Well Kate, we don’t have a clever fix for you yet. But why be clever when hacking will do? The technical difficulties last night were from timeouts in the TCS communication (which mysteriously had never timed out until we tried taking data for Vanessa……). Jared implemented a workaround in which we timed various nod sizes at the beginning of the night on a test star, and used those delay times as the wait statements for the AO. It worked so great that we were able to look at 16 targets for ASU grad student Kim Ward-Duong tonight, which is a lot! We only had 1 unexplained RIP all night and recovered from that just fine. Kim is a very experienced AO observer with adaptive secondaries (MMT, LBT, and now Magellan), and has become an expert on Clio in just 3 days, so we were very efficient. It was a much better night! Here we are all looking happy to be observing with MagAO:
Here we are happily observing for Kim
Povilas: Well, what did you change?
Jared: I haven’t changed my code.
Povilas: It worked fine yesterday. You must have changed your code.
Jared: I haven’t changed my code.
Povilas: That’s what everyone says. “I haven’t changed my code.” “Fezzik, tear his arms off.” “Oh, you mean *this* mount-wait statement.”
Jared captured the sun rise in dramatic fashion yesterdayTwo days ago we ended early enough that I got a jog in before breakfast. This is on my way back. That’s Baade glinting in the sunlight, and Clay right next to it.
Jared: Well, at least there’s some good news… I still have an empanada left!
Alberto: Oh, you mean *this* empanada? …It was delicious!
(Haha just kidding!)
Anybody want a peanut?
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:
Jordan took this spectrum tonight. First he finds the position of the star. Then he puts in the slit and finds the position of the slit (left). Next, he puts the star at the slit position and checks to make sure it’s in there (center). Finally, he puts in the prism to disperse the light, and gets a spectrum from 3-4 microns wavelengths (right). With all the overheads involved in this maneuvering, he was achieving about 50% efficiency (ratio of integration time to clock time). This was with intensive involvement of 2 expert users (Jordan and myself), so it isn’t easy!
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:
Jared, Jordan, and me – this was supposed to be a pretty pic for our moms n dads but Alan isn’t here to clean off the mirror for us
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! Jared is closing on 10 modes at the start of the night.
Speaking of the sun setting, here are Jared and Kate — 2 of the VisAO PhDs — at sunset: Jared “VisAO PI” Males and Kate “Also Important” Follette
When we wake up, we can see the telescopes beckoning us from the top: You can see the Baade from the sidewalk through the astronomer dorms
Here’s more of the dorms — really pretty and comfy: A panorama of the dorms
And here are some more pretty pix from around the observatory: Kate biked out to the end and back
Clay, Baade, and the Moon!Looks like telescopes on the Moon — Or how it will look some day.
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.)
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:
Alfio calls in from Firenze to check on our progress.
In fact, we are mostly keeping his chair empty for him:
Also, Alfio is here in spirit, running the AO system — his software has been working so well, we just leave this chair empty and let Alfio’s code run the show.
Except for when things need attention:
Jared, T.J., and Jorge running AO, Clio, and the telescope
Our friends over at Cerro Pachon are observing with GPI on the Gemini South telescope for the Gemini Planet Imager Exoplanet Survey (GPIES):
Chilean telescopes tonight: MagAO and GPI
I was Skype-chatting with them a bit tonight:
Here I am chatting with GPIES
We talked about astrometric calibrator fields, such as the Trapezium: Jared shows us how it’s done
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. At the end of the night, the seeing spiked up to 2”, making the WFS think clouds had rolled in.
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. Attempting an astrometric field – a quick snap-shot of HD 269433 in Ks-band Narrow camera. The circle is the GPI field of view.
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: Vizcachas at sunset
Also, we also saw a herd of burros on our way up to the top tonight: Donkeys on our way up to the top
And we took a picture for our loved ones back home: Hello everybodeeee!
Finally, today is Jared’s mom’s birthday, so here are some pictures of her favorite oldest son for her to enjoy: Happy birthday to Jared’s mom!
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.
Jared is starting up at the beginning of the night.
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. Clio temperature monitor, plotted as a function of # of hours since we started cool-down this run. Top: The temperature of the Clio optics in Kelvin (77 K). Center: The temperature of the Clio detector in K. Bottom: The percent the heater is turned on. Each spike in temperature of the detector is when the Clio dewars are filled with 77-K liquid nitrogen, which melts the solid nitrogen and warms it up. Then the pump starts pumping away and lowers the pressure so that the nitrogen freezes and solidifies. The temperature keeps dropping, but we want to keep it stable, so when the temperature drops below the set point (53.3 K), the heater engages and tries to keep it at a stable temperature.
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. Take a closer look at just the detector temperature (bottom plot here). It isn’t quite stabilizing at the tenth-of-a-Kelvin level. I have to examine the darks to see how much it affects us. Also, the new set-point means I had to adjust the bias voltage, which means there is going to be a new linearity correction this run. Stay tuned.
Finally, some LCO lifestyle pix as we are settling in: Sunrise from the summit
Dos huevos fritos por favor con aguacate, oatmeal, and fresh-squeezed orange juiceLife at LCO – breakfast then bed (please do not disturb)
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:
We contacted our friends in Firenze and Bolzano, Italy. Here is Arcetri Observatory in Florence.
Alfio has been following our progress this run, our first run without him. Here’s Alfio with Jared last summer: Jared and Alfio in Firenze, summer 2013. With the Arno and the Ponte Vecchio
And here is Laird, Jared, and me with Galileo in Florence: Jared, Laird, and me with Galileo
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.
Jared is testing the voltage at the BCUJared is about to adjust the voltage in the BCUPato and Jared connect the BCU back up
And…success! Slopes were being sent, slopes were being received, and nary a divide-by-zero error to be seen!
Yay! It’s alive! Slopes are being sent & received!
We celebrated by replacing the batteries in the wind monitor, getting on sky, and closing the loop!
Here I am hooking up the wind monitor. We replaced its batteries … but there was no wind tonight!Laird left me in charge. I let TJ point to the North tonight — there was no wind!
At the end of a night of good hard work, we were rewarded with the sunrise, a vizcacha, and a herd of burros:
Sunrise and the trucks of LCOA burro runs away from JaredBurros at dawnA wild vizcacha… or is it Grumpy on his morning perch?