Katie Morzinski – Page 27 – Extreme Wavefront Control Lab

2014A Day 30: Send Me On My Way

We’ve departed the mountain. Thanks for hosting our first full science run, LCO, and we’ll see you next time.

at dawn. We were in a hurry to get some cerveza in La Serena. — Our transport awaits

Send me on my way — Our driver loads up the transport

It's a pretty place — Sunrise as we’re leaving

Till next time — Goodbye to Clay and Baade

Don't be offended, but we're happy to be leaving. See you soon though. — Saying goodbye to the observatory

We'll be home soon — The Pan American Highway

2014A Day 29: All Packed Up

We packed everything up and left the mountain, and now I’ve gotten enough sleep I’m finally awake enough to post some pictures for you.

The crew spent most of the day putting MegaCam on the telescope, which uses the F/5 they put on the day before. It’s a big job, being one of the biggest and heaviest instruments.

It's big and heavy — Victor and Francesco lift MegaCam up through the floor

And all it does is lift MegaCam up and down. — MegaCam and Cartzilla. Cartzilla is so big and heavy they have to take down a post to fit it through the door, and it has to drive on tracks so it doesn’t fall through the floor.

Then they had some time to squeeze in taking Clio2 and the MagAO NAS off the telescope before supper.

while the rest of us look on — Felix prepares to take Clio2 off the NAS

Thanks for your hard work guys! — Felix, Juan, and the crew prepare to lift the NAS off the telescope. They worked very hard that day to get it all done before supper.

Nice hard hat — Jared secures the NAS on its cart

We parked them in the Aux.

Earlier in the day, Laird and I accompanied the ASM down to the Clean room.

I wanted a nap in the sun too — Baby Vizzy flopped out in the sun after being terrified out of his wits from the loud diesel Isuzu that brought the ASM down to the clean room

We had a final dinner, then packed up to leave.

Our last dinner -- stuffed zucchinis — Our last dinner — stuffed zucchinis and

Song of the day: Zumba version

Song of the day: Electric Slide version

2014A…28 Days Later: No Led in Our Zeppelin

Today Laird got up at 8am while Jared and I went to bed after our Last Star last night. Laird and the crew took down the ASM, then Laird and Jared de-cabled the NAS and I de-cabled Clio with their help. Here are some pictures:

Shiny — Jared peering through the optics

Its so loud it shakes your organs — Turning off the Clio pump in the scary loud pump room

That's me in my ND sweatshirt — The tunnel by the scary loud pump room.

Why did it have to be snakes? — Jared feeds the anaconda through to Laird, who catches it in the snake pit below

I hate snakes! — Laird in the snake pit. Left: the view from beneath the NAS. Right: The view through the hole from on the NAS platform.

All uncabled! — Jared and Laird posing by the NAS

Laird wishes he could show you how he really feels — Jared shows us how he really feels

Actuating? — Povilas works on the M1 mirror.

Also it wasn't our breakfast any more! — Tonight’s dinner was delicious – stuffed tomatoes, sliced potatoes, and salmon with a cream/shrimp sauce

Grumpy, Mizz Vizz, and Baby Vizzy — It was a rare 3-vizcacha day at the clean room today.

The song of the day is inspired by the film 28 Days Later. We hope when we get back to Tucson, it isn’t a post-apocalyptic wasteland with everyone crazy party-rocking and/or our loved ones turned into zombies. Still, should the need arise, we are ready to party rock.

2014A Day 26: Factor of a Million

Only one more night to go — I think we’re going to make it! Tonight was fun in a crazy busy kind of way. We did about 20 targets total, most of them were faint Clio targets. Vanessa had left at the end of the previous night, so this kind of a night kept me really busy and missing her. Here is a picture of Jared and Vanessa and me at the end of last night right before Vanessa left to go back to Tucson:

Brookings High School, South Dakota, 2/3 — Me, Jared, and Vanessa on Vanessa’s last night

Tonight we bagged about 20 targets and spanned a factor of a million in guide star brightness. And that’s without any optics changes — we just bin the pixels on the CCD and adjust the gain, and we can lock on zero-th to 16th magnitude guide stars!!

Here we are locked on one of the brightest stars we can do:

Stellar. — Two bright stars on Clio. This is just about the brightest guide star we can guide on.

And on one of the faintest stars we can do:

Way to go Laird! — Here we are locked on a 15.5-th magnitude faint binary (the bright one at upper left). And see the star about 5 arcseconds away, it’s still pretty round! Wow. OK yes, we did have amazing ~0.5” seeing tonight — yay LCO!

We also got some amazing images with VisAO:

Bright star, Dark hole — A bright star in z’ on VisAO. What an amazing dark hole around the star, which means the AO correction is working so well that it is clearing out all the scattered light up to its control radius!

And finally, we imaged yet another faint substellar companion — Pluto!

Go Clio Go — Pluto and Charon! Our observers tonight, Amanda Bosh of MIT and Stephen Levine of Lowell Observatory, needed to get some data for their on-going program, and we were all so excited to image a (dwarf?) planet and its moon tonight! We are locked on Pluto itself.

Fish eye, Fish bowl. — Here we are in the control room at the end of the night, wrapping up our calibrations and data. From left: me, Amanda, Stephen, and Jared. Photo by Amanda Bosh.

Very concentrate. Much stellar. So astronomy. — Jared taking VisAO data

Locked. — Laird keeping the AO system under control

A starry night. — Gorgeous star trails over the Clay telescope, courtesy Amanda Bosh. The dotted line is a blinking airplane flying by. Simply gorgeous. Click for high-res.

Quote exchange of the day:
“Ok, open the AO thing.” – Jen.
“Ok, the AO thing is open.” – Laird.

Video of the day: Amanda Bosh’s video of the Baade (left) and Clay (right) telescopes going on-sky for the night. Really cool! Thanks, Amanda!

Song of the day:

2014A Day 21: Loops of MagAO

A closed feedback loop is when you are monitoring some output so that you can control some input. How many closed loops does MagAO run? Here we present: The Loops of MagAO.

1. The AO System’s Pyramid WFS and ASM

The top-level loop is the adaptive optics (AO) loop. This is the loop that all the others are here to serve. We are making flat wavefronts so that our science cameras can take sharp images, and it is a serious business.

Closed loop control. — The AO system in control

Doesn't look too hard — Me running the AO system a few nights ago. Dear Laird: Do you notice how I’m taking logs?

Which we've been using! — And when everything is running smoothly, this is the AO Interface that the AO operator can use to close the loop

2. The Camera Lens

This loop is my favorite, because it’s one of the subtle calibrations we do that keeps our AO system one of the best in the world. The camera lens loop keeps the positions of the Pyramid pupils aligned to the pixels on the WFS CCD to a tenth of a pixel. This means our AO system is always calibrated, in the way that it measures brightness and on the CCD and converts it to slopes to send to the ASM.

KT's Favorite Loop — The camera lens loop is my favorite. (Well of course, besides the AO loop). Left: The light falls in these 4 pupils after it hits the pyramid, one for each facet. Center: We measure the position of the pupils in software (red cross-hairs and thin circles). Right: We compare the measured positions to where the software is expecting the light (blue and red lit-up pixels), and the camera lens loop moves the camera lens to line up the pupils with the pixels we want them to fall on.

3. The 585 ASM Sensors

The ASM has 585 actuators to control its shape at 1000 times per second, and they have sensors to control their current and check their temperatures.

The subtlety is that the mirror shape is actually controlled by the DSPs upon the back of the ASM itself. — The control electronics for the MagAO ASM

Keeping house — The ASM housekeeper tracks the temperatures, currents, and forces of the 585 ASM actuators

4. Telescope Off-loading

We send some of the wavefront correction to the telescope — we call this off-loading. For example, if the ASM has to tilt too far to the side and starts to use up all its “throw” or stroke, then we just send a little nudge to the telescope and re-point the whole telescope, flattening out the ASM. We do this once per second, and we off-load focus once every minute.

5. VisAO Coronagraph Guider

Jared wrote a little opto-mechanical loop for VisAO in coronagraph mode. He nudges the VisAO gimbal mirror to keep the star aligned precisely behind the coronagraph. The loop runs once every few to tens of seconds.

Space Aliens — Jared running the coronagraph guider loop on VisAO

I forgot how fast this loop is running but fast enough — Here we see the offsets scrolling by, and finally a gimbal command at the end

I'm impressed — The coronagraph guider in action

6. Clio Temperature Controller

The Clio2 optics are kept at 77K via the outer dewar, by the LCO staff who refill its liquid nitrogen dewar every morning. The Clio2 detector is kept at 55K by a pump that lowers the pressure of the liquid nitrogen and makes it solid inside the inner dewar. However, the pump could keep lowering the pressure and thus the temperature even more, but it’s important to keep the temperature stable. Therefore, we have a heater that senses the current temperature, and turns on a bit when the temperature is below 55 K, and keeps it always at 55K. This is a closed feedback loop.

Liquid and solid nitrogen — The Clio temperatures

7. Mechanical Loops with Encoders:

We also control a lot of mechanical components using encoders. On the WFS/VisAO board, called the “W-unit”, we have the Bayside stages X, Y, Z; the PI piezo Tip/Tilt mirror X, Y; the camera lens X, Y; the two atmospheric dispersion compensators (ADCs) and the re-rotator (K-mirror); the beamsplitter and the two VisAO filter wheels; and the gimbal motors X, Y. That’s 15 encoders:

Free chocolate to the first person who emails me what I forgot — All the things on the wavefront sensor and VisAO that move mechanically and with encoders

8. Finally, the telescope itself has several mechanical loops: Elevation; Azimuth; the Dome; and Active Optics (the primary mirror M1 has ~150 actuators controlled via a closed-loop Shack-Hartmann (plus the 5-d vane ends (x,y,z, theta, phi))