Logan Pearce – Extreme Wavefront Control Lab

MagAO-X 2024Aa Day 20: A Day and a Halffert

Tonight was an oddball: we were off the telescope for another observer for the first half, then came up at 1:30 for the second half, which was solely Sebastiaan on VIS-X, our spectrograph. So we had half a Haffert night.

Various angles of Sebastiaan squinting at spectra

It also the last night of the run, so you know what that means: spending all day getting MagAO-X off the telescope and put away for the May run. Some of us slept for the first half of the night, including me. I went to bed after dinner and slept until 12:30am and it was glorious. At the end of night we will go up on the platform and de-cable the instrument. Then we head to bed and the morning crew, who went to bed around midnight or so, will get up and get ‘er off the platform with the LCO crew. We will join them again after lunch. Fortunately we don’t have to prepare for shipping this time and only have to button her down until May.

We ended up observing well into dawn so we got a late start on decable, the morning crew came up as we got started. Pics from decable crew:

And with that we retired to our room for a few hours while morning crew takes over.

And there is the 8am down-the-mountain transport picking up riders. That’ll be us tomorrow fam.

Anyway here is an assortment of pics for your viewing pleasure.

So milky. Credits to Sebastiaan (left) and Jialin (right)

Large and Small Magellenic (Milky?) Clouds, only visible from the southern hemisphere. Photo by Eden.

Keep a lookout for the upside-down Orion constellation to the left here. Proof the Earth is a sphere. Photo credit to Sebastiaan.

Eden got some incredible Carlos footage I felt wasn’t properly displayed here, so here’s some fox for you. (Not a true fox)

He is a look-don’t-touch friend.

Yesterday was April fools but on Day 19 we couldn’t get our act together to post something witty.

The day before was Easter Sunday. So here is a repost of the Easter Viz

The song of the day is Break It Down Again by Tears for Fears.

MagAO-X 2024Aa Day 12: Off the charts

If you’ve been around this blog a time or two you’ve probably heard our woes with respect to seeing — the measurement of just how twinkly the stars are. Twinkling is bad for science, and our instrument can’t operate well if the seeing is too high.

We started this run with some pretty good seeing! In fact, two nights ago was the first night for my program and the seeing was excellent! I was able to observe a lot of my targets and get great images. You might have seen that last night was less spectacular, and I’m sad to see tonight is no different.

To the mooooooon — Off the charts seeing

That’s 2.5 arcsec seeing, wind gusts of 35.

Before we closed for wind and more engineering, Jialin got to drive some and I took some maybe-useable data.

Some animals and nice shots from the day.

Some of Eden’s lovely telescope night shots

BUT WAIT! The night’s not over yet. Immediately after my time was up and I left the control room, seeing tanked just in time for Jay’s disk observations

The night ended strong with Jay riding out his target until sunrise.

Some of you may have clocked that I arrived a bit late to the mountain this time. Well here is the quick story time.

In May last year I had a foot surgery that through many ups and downs has still not fully healed today (that’s a story for another time). I haven’t been able to bear weight on my left foot since May, approximately 10 months of not using my foot. About three weeks ago I got the go ahead to start walking on it again, and I was slowly and carefully transitioning back to bearing weight. But even though I was mostly walking, I couldn’t walk long distances, so I decided to bring my knee scooter to get around the airports easily.

In Santiago customs I got selected for an extra security scan and as I was hauling my luggage around I lost balance and fell over the front of the scooter, which severely messed up my left first metatarsil bone (the main bone through your foot leading to each toe). I couldn’t put any weight even on my heel or move or touch or even put my croc shoe on my foot. So I decided to stay in La Serena and see a doctor to be sure it wasn’t broken. It wasn’t. But the long period of disuse makes it incredibly lucky that it wasn’t! I saw the dr again a few days later, then headed up on Thursday.

I’m doing a lot better now! Still not walking, I’ve got crutches now to get around the site. But definitely better. At this trajectory I might be able to walk some by the time we leave.

So that’s the story!

The song of the day is The Calamity Song by The Decemberists

2024Aa Packing Party

MagAO-X is up and off to the great mountain in the south! As we are approaching our next great observing run, this time in two parts: 2024Aa in March (14 nights) and 2024Ab in May (10 nights). We spent the week packing her up and buttoning her down, and today saw her stuffed into the shipping truck and waved goodbye.

Our mascot for this run is the Bubo Magellenicus, or the Lesser Horned Owl (of fluffy–butt allsky cam fame)

Please enjoy this video and pics of the week’s events.

The song of the day is Yakety Sax

Annular eclipse of the heart: L&L adventures reprised

I suspect all of our readers will be aware that last Saturday there was an eclipse event over the US. At 9:30 am Tucson Time was the peak of the annular eclipse, an eclipse where the moon is at the furthest point on its orbit, called apogee, so the disk of the moon is a smaller angular size on the sky than the sun (where normally they are essentially the same size) so it doesn’t block the whole disk and you can’t see the corona. Instead you get a “ring of fire” caused by the moon’s antumbra on the Earth’s surface.

Source: https://www.eclipsewise.com/solar/SEhelp/SEbasics.html

Tucson was not in the area of max shadow, it only got about 80% coverage. So some XWCL members traveled to regions getting the full antumbra effect.

I met up with XWCL alum Lauren Schatz and UA OpSci grad Silvana Ovaitt. When Lauren was at XWCL she was my hiking and camping buddy, so we reunited for more L&L adventures by camping in Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park!

We also went on a backcountry guided tour off the public access road and led by a local named Larry

Song of the day is Black Hole Sun by Soundgarden.

It’s giant! It’s magellan! And it’s a telescope! Coming to a Chile near you in [mumble mumble mumble]

The MagAO-X team is also fully engaged in preparing for the next big thing in telescopes, the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT). GMT is one of the ELTs (extremely large telescopes) being planned for the next generation of ground based science, along with the Thirty Meter Telescope and the ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope (yes, ELT is an ELT). GMT is currently being built near our MagAO-X home at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile. Our group is knee deep in planning for GMagAO-X, the extreme adaptive optics coronographic instrument for exoplanet science on the GMT.

So we made a big showing at the GMT Community Science Meeting this week in DC. These meetings are run every year with a rotating science focus, this year was our time to shine with the Exoplanets meeting. The idea is to get future GMT users together to talk about the exoplanet science they want to do with this powerful exciting new platform. Jared gave an invited talk about GMagAO-X, while Laird, Jay, Maggie, Eden, Sebastiaan, and I presented posters about our current and future science. MagAO-X collaborator, super star, and blog alum Alycia Weinberger was there as well. There was an opening reception Tuesday night, two full days of talks and posters, fancy pantsy meals provided (and open bar!!), ending with a half day wrap up on Friday. All in a super fancy hotel in the middle of DC. I had a great time, this was maybe the first time I’ve been to a conference where every talk was something I was interested in (my optics colleagues may have felt differently).

Pics for your viewing pleasure.