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:
We’ve really settled into a rhythm here on the mountain top. While our individual wake-up times vary, we all mosey on down to the lodge for dinner at around 6:30. After an unfailingly excellent meal (and perhaps a cup of tea), the first shift of AO operators make their way up to the summit and start aligning MagAO-X for the night. The TO opens the dome, we set up our observations, and then we spend the night doing cutting-edge science and engineering until the Sun threatens to peek above the horizon. It’s not without hiccups–the atmosphere doesn’t always behave and neither does your code–but it’s honestly impressive that we’re able to pull it off night after night.
a fox yells at me for forgetting my glasses in my room (again)watching alpha cen rise from the telescope catwalk
Tonight had its ups and downs but overall fell nicely into that rhythm. While I revised my SPIE abstract downstairs, Parker and his crew did another round of Tau ceti observations. I made it back for Eden’s observation block, which was filled with complex coronagraphs, art criticism, and cat photos. We were also able to commission our Lyot low-order wavefront sensor (LLOWFS, pronounced yo-fuss), which uses rejected starlight from a reflective Lyot stop to control our non-common-path DM. The result is more stability in the coronagraph, which makes finding planets easier. Atmospheric seeing was … not great for the first little while, but our noble efforts to press through were rewarded with an incredible second half of the night. Our data were stellar, in both senses of the word.
powerful women of MagAO-Xcaught off guard
At least to me, at this point in the run Tucson starts to feel a bit like a dream. Maybe it’s because I’m avoiding yet another controls assignment, but something about this mountain makes the rest of the world feel less concrete. You walk outside, and the moonlight illuminates the peaks in the distance; you walk inside, and you see a team of people all working towards the common goal of seeing things no one has seen before. Perhaps I’m over-romanticizing because I’m running on very little sleep, but you can’t deny that there’s a unique feeling here. It might just be the reason we come back night after night, run after run, year after year.
Fun fact of the day: the painting “Sailor Boy” by Columbian artist Fernando Botero hangs in the Tucson Museum of Art.
This is now my fourth(!) observing run, and they’ve all had a unique flavor to them—but if there’s one thing I can count on, it’s sleeping like a brick the first night at LCO after 30+ hours of travel. This morning the three of us were feeling sufficiently back-from-the-dead, and we hit the ground running on getting MagAO-X ready to be on-sky this Thursday. We started out with some plumbing, removing the pink goo that builds up in our glycol filter and giving it some brand-new o-rings to prevent leaks. Once we confirmed cooling was up and running, Parker took some time to work on his accelerometers while Jared and I brought stagebs back to life:
“I’m acc-ing!”goop
After lunch I took some time to hide in my room, stare at plots of Xs and Os, and question the stability of both my control systems and possibly my own mental state (the timing of this midterm was kind of inconvenient). At about the same time, two wild postdocs appeared, one of which had gotten much more sleep than the other. The more well-rested postdoc and I took a walk up the mountain and we introduced him to the cleanroom, the library, and most importantly, the espresso machine.
The rest of the afternoon was spent aligning Miles’ polarization generator so that we could capture nice flat fields on both the camscis. Not too bad for having only been at LCO for a few hours.
a polarizing figurealignment laser on targetthe flat field in question is not pictured, but trust me it was flat
We haven’t yet been graced by the presence of cleanroom vizzys, but Carlos el culpeo was feeling mischievous and photogenic tonight, and we are all the better for it.
why hello up there!smiling for the camera?plus, a bonus burro
Random fun fact of the day: did you know that one of the world’s largest viruses, Megavirus chilensis, was discovered in water samples from the coast of Chile in 2010 and is larger than many bacteria?
