I fell asleep trying to write this blog last night, if that tells you anything about how hard we’ve been working now that we’re back down here at LCO. That’s right — all good things must come to an end, and MagAO-X’s first experiment with remote operations has finally called it a wrap. Uninstall day started bright and early (well, dark and early) at 5AM, where we briefly regrouped with the home team on Zoom before the telescope closed up. Once the telescope was safely parked, we took a few measurements on the platform for posterity and began the familiar procedure of undoing all of our hard work from install day back in March.
Since there’s only three of us and we’ve done this more than a few times, we only seem to have photos of measurements and random silly moments. Very few pictures of the actual work, of course.
It hasn’t been overly cold here but it has been super windy! That made it even more important to bundle up our instrument real tight for the ride down the hill.
the case of the missing cart boltsroburrito
Despite only having three of us here, we were able to stay on pretty much the same schedule as we do when the whole gang is lending a hand. Everything was moved into the cleanroom and all but the DM cables were complete before dinner, which is a lot more work than it sounds like. Our smooth progress came to a grinding halt, however, when we started to have serious problems with the drives on one of the computers. While Jared and Joseph tried to diagnose the issue, Parker and I packed up the infrared camera for our friends Rob and Viktoria back in Durham.
teaching parker the ways of the spanner wrench
At this point, I can’t really remember what exactly happened the rest of the evening. That’s my bad for waiting so long to write this blog. But by looking at the random photos in my camera roll I can tell you that we did the following in some order at some time after we brought everything to the cleanroom:
Uninstalled and packed up the HDFS to bring back to the HCAT lab
Removed the y-band filter from fwpupil
Back-flushed the glycol system and cleaned the filter
Drained the CRED-2 of glycol
Checked the ADC alignment
Removed the infamous cardboard tubes
And before we knew it it was already 11PM.
Colors of the Day
Since we pulled an enormously long workday, I’m choosing two of my favorite contrasting colors from the sunset.
Remote observing feels weird. Not because of what goes on in the ROC, but rather because of what goes on outside the ROC. When we observe at LCO, Tucson starts to feel a little bit like a dream. When you’re on top of Cerro Manqui, the idea of grocery shopping or vacuuming or pulling up the weeds in the yard is so distant it’s almost ludicrous. There is only telescope. But, during these remote ops nights, those things aren’t far away. Dishes need to be done, cats need to be fed, the car runs out of gas, and your professors expect you to show up for class. The world doesn’t pause for observations in the way it sometimes feels like it does when we go down to Chile.
However, this means the good things in life also don’t get put on hold! These include, but are not limited to: the ability to replenish the snack pile mid-observing run, joyful toddler noises, and getting to sleep in your own bed at the end of a long night.
our love for brookside dark chocolate covered açai transcends all borders
it’s a shame they don’t make hoodies like that for adults
And, if you’re lucky like me, you get to show off your work to your parents! It would be a little bit of a journey for them to come down to Chile, but they made the trek down to Tucson this week. Among other things, they got to witness MagAO-X doing some real science in really good seeing conditions.
again with the brookside
While we don’t have a dedicated kitchen staff making us empanadas in Tucson, being able to get a Sonoran dog and a churro right before observations is pretty sweet. So I’ll stand by what I said: remote observing feels weird–but it certainly comes with perks.
I really hope we never have to align these cubes again!
Laird Close, MagAO-X 2026A Day 7
Today Laird and I aligned the beamsplitter cubes again. This time we discovered a faulty clamp, which is a better explanation for our constantly having to re-align than “perhaps someone is hexing us.” We’re confident that the problem is fixed for real this time–but if it happens again, we might have to seriously question if we’ve accidentally triggered an ancient curse.
they’re real cute though
The last two nights have been entirely engineering blocks, so tonight was the first time we had dedicated science time. Thanks to our hard work during engineering, the new infrared camera was up and ready to go for Sebastiaan’s observations at the beginning of the night. After the appropriate amount of ooh-ing and ah-ing over the exquisite stability of the H-band images, we spent some time looking for little guys:
That little guy? I wouldn’t worry about that little guy
Sebastiaan being Sebastiaan, we also had another tech demo to do tonight. After a long and arduous FedEx journey, a new coronagraph mask arrived at the telescope a few days ago. This very special mask, fabricated by our friends at UCSB, is a metasurface: a material with tiny (think nanometer-scale) structures printed on it that make light behave in very strange ways. This specific part is designed to function as a coronagraph at one wavelength and as a wavefront sensor at a different wavelength. Tonight was the first time a metasurface has been used for high-contrast imaging on a real star!
The star on the bottom right is actually much brighter than the star on the upper left, but we are blocking it with the metasurface coronagraph
Sadly, we hit a bit of a snag with the telescope hardware during the second half of the night. It’s always a huge bummer to miss out on telescope time, so here are some of today’s animal friends as a consolation prize:
You know it’s optical alignment day when you open your camera roll to write a blog post and it just looks like this:
“why don’t we take a picture of it, just to be safe”
It’s been an all-hands-on-deck kind of day. Our activities have ranged from the very low-tech (cardboard tubes) to the very high-tech (new infrared camera in the visitor port) to the sort-of-medium-tech (refractometer to measure glycol concentration). While all that’s going on, at any given moment there are a handful of graduate students in the library furiously writing code to do any number of things when we go on-sky soon.
he’s baffledgood news, our battery fluid is “fair”r u seein this
This morning, Laird and I monopolized the instrument to obsess over cubes. MagAO-X has three different science beamsplitter cubes, which allow us to create an image on two cameras at once. Last run, we replaced our old 50-50 beamsplitter with an r-i beamsplitter, which gets us more throughput by splitting the beam by color rather than just sending half in each direction. A couple days before heading down to Chile, we noticed the r-i cube behaving oddly, so today we took a crack at fixing it. Long story short, we learned two things: 1. If your clamp is too loose, bad things happen. 2. If your clamp is too tight, worse things happen.
smile if you can’t stop accidentally making fabry pérot etalons!
Around lunchtime, we got some really exciting news: the infrared camera from our Durham collaborators finally made it onto the mountain! My roommate Viktoria and I swapped spots, and the joint Durham/Leiden team has been gowned up in the cleanroom working tirelessly all afternoon/evening.
three cheers for CRED2!
it must be wear-matching-outfits-with-your-advisor day
And, there’s nothing better than getting to see the fruits of your labors:
Now that’s an Airy disk if I’ve ever seen one.
Honestly, I think this means the color of the day should technically be “infrared.” But humans, unlike snakes, can’t see that far into the electromagnetic spectrum, so I present to you: beamsplitter-cube green – a color that makes an appearance on the left side of the middle cube in this photo.
PASADENA, CALIFORNIA – Every fewyears, an eclectic group of scientists and engineers gathers in a scenic location to discuss the minutiae that come with taking pictures of really dim things next to really bright things. The Spirit of Lyot conference is named for one Bernard Lyot, a French astronomer known for inventing an instrument to observe the Sun’s corona without having to wait around for a solar eclipse.
Early on in the conference, one of the organizers clarified that this gathering was about Lyot’s “spirit” meaning legacy, not his literal ghost. Now, we here at MagAO-X most certainly honor Lyot’s high-contrast legacy by observing binaries, disks, and planets. But, it’s also worth mentioning that if there’s one thing optical engineers are haunted by, it’s ghosts.
For those unfamiliar, a ghost is a technical term used in optics to describe an unwanted reflection. Put simply, this could be anything from seeing your own face reflected back at you when you’re trying to look out the window to having your laser bounce back off lenses it’s supposed to transmit through. Optical ghosts are pernicious little things; they can cause unwanted spots on your camera or even render your g-band filter practically useless. They’re difficult to get rid of, but pretty easy to introduce. So, in order to understand Dr. Bernard Lyot’s true opinion of MagAO-X’s contribution to his conference, I have taken it upon myself to summon his (optical) ghost this Friday the 13th and ask about his approval or disapproval on some things we did last week.
whether or not this is *technically* a ghost is up for debate, but I certainly consider seeing myself in my laptop screen as an “unwanted reflection”
APPROVED: A Plethora of Posters
From graduate students to postdocs, Lyot agrees we kept MagAO-X well-represented at both poster sessions throughout the week. In no particular order:
And this isn’t even all of them!
DISAPPROVED: Yassification
“Mais c’est quoi ça??”
-the spirit of Lyot, upon being shown the AI-yassified versions of our poster presentation photos
Out of respect for him (and Hayao Miyazaki), I will not include them here.
APPROVED: Talks on Talks on Talks
During the instrumentation sessions, we found ourselves well-represented. On Thursday, Jared talked about next-generation HCI with GMagAO-X, Laird got the chance to talk about WISPIT 2b, and Miles did some polarimetry show-and-tell about some disk observations. We also got to hear talks from Rico, Louis, and Adam, members of Sebastiaan’s group in Leiden, and Saraswathi, a postdoc from UASAL.
On Friday, Josh told us about the highs and lows of building the Self-Coherent Camera on the CACTI testbed, and Sebastiaan closed out the MagAO-X talks by giving an overview of the many, many emerging technologies in our field.
DISAPPROVED: Upside-down Glasses
A couple of us took the chance to tour NASA JPL, which got a seal of approval from both the four of us and the Spirit of Lyot. However, he (rightfully) poked fun at the picture of my failure to understand how 3D glasses work.
our girl voyagerooooh ahhhhJay’s kryptonite around every corner
APPROVED: Family Dinner
The conference dinner was held at Caltech’s Athenaeum. Not everyone could make it (places to be, e.g. Target), so we made sure to get a family photo beforehand.
say cheese!
DISAPPROVED: Etiquette Ignorance
I have no visual to illustrate this, but let’s just say Parker and I exchanged a very panicked glance when we saw the number of utensils we were expected to use at this dinner. Luckily we had a couple of former Navy Nukes to teach us the difference between a salad fork and a regular one.
APPROVED: Astro-tourism
If you believe his Wikipedia page, Lyot was also an avid mountaineer and even trekked to the Pic du Midi observatory when it was only accessible by cross-country ski. Naturally, his spirit approved of the group that stayed a little bit longer to make the journey up Mount Wilson.
c = 3×10^8 m/s
DISAPPROVED: A Seat-cushion Mishap
Ever wondered why, during the standard aircraft safety briefing, they tell you to ask for assistance if you lose an electronic device in your seat? Well, I no longer wonder that. Let’s just say the pilot himself came out to help at one point. The important part is that Josh and his earbud were reunited, safe and sound.
APPROVED: Song of the Day
In the spirit of Lyot: a French song that talks about both the Sun and finding something that exists, but was hiding:
