Katie Morzinski – Page 28 – Extreme Wavefront Control Lab

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:

2014A Day 12: Count to Ten

Our first non-Arizona visiting astronomer was taking data with Clio and VisAO tonight. His name is Brett Addison of the University of New South Wales, Sydney.

I think it went pretty well. A few hiccups. — Here is a picture of the team with our visitor. On the left side of the room going back: Jared, Katie, Brett, Hugo. On the right, coming forward: Alfio, TJ, Laird, Ya-Lin. Photo courtesy Jordan.

Also Alycia arrived safely today.

Today the seeing was bad to very bad for almost the whole night.

Off the charts — Seeing was off the charts. Yet we managed to close the loop with very very low gains and only 66 modes.

Are we at the LBT? — A zoom-in of the seeing. The part where it starts to get better is at around 5:30am, and we started around 8pm, so that was a long night of a lot of bad seeing!

LBT eat your heart out... — The AOI GUI is running very smoothly tonight, which is great because we won’t have Alfio here for the whole run…

Alfio made a new mirror diagnostic last year that shows the mirror commands sampled at a very high speed. See the video here: It’s a really cool one!

Then this run he added the plot to the right that shows the maximum mirror command at each time step. I liked this plot so much because it shows you both how stable the loop is as you are adjusting the gains, and also gives a diagnostic for what happened if the loop breaks open. I told Alfio it was my favorite plot, so he made a quick update to the code:

A white dielectric coating — Laird took a photo of the pupil from the NAS. It’s just like last year’s — even the bird-dropping-fiducial is still there, only now it’s de-aluminized tertiary. The slot (lollipop at 9:00) is useful for a fiducial when modeling the PSF of Clio — see my post from last year.

Hi Alan — Also this mirror has lots of bird-dropping fiducials. But anyway… Hi Mom! And Dad! And everybody!

Is this interesting? Or too hard to see sideways? — Another panorama

In honor of our knocking out targets numbers 1-10 tonight (although we had to skip target 3 due to seeing and faintness, so it was 9 targets total…) here is Tina Dico singing her song Count to Ten:

2014A Day 10: 12 magnitudes of extinction

Clay right? -- No, Baade. Are you new here? — From yesterday – the telescope

Today was our first official science night! The previous nights were engineering, but tonight we had a visiting astronomer here at the telescope, and he was calling the shots for his observations. He took logs while we helped him take data, and the operations went pretty smoothly.

Feral Vizzies — The Clay at sunset, from the vantage point of the wild viscachas

The night started out well, with Alfio successfully managing a difficult aquisition, and with the data coming down the pipeline looking just fine.

Trapezium! — This picture is from yesterday, when we looked at the Trapezium to do some astrometric calibration. Pretty cool how you can see it on the acquisition camera huh?

However, around midnight the clouds thickened up, and the AO system couldn’t stay locked.

With a chance of meatballs — Clouds, clouds, and more clouds

We kept trying brighter and brighter stars, eventually trying a 0-th magnitude star — the wavefront sensor would alternate between saturating counts on this bright star to not even seeing any photons from it at all — 12 mags of extinction! Sigh. So it was a disappointing night. At least we were able to get some testing of various modes and set-ups done, so that’s good. But we are really hoping for a better night tomorrow!

Time for the pretty pictures:

Cartzilla's home — Panorama from East to West by the Aux at sunset

Sunrise, sunset. — Top: To the West at sunset. Bottom: To the East at sunset.

Kangaroo-squirrel-bunny — A wild viscacha behind the Clay (as opposed to the “tame” ones that hang out at the clean room)

See how tame she is? — Mizz Vizz said hello to us on our way to dinner by the clean room

This is the song in my head when we are watching the photons on the wavefront sensor slowly diminish:

2014A Day 7: Closed Loop

Today we went on sky and closed the loop! The first half of the night was cleaning up final guider problems, but then just before midnight we acquired our first AO setup star and were able to close the loop with an audience and everything! I’m glad we showed the GMT folk some good images before they had to leave. Jordan arrived safely today.

First we finished up the final touches — removing the ASM cover and mounting the wind monitor:

Good thing they are both pretty good climbers. — Povilas and Laird took off the protective cover of the ASM. It required the scissor lift and then some climbing.

This was during the first half of the night when there was still some guider debugging going on. — This is what the Clay control room looks like during commissioning and engineering.

Then Alfio closed the loop and we had some beautiful 6.5-m diffraction-limited images!!

And the GMTAO people were here to see it! — First closed loop of 2014A!

Arbitrary scaling and rotation applied -- warning to the wise — A brown dwarf companion imaged in thermal IR filters with Clio2 today

There was also some good wildlife today:

I didn't see the horse because I was sleeping in. — Jared took these gorgeous photos of a horse in the afternoon.

Not a zoom lense! — Vizzy has a special affinity for Jared, and she (Mizz Vizz) let him get really close to take these pix with his cell.

The song today is historic and fun:

Well, now we’re all on a night schedule — the run has begun!

2014A Day 6: We’re okay

You may have heard that a magnitude~8 earthquake struck northern Chile after dinnertime. Thanks for all your checking-in emails, and we are happy to say that we did not feel the earthquake at all; it was up in way way northern Chile and we are approximately central:

thanks for emailing us to see if we're alive everyone — LCO is about halfway down Chile and the earthquake was way up in the north.

Our thoughts and well-wishes are with the people affected.

Ya-Lin arrived safely this afternoon.
Today we worked all day and all night so I have a lot of pictures to catch you up.
Yesterday Pato balanced the telescope and I got a good view from the catwalk. Povilas was working on alignment.

blue — Here’s what the ASM looks like hung up above the telescope

so tired — This is what the crosshairs look like on the ASM cap for fiducial alignment. On the left is a picture of the crosshair taken from standing on the NAS through a telescope Povilas had connected for alignment. On the right is me looking tired.

Today we installed the rest of our instrument: the NAS ring that holds VisAO and the wavefront sensor, and then Clio mounts to that ring.

Through the wind tunnel — The crew pushes the NAS ring from the Aux to the telescope

stripey — Emilio and the crew work on the NAS while Fernando looks on

anananaconda — Jared and Laird cable up the NAS

good work crew — The crew put Clio on the NAS

It doesn't — We are carefully checking to see if Clio is going to fit with the new dust covers

she looks pretty — T.J., Povilas, and Jared checking out Clio

photo-awesoming — Clio attached to the NAS

pink pigtails — The Clio umbilical after we wrapped it all up

cooled down just fine — Clio temperatures are good

well we still have to boot off it — Clio cloning successful

Then we turned on all our various cooling systems before powering everything on.

windy — Laird showed me the fans for cooling the ASM heat-exchange glycol

The Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) will be built on a neighboring peak, and so Antonin Bouchez (the AO lead on GMT) and colleague are up here to look in on what it’s like to install and bring online an AO system up here. We are happy to be their pathfinder and to host their visit.

it worked! — Jared, Antonin, and Laird look on as Alfio and I power up the ASM

I think we need a handle on that wall just for this job — Laird is plugging in the single-phase and 3-phase power sources for the ASM, while I am hoping he doesn’t fall off the ladder

she looks good — Laird and Alfio check out the ASM gui

Oh, you have to DOUBLE click to check the actuators! — Up in the Clay control room after powering on the ASM, Alfio and I are checking that everything is ok while Antonin and Laird look on

Tonight we wanted to go on-sky for the first time, but unfortunately we had a major issue with the guider communications and software. TBD, check back in tomorrow.

Did I mention that we worked all day and all night?

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz — T.J. fell asleep at the Clio workstation while waiting for the dome to open.

did everybody leave? — I passed out on the couch in the lounge.

The song of the day is a change-up of genres. It’s a fun one, Lonely Boy by Mnozil Brass. Enjoy!