Author: Katie Morzinski

First MagAO arrivals

Alan, Jared, and Katie arrived today as the first of the MagAO commissioning team.  We stopped at El Pino before heading up to the mountain.  Here are Jared and Alan with the eponymous tree:

El Pino
El Pino

La Serena is a beautiful beach town, and we couldn’t decide whether it reminds us of San Diego, Santa Cruz, or San Francisco.  You decide:

La Serena
La Serena

And here’s a picture for our various mothers and other followers who are fans of the many gorgeous flowers that are in bloom in late Spring in Chile:

Spring flowers
Spring flowers

Finally, we made it up to Las Campanas Observatory.  We saw our old friend Vizzy.  We also saw the sunset when we went up to visit our telescope, the 6.5-m Magellan Clay:

Katie at Clay
Katie at Clay

We went up and powered up all the motors and computers, and everything is working fine!  Clio is cooled and doing great.  Tomorrow we will attend the LCO turnover meeting, meet the staff, check up on our instruments and stages, and get prepped for the arrival of the PI.

Clio, 2012/11/12
Clio, 2012/11/12

Clio2 Gets The Freeze

After shipping, unpacking, and verifying that everything still works, the last step was for Manny and Richard to cool Clio2 down. Then they took some pictures.

Manny celebrates after taking a good, low-noise, pupil image. He and Richard just successfully cooled Clio2 down to operating temperature and confirmed that the detector works.

Since it works in the IR, basically detecting the heat of planets and brown dwarfs, Clio2 is kept very cold. This is because a blackbody at room-temperature emits most of its energy at a wavelength of about 10 μm, according to Wien’s law. A lot of flux from the tail of the distribution is also emitted at near-IR wavelengths of 1–5 μm. Therefore, for IR astronomy, it is important to keep the telescope and the instrument cold, to avoid this excess thermal flux, which shows up as noise in our images (you’ll hear us call it “sky” or “background”).

To make this work, Clio is contained in a dewar, which is a kind of vacuum flask (a.k.a. Thermos) — an insulated canister that keeps cryogenic material at very cold temperatures. Clio2 has a nested-dewar design with an outer and an inner vessel. The cryogen we use is liquid nitrogen, which has a boiling point of 77 K stp. We also lower the pressure in the inner dewar, using a vacuum pump, in order to solidify the nitrogen (55 K). A blackbody of 77 K emits most of its radiation at ~38 μm, and a blackbody of 55 K emits most of its radiation at ~53 μm. These wavelengths are well beyond what we care about when hunting planets.

In case you ever find yourself in charge at LCO, the cooldown steps and instructions for refilling cryogens are also posted in the Clio user manual.

Tracking Clio

Our IR science camera, Clio, has arrived in Chile and is in transit to LCO.  Here’s a pic from last month in Arizona: 

Clio and friends
Clio flanked by Manny Montoya (left) and Mitch Nash (right), in the lab at Steward last month.

Stay tuned – more updates about Clio coming soon.

Arizona call for proposals, 2013A

The director of Arizona’s telescope time at Magellan has just issued a call for proposals for MagAO for 2013A.  This is for shared-risk observing during our second commissioning run, during early April of next year.  These observations will demonstrate our new AO system and science cameras in the best way possible — with science!  Eligible astronomers are at public universities in Arizona (those sharing Magellan telescope time with us).  This is an exciting opportunity to get involved in the first high-order AO system having broad O/IR spectral coverage!

Please see our webpage with information for observers for help in planning your telescope proposals.  The optical wavelengths will be available for observation with VisAO and the near-infrared with Clio2.

Note that we (the commissioning team) will execute, in a “mini-queue”, the top TAC ranked MagAO proposals (for Clio2 or VisAO or both) in a shared-risk manner. The proposal PI would participate with the team, and could optionally join us in person, but attendance at Magellan would not be required. All proposals for this special call need to be signed off on by the MagAO PI (Laird Close, lclose at as.arizona.edu, 520 626 5992) before TAC submission. The MagAO commissioning team would receive proper credit (co-authorship) for our efforts in accomplishing any of the proposed science programs.