Author: Katie Twitchell

It’s nearly three weeks into this observing run and being stuck on this mountain together has finally driven us to form opposing factions. Professor Laird Close fearlessly leads the “day shift” camp: holders of doctoral degrees, champions of going to bed at a reasonable hour, and cart-building aficionados. The second “night shift” faction is largely anarchist, with its leadership defaulting to whichever graduate student is the least sleepy when a decision needs to be made. Only the unthinkable, an alliance between these two groups, will grant us the strength to accomplish our next monumental task. That’s right—it’s about time to uninstall MagAO-X from the telescope.

But before we do that, we had one last night of on-sky shenanigans (and science!) to get to. Before sunset, Eden went pro-photographer on some viscachas, and Jialin caught a tender moment:

We then briefly reconciled our differences to focus on something both night owls and early birds can agree on: watching the beautiful sunset together. Sadly, this is our last sunset with Sebastiaan and Elena before they head back to the Netherlands. We wish they would come hang out with us in the Sonoran Desert sometime, not just the Atacama… “Parting is such sweet sorrow”

Tonight was an observing night for our Michigan/MIT collaborators, and we were able to get some really nice Hα images once the seeing calmed down in the second half of the night: “[MagAO-X] will make the face of heaven so fine / That all the world will be in love with night”. The day-shifters missed the best seeing due to their sensible bedtime, but on their way down the mountain they stumbled upon some critters we hadn’t yet met on this run:

Once we’d closed up for the night, the de-cabling crew took on the task of shutting down the instrument and beginning the removal process. Despite a pervasive, nagging sensation that we were under-supervised, we managed to get the instrument ready for the day crew’s craning operations.

As I write this, the day crew is up on the telescope platform picking up where we left off. Despite our differences, I wish them the best of luck in their endeavors. We’ll reunite in the cleanroom sometime later today to begin reassembling the whole thing—but that’s content for another blog post.

Song of the Day: okay, okay. This might be a bit of a stretch from this run’s blog rules. I really love classical music, but since there had to be song lyrics written into the blog post I thought I’d have to abstain this run. Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet Overture does not contain lyrics, however it is based off of a play that is rife with quotes that seemed appropriate. We’re getting close to the end of the run here, so I figured why not:

Empanada Sunday is always hard to follow, but today started off on a really strong note: an adult and a baby vizzy graced us with their presence just before sunset. Viscachas are notoriously jumpy creatures (in both senses of the word), so there was a National Geographic-esque effort to get some decent shots. Fortunately, our efforts paid off. I now present to you some full-resolution images of the cutest little guys known to mankind:

And some slightly-less-cute behind-the-scenes footage:

After the sun went down and vizzy-viewing was over, we got straight to work. Jay and I first fiddled with some cables on the platform to diagnose a shutter issue, and before we knew it, we were on-sky. The seeing started off a little rough at >1 arcsecond, but after a little patience and a little tweaking the AO system, we started to produce some good images for our collaborators at Michigan/MIT.

(quick aside: if you don’t know what we mean by “seeing,” this blog post by Logan offers a quick and easy explanation).

The last few hours of the night were for engineering. We started off with a game of telephone: Laird went onto the telescope platform to do some alignment with Jialin acting as chief flashlight-holder and walkie-talkie user. I sat in the driver’s seat in the telescope control room with the other walkie-talkie and Jared on Zoom. To get our mirror aligned, I relayed communication from Jared over the walkie-talkie to Jialin, who then relayed the message to Laird. Then Laird would tweak the alignment and tell Jialin, who radioed the message to me where it was finally heard by Jared. Thankfully it only took us a couple of iterations, and nothing got too garbled as the message made its way from Point A to Point B.

After alignment we continued with more engineering tasks, mostly trying to use our low-order wavefront sensor to get vibrations under control. I also got some time to experiment with the ADCs (atmospheric dispersion controllers). Unbeknownst to me, as I tinkered with speckle fitting and prism angles, the other two first-year grad students on the mountain (with the help of the talented Jialin Li) were taking portraits that would make any astronomy aficionado burn with envy:

Oh well. There are many nights yet to come. In honor of finally (sort of) getting into the rhythm of a night schedule, the song of the day:

Don’t wake me with so much
. . .
My bed is pulling me, gravity

Michael Stipe (and also me)

We’re off! The Tucson MagAO-X crew (notably sans PI) set out for our 2024B run at pretty much the crack of dawn on Sunday. Delta Airlines must have heard through the grapevine about Jay and Jared’s intercontinental sprint from last time and opted to intervene—when we booked these flights, the only option from TUS-ATL was taking off bright and early at 7:10 AM. We all found each other at our departure gate (we congre-gate-d? that one’s for you, Josh), redistributed the snack load, and boarded the plane without a hitch.

Given that I don’t normally wake up at 5 AM, I was asleep pretty much the second I found my seat. I woke up about an hour later convinced that we must at least be somewhere over Texas, but when I pulled up the window screen I was dismayed to discover we hadn’t moved an inch; perhaps the lack of jet-engine noise and air turbulence was the reason I’d slept so well. From what I gathered from the captain’s announcement (in which I heard an airline pilot say the phrase “this is really embarrassing” for the first time), there had been a minor computer malfunction. Maintenance had been called in to deactivate the broken computer so the backup could be used, but instead they disabled both the broken and the working computer. Oops. This resulted in our sitting on the tarmac for about 2 1/2 hours, de-planing, and then re-boarding before leaving sometime around 10:30 AM. If any of us had wished for a later flight, our wish was certainly granted.

Despite the maintenance difficulties, we arrived at ATL with ample time to grab a smoothie, stretch our legs, and get some homework done. I guess a 6-hour layover really does make you delay-proof.

We boarded our second flight with no issue. However, as a fun little treat and test of our patience, the captain again came over the PA system to let us know that maintenance needed to fix something up before we could take off. Thankfully, this time it only resulted in about 10 minutes of delay, and a (not) short nine hours later we arrived in Santiago!

We learned a few lessons in the Santiago airport, the chief being that the line to re-check bags with LATAM is fast if you have Delta Status, but if you don’t have status you can skip the long “regular people” line by being declared a “problem” by the airport staff. Not naming names. 

An obligatory Starbucks run and a short flight later, we made it to La Serena, traded some Doctor Pepper Zero (a USA special) for some Nespresso at El Pino, and headed up to see our favorite telescopes. At LCO we met up with Sebastiaan and Elena, ate a group dinner, and—of course—watched the sun set.

Welcome back, everyone.

In honor of our journey, the song of the day is Traveling On by the Decemberists: