On November 26th, 2012, we closed the loop for the first time on-sky here at Magellan. A multitude of cameras and video recorders were there to document the moment. Here we present a three-dimensional tomographic reconstruction of the first-light Magellan adaptive optics controllers.
Fig. 1 is taken from the North side of the control room with a SLR camera.Fig. 2 is taken from the South side of the control room with a LG android phone.Fig. 3 is a frame grab from a video camera on a South-Southwest bearing.
We input these images into our FPGA reconstructor, to obtain the following 3-d tomographic reconstruction of the MagAO controllers: Reconstruction of MagAO Controllers (looking away from the Celestial Sphere).
The control room appears to be less crowded on our current commissioning run, but a full 3-d tomographic observation is needed to be sure.
Tonight was our second night on-sky this run, and we have been accomplishing many engineering tasks. With the AO system, we have been testing and optimizing our AO parameters. Here is a PSF from yesterday, with only ~100 nm phase rms WFE: 61% Strehl at z’, closed loop with 378 modes.
With VisAO, we are calibrating our photometric system. With Clio, we are focusing and testing the pupil masks. And Vanessa has finished adding the AO and TCS keywords to the FITS headers, and it turned out to be very useful! Thanks, Vanessa!
Here are some images in M’ from Clio with the apodized-phase plate (APP) coronagraph:
A bright star imaged through the M’ APP coronagraph.A binary star imaged through the APP coronagraph. (Ignore the ghost)
Look at all those beautiful Airy rings! It’s a pretty great way to do coronagraphy on a binary star, because the APP is a phase mask placed in the pupil plane, so it attenuates the PSF of both stars.
Well, these nights are long since it’s getting to be winter, and so I’m really tired… let’s finish with some more pretty pictures: A guanaco gazes at the 100”.
This sunset picture shows a diffraction spike and ghosts and flares, just like the Clio image.Sunset at the Clay was exciting tonight — a few of us believe we saw the green flash for the first time!Looking to the east after sunset, the sky was just gorgeous.
Some quotes from today:
“You’re not doing astronomy if you don’t have to do everything twice” — Dave Osip
“I’m not going to give you any more quotes for the blog” — Povilas
“Do you know the ratio of the ghost?” — Laird
“Which one?” — Clio team, in unison
“I know my Astronomy!” — Vanessa
“Hold on. Let’s talk about what’s really important. Did everyone get
empanadas for their night lunch?” — TJ, interrupting discussions of
observing logs.
Tonight we closed the loop on-sky, on Kate and T.J.’s first night here this run.
We were able to use the new pupils we calibrated over the last few days, and Marco’s new interaction matrix, to close the AO loop with 378 modes. This was a big step forward! The wavefront error was close to 100 nm rms in 0.5-0.7″ seeing. This is our best correction yet!
Closed loop image of V~5 star at 980nm wavelength with coronagraph on VisAO.Clio display and Vanessa with a beautiful diffraction-limited image.AO WFS and ASM display.Focusing Clio in various filters as well as the APP.
Well the Wildcats lost to the Buckeyes this evening, but take heart, Arizona, things are looking up for us MagAO’ers down here.
MagAO says “Bear Down”
The main highlight of today is that the AO system is running closed loop on 0.8″ simulated seeing at 1 KHz sample speeds (where we were at the end of Comm 1). We have 300-325 modes running with a brand new (better) basis set of Fernando that will hopefully work on sky (which would be an improvement over the 200-250 modes achieved on-sky in comm 1). We’re going to keep the CRO on tomorrow night to take the time to get our interaction matrices and camera focus positions right… but everything seems to working well.
The loop closed with beautiful Pyramid pupils on the right and a beautiful red-optical PSF on the left.
There was also a VIP guest tour of AO operations today, and the guests were “more excited than undergrads” (as Vanessa put it) when we demonstrated closing the loop.
Jared wows the crowd with a closed-loop demonstration, and some exciting imagesKT impresses the crowd with her planet image.
Vanessa and I have been working on all sorts of housekeeping and optimizing Clio tasks…
Vanessa and I standing by Clio after it was mounted the other day
Of course the zoo is still hopping here:
A guanaco gazes at Las Campanas Peak, visualizing the future GMT on the now-flattened mountainMarco caught this awesome shot of Vizzy curling his tail, squeaking, and watching the sunset. We call this a “wild vizcacha” since he’s not at the Astronomer Support Building as is his wont, but is hopping about the landscape.
“You should show them the chaos that is MagAO” –Dave
“Sitting through an earthquake here feels like observing at the MMT” –Laird
“It’s the Wild West — It’s Cowboy astronomy” –Katie & Vanessa
Today we installed the NAS (the metal ring that mounts to the telescope and holds all our instruments) and the CRO (the calibration return optic, for internal alignment and calibration). We also said goodbye to Tyson — thanks for everything! It was a long day and I’m tired so this will have to be quick, even though lots of fun stuff happened.
First the NAS was installed. Povilas collimating the telescope before the NAS was put on.
Here comes the NAS, up from the basement of the dome.Mounting the NASThe pupil through the NAS ring
Then we needed to create a new fiducial for the CRO so that we could align our internal light source along the optical axis. It was a fun exercise by me, Marco, Alfio, and Vanessa, and it reminded me of the Inquiry labs I did in the Professional Development Program when I was a grad student.
Coming up with a procedure and then implementing it to create a new alignment fiducial on the back of the CRO.The final result of the new fiducial on the CRO.Laird and I putting some more tape on the CRO fiducial.Juan and Laird going up in the scissor lift to install the CRO (that I’m handing to Laird)Sunset
Quotes:
“Here, try it — shine a light in your eye!” — Laird
“I know I don’t like it just from looking at it.” — Laird
Laird: “This is a little unexpected.”
Povilas: “If it’s unexpected, that’s your fault.”
