Lauren Perez – Extreme Wavefront Control Lab

MAPS April 2025A Night 2: Toky(A)o Drift

Not a sunset picture. I took this earlier in the day (I actually went outside! It was not 100 degrees out, so I decided to enjoy the weather.)

For the first time, Bianca and I are the only AOistas at the AO station for the entirety of a run. After last night’s work, we felt motivated to close the loop. In fact, I would even say we felt confident in our abilities to do so. We began the start of the night CACAO processes while making constant WFS pupil adjustments. Normally our pupils don’t drift this much, so we decided to check the pupil imager. Sure enough, our pupil image was vignetted.

Flashback to last night:

After alignment, we worked on booting up CACAO and acquired an RM. While checking RM modes, we noticed modes were not looking AO ready. They should not have chunks taken out of them. This led us to check the pupil image. We saw the same vignetting we see today.

Not smooth RM modes. Notice the chunk taken out in the bottom right corner of each | Photo Creds: Bianca Payan.

Vignetting as a result of MIRAC being off the center of rotation.

Our solution was to adjust alignment in the periscopes and MIRAC dichroic. With the remaining time in the night, Bianca and I were able to get to the part of the CACAO process where we open up the gains gui that allows us to close the loop. At this point, we did not notice any extreme drifting. Unfortunately, we were receiving errors while trying to open the gui, and sunrise was just around the corner.

Back to present:

Just as last night, Oli and Maggie adjusted the MIRAC dichroic and top-box periscopes. Bianca and I proceed to CACAO, but continue to face the same drifting issue. We now realize this vignetting/drifting issue is very repeatable. Our suspicion is that this is due to MIRAC being off the center of rotation. To test this, we realign to the telescope chief ray to see how AO performs without MIRAC. By the end of the night we are able to close the loop on 20 modes with minimal drifting. This was a bit tricky, as we did not have a PSF to reference as we were closing the loop (MIRAC is very useful for PSF imaging). Unfortunately, we cannot easily determine how good the loop is working purely based on vibes and what we can see from the acquisition camera.

Bianca and I closing the loop on 20 modes without the MIRAC PSF.

We came to the conclusion that we do not want to proceed using MIRAC this run. Our plan is to hopefully get PISCES installed before tomorrow night so that we can continue with the optimal setup to perform AO. To be continued…

Stay tuned for the next chapter of the MAPS April 2025 run!

The song of the night is “Drift Away” by Uncle Kracker.

MAPS Feb. 2025A Night 2: The Fog

As much as I hate to report it, the MAPS crew is once again trapped in a cloud. For a few days now, the forecast has consistently predicted high cloud coverage for all of tonight. To be sure, we performed our own professional survey of the sky at sunset. Yep, those clouds look cloudy, and it seems like they want to stick around with us.

We decided it was best to make ourselves cozy in the dorm common building while waiting for any break in the clouds. Bianca and I took this time to practice AO/CACAO set up . ݁₊ ⊹ remotely. ݁˖ ⊹ ݁. We have ran through this process four times between the two of us so far this run without making any dire mistakes. Amali has trained us well! Additionally, we properly troubleshooted an issue with the visible wavefront sensor camera, which was reporting a frame rate of ~2000 instead of the expected 500.

Unfortunately, there is not a fireplace here. Instead, we turned on all of the “cozy” lights (minus the lamp that had exposed wires in place of prongs on its plug) and a space heater. For some ambient noise, we turned on the tv to the H&I channel. This was not by choice, but the remote wasn’t working. Walker, Texas Ranger (5.7 stars on imdb), featuring Chuck Norris, was playing. I think the cheesy acting and ’90s aesthetic of the show really helped set the vibes for the night.

Our cozy setup. Note the 94% humidity reading.

I made a few trips outside throughout the night. The fog that engulfed Mt. Hopkins was quite dense, and I could not see further than five feet in front of me. Around 2 AM, we declared the night to be unobservable.

The song of the night is “Clouds” by One Direction, which is featured on their best album (in my professional opinion): FOUR.

Bonus song because it is February 14th:

MAPS Dec. 2024B Night 3: MAPS “Pop” Culture

‘Twas the night before running AO, when all through the telescope
The wind was violently stirring, we had lost all our hope;
The MAPS team decided that the night would finish
In hopes that tomorrow the gales would diminish;
There are 52 more lines in this old-time poem
So I will write the remainder of this blog in the way that we know ’em

༄ ⋆⁺₊❅.⁺˚⋆｡°✩₊･:*༄:｡

As soon as I stepped outside, I could tell tonight was the night we would be able to start running AO. The sky was clear, and the roaring winds of last night were gone.
It was silent… too silent. I couldn’t help but feel as if something else would soon stir up our night.

A nice, clear, calm sunset from the Bowl dorms

Another stunning, beautiful sunset. Photo credit: Bianca Payán

We all arrived at the telescope and set everything up just like any other night: Bianca and I filled BLINC and uncovered the science cameras, Amali booted up the ASM and prepared to start up CACAO/AO, Ben, our telescope operator, moved us to our first target, and Krishna and Jorge confirmed the absence of the target viewed from MIRAC.

Wait. What? Where’s the star!? Krishna and Jorge scramble around their work station trying to understand what is going on. Everything was fine yesterday! Why can’t we see our target tonight?? After two days of alignment, they are confused as to why this is happening.
Minutes pass by. *scramble scramble*
No star. *clickity clack*
Still no star. *brrrrrr… pop, pop!*
Popcorn is done!

In the heat of the moment, ~~Krishna~~ an ASU grad student (who is also looking to buy a car – check previous blog) fuels themselves with popcorn, hoping the sustenance will give them comfort in troubling times as well as the power to solve the issue. Everyone else joins in, munching on popcorn, as a call is made to MIRAC P.I. Jarron. The unnamed grad student’s popcorn munching intensifies. Right as Manny and the MIRAC team are about to head up to the chamber to delve into the instrument, a beautiful, amoeba-like blob appears on the MIRAC viewer. A star! During the stress-eating frenzy, we moved to a new target, made various telescope movements, fixed coma between the primary and secondary, and adjusted voltages on the MIRAC chopper. The combination of those actions allowed us to see our target on MIRAC as we desired.

While we waited for Amali to get CACAO running, a few of us decided we wanted a break from staring at the sky on a screen so that we could instead stare at the sky with our own eyes. Conveniently, the Geminid meteor shower was happening tonight, and we were in the perfect place to view it. To my surprise, the meteors looked significantly brighter and closer to us than when viewing from Tucson. I stood out there for 20 minutes, attempting to get a picture of a shooting star for the blog (I am always thinking of you). I had hoped to capture a picture of a shooting star coming out from Orion and heading towards the telescope dome, as if Orion himself was shooting it. It got cold, and my arms were sore from holding my phone up in the sky, so I gave up and went inside. I shall leave you with a sky cam image instead.

Geminid meteor (circled in red) seen from the MMT sky cam.

We go back inside to continue working, still feeling the energizing effects of the popcorn that fueled us. Throughout the wee hours of the night, Amali works towards closing the loop on 50 modes. As expected, she is able to successfully do this, thus confirming we are back on track to continue where we left off in August! (For those of you who didn’t know, pushing the ASM to 100 modes during the August run resulted in the loss of 24 magnets. To keep things short, software issues lead to magnet detaching issues.) Four months of hard work pays off! Despite the seeing going between 1.5 and 2.2 arcsecs, Amali continues working. We even verified that CHAI responds appropriately to overheating actuators by going into ESTOP – we have learned this is a crucial part to not losing 24 magnets. Meanwhile, Krishna spends the entire last half of the night coding away, developing a script to find centroids of hot pixels. That popcorn really does work. Thank you, Manny!

MIRAC PSF of 50 modes.
Closed loop → open loop → closed loop

Krishna’s plot showing a MIRAC image and its corresponding PSF. The image is in L-band with the AO loop closed on 50 modes. The FWHM of the PSF is 0.13″ which is also the proposed slit width for the soon to be commissioned ARIES spectrograph!

The song of the night is “Popcorn” by The Muppets.

MAPS Aug. 2024B Night 6: On and Off

Welcome to the last blog for the MAPS August 2024 observing run!

The evening started off with Grant and Oli performing an LED strip test that would allow us to more clearly see out of focus images on our pupil lens and visible wavefront sensor. The LED light strip was placed in front of the ASM, along the radius of the shell. Our pupil image was clearly out of focus. Ideally, the circles of light (each individual LED bulb) should not be overlapping. They should look as they would if you were to look directly at the LED strip itself. The VIS WFS image looks better, as you can see more defined pixels of light.

Out of focus pupil image. If you own an LED light strip and ASM, you can replicate this at home!

LED strip test on the VIS WFS. WFS pupils should not normally look like this.

After waiting for a few storms to dissipate, we get straight to doing some AO. Amali closes the loop on 50 modes, then closes on a whopping 100 modes shortly after. The 50 mode loop had a 1.4 lambda/D full width half maximum, and the 100 mode loop had a 1.8 lambda/D FWHM. GO TEAM! Tonight’s honorable target was FK5 0672, theta Herculis.

Open loop for comparison. Pupil and PSF quality courtesy of atmospheric turbulence.

50-mode loop on and off. Video taken by Amali Vaz.

Bonus Jared quote of the night: “We need more monitors.”

Now we hand things over to Grant and Oli. They battle the on and off cloudy weather as they work on VIS pyramid alignment.

Starlight, no starlight, starlight, no starlight, starlight, no sta-

After they scrambled the topbox (moved the vis CTL and CCID75), the VIS WFS pupils looked VISibly better.

After topbox alignment. The clouds took away some starlight on our pupil image.

With our new, beautiful WFS pupils, Amali, Bianca, and I take turns taking 50 and 100 mode response matrices. The image below is a 50-mode self RM, which confirms we are sensing the same modes that are being poked.

Unfortunately, AO had to come to a halt with about an hour left of observing time. While taking some RM’s, we noticed a giant red blob on our actuator position and current map. Red blobs are not good, as they indicate contamination in the ASM. What could this contaminant be? We are not sure yet, but it could be anything from a detached magnet to a bug seeking warmth.

That brings us to the end of the August 2024 MAPS run! I haven’t even hit the one year mark of working with the MAPS team, but I can still say that I am proud of how far we’ve come since my first run.

Goodnight MMT, goodnight air, goodnight stars, goodnight ladybugs and abnormally large daddy long leg spiders that are everywhere.

:･ﾟ✧:･.☽˚｡･ﾟ✧:･.:

As we all make our way home, I would like us to keep the song of the night in mind: “On the Road Again”, but specifically Donkey’s version from Shrek.

MAPS Aug. 2024B Night 4: 100 Modes and Tornadoes

Hello! My name is Lauren. Similarly to Bianca (introduced in the last blog post), I am research staff for CAAO, and the second padawan under the great Amali Vaz. This is my sixth MAPS observing run, and I have been given the duty of making my first blog post! Since we are currently clouded over, I will mostly be filling you in on the non-AO happenings of tonight…

As soon as I was awoken from my slumber by the sound of thunder, I knew the day that we had all been dreading (just for astronomical reasons) had arrived. Once we got to the summit, I decided to enjoy the cloudy weather and see what the great outdoors had to offer today. Out of the corner of my eyes, I saw two little blobs hopping around. Coatis!

This coati and I had a staredown for a minute or so.

The second coati quite literally huffed at me and ran away. I was a little offended that the wild animal did not sense my calm, animal-loving spirit.

Besides rain and hail, there were other interesting meteorological happenings in the area today. First, a tornado warning was issued early this evening in southern Pima County. Just a couple hours later, another tornado warning occurred in Dragoon, AZ. This led to the important conversation of where we should go for shelter in the case that a tornado rudely passes through the MMT.

Pop quiz:

If a tornado warning occurs in the MMT area, what should you do?

a) Seek shelter at the top of the dome b) Seek shelter in an area away from windows and external walls c) Rotate the building at the same speed and in the opposite direction of the tornado in order to counteract the tornado (Yoav’s idea)

Artist interpretation of Yoav’s idea. MMT image courtesy of Frank Taylor

One good thing about cloudy nights is that we can always work on software. Thanks to Andrew and Orlando, we can now control filter wheel positions through INDI, which can also be selected in the INDI GUI.

In addition, Amali and Jared set up the wavefront sensor simulation with CACAO! They successfully closed the loop with 50 modes.

Alas! The sky has cleared and now we can do some AO. Amali gets to CACAOing, working on taking 100-mode response matrices, while closing the loop on 50 modes. While doing so, we noticed a nice core and parts of Airy rings on the MIRAC PSF. The honorable target was FK5 0857, eta Pegasi.

Midway through this, a minuscule cloud perfectly obscured our target.

However, all good things must come to an end. There are storms developing nearby, and we close for the rest of the night.

The song of the night is “You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)” in honor of the rotating MMT building.