Katie Morzinski – Page 27 – Extreme Wavefront Control Lab

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))

Not spatially filtered — The Shack-Hartmann guider loop

Also at the top, the vane ends — The back of the primary mirror, where there are actuators controlling the active optics

Well, I lost count, but that’s a lot of control loops! And when it’s all working, this is what we get:

Diffraction limit is 51 mas. Probably a background star -- this was a LM standard. — 60 milli-arc-second PSF at H-band on a 7th-magnitude guide star. That’s really good! Also it has a faint companion…

Well, that’s it for tonight, suffice it to say we had a good busy night on sky.

Sunrise sunset — The moon to the west, at sunrise, from Clay

The truck is for Nick and Drew — The moon setting as the sun was rising, the morning after the lunar eclipse

The song of the day has an astronomical theme, is by a top South American artist, and it came out on Vevo the day we left Tucson for this trip:

Here’s another good one by Shakira, from when the World Cup was in South Africa, it’s in the top ten most viewed Youtube music videos of all time:

oh I wish we could play... — Speaking of the World Cup, I’m happy to report that there is a soccer field at LCO! But it’s near the gate and we never go by there, so I’ve never seen anyone playing soccer here.

2014A Day 20: Spares and backups

Vanessa arrived safely today after boarding 6 planes (but only traveling on 3) to get here. We are happy to see her! She is helping with Clio2 engineering as well as AO operations. We also had 2 of our observers arrive today; their run is in a couple days but they wanted to get up to speed on the system. Unfortunately, we couldn’t show them much at the start of the night, because while closing the loop on the first star, we had a hardware failure that got us pretty worried for a few hours. The ethernet module on our slope computer failed. Luckily, we had a spare, and Jared and Laird put it together without any help from our Italian friends who were all sound asleep in Tuscany.

Ignore the 47 — Two photos of the spare BCU 39 slope computer

Amazing work guys — The failed ethernet module (top) was swapped out for the spare (bottom)

After they got that fixed (in the mean time, Vanessa and I were working on the CLio computer backup), we got on sky. We had amazing seeing tonight.

Except for that 0.7'' spike at the end — I know there’s a reason we picked this site.

And we got some amazing data.

Stay tuned for more on the coronagraph guider — A bright star behind the coronagraph on VisAO at i’ (770 nm) with very high Strehl

We also took some spectral-differential imaging (SDI) data with the Wollaston beamsplitter in to divide the light into the narrow-band and continuum beams. Here is Laird inserting the Wollaston, which he has to go up to the instrument in the telescope to do:

PI mode only — Here is Laird inserting the Wollaston by feel and sound

It was a beautiful night.

Amazing — The ASM by moonlight. Photo courtesy Prof. Laird M. Close.

gorgeous — The Clay telescope by moonlight. Photo courtesy Prof. Laird M. Close.

We’re all quite tired.

But seeing Raphael and Pele dance it up on Xai //na gomasen is quite energizing!

And you can see their dancing much better in this video, I love the Namibian dance style!

2014A Day 18: Binaries are the vermin of the sky

Have you ever heard that pigeons are the rats of the sky? Well, tonight we were contemplating that binaries are the vermin of the sky. The binaries we are talking about are “stars” that are actually two stars, only they are so close together that they weren’t discovered to be 2 stars by the early astronomy surveys. But when you have AO on a large telescope like we do, you find out that a lot of stars you thought were single are in fact binary. And then you are disappointed if you were looking for something else when you chose to look at that star.

Laird discovered a binary with the pyramid wavefront sensor tonight. The pyramid pupils were lit up diagonally, and he correctly predicted its properties (about an arcsecond separation, about equal brightness) before we even saw it on one of our cameras VisAO or Clio2. Here it is:

Pretty awesome pupils! — Laird discovered a binary star with the pyramid wavefront sensor (left) before we even had a chance to look at it in the focal plane with VisAO (right)!

We have been looking at disks around stars recently. Here is a Clio2 image by T.J. of a star that was supposed to have a disk… but instead it was a binary star:

Vermin. — A binary imaged with Clio2. The ring around the primary star is the control radius of the AO.

Kate, Alycia, and T.J. are heading down tomorrow, and our mean tiredness is going to go way up. Thanks for all your hard work, guys!

after almost a week of good disk images — Here is the disk team hard at work.

Tonight we got on sky about half an hour earlier than normal, to get some narrow-camera K-band flats, which have proved to be difficult to get enough light. I’ve made a new page with all the Clio2 calibrations, and I’m posting the flats as we get them. They are still not ideal due to an in-focus pupil glow that we think may be related to a slight pupil misalignment. Here we are opening up the dome the previous night:

A bit late — The Clay telescope opening at dusk

And from the inside:

Lovely — The ASM hanging over the Clay primary, from inside the dome, at dusk.

Caustic — The pyramid pupils taking sky flats. On the left, you can see a pretty cool diffraction pattern around the tip of the pyramid

We miss Alfio, but things have been running pretty smoothly, which is a testament to the amazing software he left for us.

And VisAO and MagAO — The team on Alfio’s last night. From left to right: Kate Follette, Katie Morzinski, Jared Males, Alfio Puglisi, Alycia Weinberger, Laird Close, and T.J. Rodigas.

We're on the left — The Clay and Baade at sunset

I don't think I've seen this in the US. Nicely done, Chile. — Alycia took this picture of Quadritos cereal with braille on the box

Although this post says day 18, we started the 2014A blog on “day 0” (the PI arrived on “day 1”) and it took 2 days to travel here …. so Jared, T.J., and I left our homes 3 weeks ago now, and it’s been 20 days for Laird. In honor of that milestone, here are some pictures from the run that haven’t made it onto the blog yet:

Looks pretty — In the first week we were here, Laird put some new filters in the VisAO filter wheel. It took a while because one of the filters wasn’t sized correctly for the slot, so he put a helpful “Stay away” note.

We have never had time to use the "rec" room, so far. — The “village” at LCO where we live this month. Down there you can see the dorms and the kitchen.

L for Laird. — Laird taking a picture of the ASM with his fiducial tape on the cap. He taped the crosshair on pretty much by eye and it worked perfectly!

My sister knit that hat for me :). It's reversible! — T.J. and I opening up Clio2 in the clean room, back on the first few days

Is he happy or sad? — Jared is dismantling the earlier part of his PhD project. It was a high-speed shutter he built to do Strehl selection because everyone said visible-light AO wouldn’t work. However, thrillingly, MagAO works great in the visible wavelengths, and we never used the high-speed capabilities of the shutter.

On the catwalk — Alfio and me after attaching the wind monitor to the ASM with Laird

Pix out our window — The small telescope next to the Clay that measures seeing. It is a Differential Image Motion Monitor and is called a DIMM.

Hunting as in searching with my eyes — Panorama around the back side of Clay where the DIMM is. This is where I go hunting for vizzies at dawn.

Vizzy got scared when I approached, and hopped over to hang out under the clean room eaves — Vizzy resting on the wall, looking out over the LCO village

Where the Beta Pic disk was first imaged! — A wild vizzy at dawn (foreground, lower left), looking out over the smaller telescopes at LCO

And here’s a bird, but not a vermin of the sky:

Here’s a movie Jared took of the LCO whistler, watch/listen to the video and you’ll know why. Note how it tips it’s head back when it whistles!

My brother gave me some mp3’s of him playing some peaceful songs on piano, which has been nice to listen to when I need to focus on reducing data in the control room. One of them is Prelude Op 28-15 “Raindrop” and here’s a version of the song from Youtube: