how to best take L-band spectra with Clio. Here is an image showing what Jordan has been doing, with the help of the whole MagAO+Magellan team:

Because of the sky background being so bright and varying on a minutes-long timescale at L-band, and in order to average out the chip defects on Clio, we nod up and down the slit throughout the observations. Then Jordan will reduce the data by subtracting pairs of nods, determining the wavelength solution, and extracting the spectra. As we were walking up to the top tonight, Jared, Jordan, and I took a picture of ourselves in the mirror at the top. And I think we should have all shifted to the left and taken another picture, so that we could have subtracted the pair of images, because as you can see Jordan and Jared got hit by some “chip defects” and it looks like there is a wind-ghost messing up my hair:

We also tried to lock on a bright star at the start of the night, when the sky was still too bright for the telescope active optics to work, so instead Jared tried closing our 10-modes 0.1-gain loop for a long time, to allow the low-order modes to offload to the telescope. It was fun to try… and it worked! But it also took a while, and maybe we could have just waited for the sun to set… Anyway, we should try again sometime and suss out the parameter space!

Speaking of the sun setting, here are Jared and Kate — 2 of the VisAO PhDs — at sunset:

When we wake up, we can see the telescopes beckoning us from the top:

Here’s more of the dorms — really pretty and comfy:

And here are some more pretty pix from around the observatory:

Quotes:
Jared to Povilas: When can we work on the offloading and/or the DIMM?
Povilas: How about Monday?
Jared: Sounds great. What day is today? When is Monday?

(“Day” is a vestigial mode of time measurement based on solar cycles. It’s not applicable.)

20 days and counting.

Things went pretty well tonight. Alfio called us to check in and we could proudly show him that his software is keeping MagAO running smoothly:

In fact, we are mostly keeping his chair empty for him:

Except for when things need attention:

Our friends over at Cerro Pachon are observing with GPI on the Gemini South telescope for the Gemini Planet Imager Exoplanet Survey (GPIES):

I was Skype-chatting with them a bit tonight:

We talked about astrometric calibrator fields, such as the Trapezium:

At the end of the night, seeing spiked up to 2” and we couldn’t keep a lock on our faint science target — it was the equivalent of clouds rolling in, we lost so much light.

So we tried an experimental target instead. Here is a quick snapshot of HD 269433 (all we could get before the loop opened again, as the Sun was rising too). It looks like this one, which is in the LMC and our WFS read as R=12.1 mag, will not work as a good astrometric calibrator for GPI.

Jason Wang is blogging about GPI this week and we tried to keep up with him:

Over at GPI, the GPIES team saw a vizcacha tonight by Gemini. I wonder if they stole ours, we have had so few sightings this run! But tonight, Jared did see one or two vizzies by Magellan at sunset:

Also, we also saw a herd of burros on our way up to the top tonight:

And we took a picture for our loved ones back home:

Finally, today is Jared’s mom’s birthday, so here are some pictures of her favorite oldest son for her to enjoy:

And finally, here is a beautiful song from South Africa:

It’s day 13 – we’ve been here almost 2 weeks out of 6 now – so we’re almost a third of the way through. I think of it like running a 5k (3.1 miles) where the first mile is the phase where you try to get out ahead of the pack, and the second mile is where you settle in to your pace. That’s where we are now, we’re settling in. Here’s a little bit about what that looks like.

I’ve been monitoring the temperatures on Clio. Last week we hooked up the new pump, which is stronger than the old pump, and I was worried that the temperature wasn’t settling quickly enough.

But take a closer look at just the detector temperature. I don’t think it’s quite as stable as it could be. I will think about this some more and possibly throttle the pump, crank up the heater, or go back to the old pump.

Finally, some LCO lifestyle pix as we are settling in:

A great song:

The other day we said we were back to normal… the clouds had gone away and we had a great night on-sky with a good AO correction, doing fun science. However, some not-so-normal problems cropped up again, and we just got through a bit of a stressful time. We were losing communication with our slope computer, and having other strange symptoms. In the end, we managed to get ahold of our Italian friends, who helped us trouble-shoot.

The project spent a lot of time in Florence and some in Bolzano, and we are so grateful for our friends and colleagues who show such great interest in our project and in helping to keep it running! Here is Arcetri where Laird and Jared built the system with Alfio, Simone, Armando, Runa, Marco, Enrico, Luca, and more:

Alfio has been following our progress this run, our first run without him. Here’s Alfio with Jared last summer:

And here is Laird, Jared, and me with Galileo in Florence:

So after Laird went home, we talked to Alfio, Roberto, and Mario, and got some ideas on what to check. So Jared, Pato, and I adjusted the voltage in the BCU and also switched to the spare fibers.

And…success! Slopes were being sent, slopes were being received, and nary a divide-by-zero error to be seen!

We celebrated by replacing the batteries in the wind monitor, getting on sky, and closing the loop!

At the end of a night of good hard work, we were rewarded with the sunrise, a vizcacha, and a herd of burros:

Shake it off!

Tonight was Laird’s last night for the first part of this run — he goes down later today to return home for a couple weeks, then he’ll be back again for the last couple weeks of the run. Jared and I will be taking care of everything while he’s gone. We were also talking to our friends at Mt. Graham, Arizona and Subaru Telescope, Mauna Kea about their respective pyramid WFS observing runs.

Before tonight, I was busy with Clio engineering and science, so I didn’t have a chance to run the AO system much last week. But tonight was TJ & Alycia’s first night and since TJ can run Clio just fine, I was running AO with bits of advice from Laird on what he’s learned operating the system this week. So there was a lot going on, and we didn’t have the best seeing, so I didn’t get much in the way of pictures. However, I have a couple pictures from the previous night, which was my science night looking at brown dwarf and planetary-mass companions to stars. Here are a few pretty pix from Clio:

Speaking of brown dwarfs and planetary-mass companions…
I went to a meeting last summer called Exoplanets and Brown Dwarfs: Mind the Gap, focusing on the overlap between the fields and how studying one kind of substellar object enriches the study of the other. It was a great conference and Startorialist Emily Rice led us in making a fun video about brown dwarfs, which I hope you enjoy watching as much as we enjoyed filming: