Author: Katie Morzinski

Tonight we had great seeing and also fixed a hardware problem, allowing us to practice operating the AO system, VisAO, and Clio under ideal conditions. In fact, Laird ran the AO system, under Alfio’s careful tutelage, and the loop never spontaneously opened the whole night! This is thanks to Runa who replaced the switch BCU earlier in the evening:

We miss Vanessa, who left yesterday, but now Alycia is here and she is able to help TJ run Clio on their targets, while I was running it with Laird on our targets. This is great and enabled me to get a bit of a break from observing at the beginning of the night, to work on other things. We are still engineering all our various modes — below is a photo of “waffle mode” that creates a cross pattern due to uncorrectable modes — and we are making great progress!

One of the Clio modes we’ve been excited to test, for imaging faint companions, is the APP coronagraph. Here’s a pupil image of the APP with a bright star:

Our shipment of hard drives and hard hats finally arrived.

Vanessa had to leave because her skills are also in demand at the LBTI. But here’s one last picture of her and Jared, two graduates of Brookings High School, South Dakota, doing awesome work to bring the sharpest images in the darkest skies. Thanks for all your hard work, Vanessa!

This is good work but exhausting. It’s nice to have something beautiful to see when we step out of the dome in the morning, to head down to a breakfast of fresh-squeezed orange juice and oatmeal and yogurt:

Quotes:
“Call it Laird… dot tickle” (aka .tcl) — Katie to TJ, writing a TCL script to observe Laird’s target.
“Be motivated.” — Runa
“It’s like driving a rover on Mars.” — Alycia, watching TJ align Clio’s pupil, which is a very tricky business.
“It’s like a 6.5-meter space telescope!” –Laird, marveling at how well VisAO is working.

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.

We input these images into our FPGA reconstructor, to obtain the following 3-d tomographic reconstruction of the MagAO controllers:

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:

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:

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:

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!

Well the Wildcats lost to the Buckeyes this evening, but take heart, Arizona, things are looking up for us MagAO’ers down here.

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.

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.

Vanessa and I have been working on all sorts of housekeeping and optimizing Clio tasks…

Of course the zoo is still hopping here:

“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