Manny Montoya – Extreme Wavefront Control Lab

MAPS 2nd and First Night of 2026B

Last Night we did not open and did check out of hardware and called it an early night.

I wanted to provide a quick update from last night and fill everyone in on what happened.

We were able to get on sky early in the night. After locating the target star, which was initially a little high, we guided it to the center of the dichroic. We then moved on to alignment and were able to proceed to closing the loop and getting the system operational.

A few highlights from the night:

We successfully got Suresh’s gain feature on the IR wavefront sensor working, and it was used throughout the night.
The gain feature helped us work with dimmer guide stars and improved our ability to acquire and correct on fainter targets.
We successfully closed the loop with three modes and were able to bootstrap up to 20 modes. However, the correction was still very unstable, indicating that additional work is needed before we can push to higher-order correction.

Issues encountered:

We appear to have some portions of the shell missing. We are investigating this today to better understand the cause and determine the appropriate corrective actions.
The flat does not appear to be where we would expect it to be, and we will be looking into that as well.
We also believe the optical alignment of the wavefront sensor is not as good as it could be. We plan to spend time today improving the alignment and evaluating its impact on performance.

Overall, the night was productive. We achieved on-sky acquisition, completed alignment, closed the loop, validated the IR wavefront sensor gain feature, and demonstrated bootstrapping from 3 to 20 modes. Today’s focus will be on understanding the shell issue, investigating the flat, improving the wavefront sensor optical alignment, and stabilizing the higher-order correction

MAPS Apr. 2025 Night 1: Six Degrees of Freedom

It is the start of the second run of the semester. The night was focused(pun intended) on alignment and understanding how each one of the movements of the telescope, science camera, and Wave Front Sensor. And what it comes down that each one affects the other and it takes a lot of abstract scratching of head to figure out what happens when a move is done.

The Bad news this run is that the IR Wave front sensor did not make it to the mountain. But we now understand what the problem was. We have been extremely lucky that it worked at all. This is a problem that has been inherently sneaking up on us and we had never been able to figure it out. Turns out that the PCB feed through of the cryostat as it shirinks when it goes to cryo makes contact through hole mounting screws. Good news is that we have a path forward and the fix will soon be implemented.

So the hope for tomorrow night is that the wind stays slow and we get clear skies.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jn1qkf8vVQU

Sorry No news

System is ready, but Weather is here.

Last night we started the night with clouds above and over 30 mph winds. We got the system ready for on sky time and then waited for the wind to die down. Hopefully it will all clear out and we will start doing some AO’ing soon.

Moon Over MMT

With all the bits and pieces working and at the end of last night. Tonight is geared toward the goal of the AO consistency, training, and reliability. As one can see from the picture from the start of the night it does not look promising.

Training Training Training

Amali had a classroom of future AO extraordinaire such as her. When you have to juggle CHAI, CACAO, MILK, INDI and every other software package. Being an AO operator is more of a lion tamer than anything else. In real time you have to be wrangling many different parts to make the AO system work. I am impressed and I think she is teaching a hopeful and bright future for AO and MAPS.

Thank you Amali for all your hard work and know how. Your expertise and know how is next to none.

And you know it is going to be good when you have laser dog poodle in the mix.

Hard work Pays off

This is starting to look like an AO system and we are starting to get to a point where we are no longer wondering how the parts work together, but rather how do we make them better. Congrats to all those that have worked on this system in the past, current, and for our future selves.

FK5-0074 star (-0.63 K mag), K-band image, closed loop with 50 modes, 73 degrees altitude (1.04 Airmass)

In the Spirt of Christmas I had Chatgpt put a poem together. Thank you AI

The 10 Days of AO Christmas

On the first day of Christmas, the AO team gave to me:
A single ASM guiding flawlessly.

On the second day of Christmas, the AO team gave to me:
Two WFS tracking,
And a single ASM guiding flawlessly.

On the third day of Christmas, the AO team gave to me:
Three MIRAC/BLINCs imaging,
Two WFS tracking,
And a single ASM guiding flawlessly.

On the fourth day of Christmas, the AO team gave to me:
Four CACAO scripts running,
Three MIRAC/BLINCs imaging,
Two WFS tracking,
And a single ASM guiding flawlessly.

On the fifth day of Christmas, the AO team gave to me:
FIVE TOP BOXES aligned!
Four CACAO scripts running,
Three MIRAC/BLINCs imaging,
Two WFS tracking,
And a single ASM guiding flawlessly.

On the sixth day of Christmas, the AO team gave to me:
Six RC3s pointing,
FIVE TOP BOXES aligned!
Four CACAO scripts running,
Three MIRAC/BLINCs imaging,
Two WFS tracking,
And a single ASM guiding flawlessly.

On the seventh day of Christmas, the AO team gave to me:
Seven Chai teas steeping,
Six RC3s pointing,
FIVE TOP BOXES aligned!
Four CACAO scripts running,
Three MIRAC/BLINCs imaging,
Two WFS tracking,
And a single ASM guiding flawlessly.

On the eighth day of Christmas, the AO team gave to me:
Eight milks for Chai tea,
Seven Chai teas steeping,
Six RC3s pointing,
FIVE TOP BOXES aligned!
Four CACAO scripts running,
Three MIRAC/BLINCs imaging,
Two WFS tracking,
And a single ASM guiding flawlessly.

On the ninth day of Christmas, the AO team gave to me:
Nine photons dancing,
Eight milks for Chai tea,
Seven Chai teas steeping,
Six RC3s pointing,
FIVE TOP BOXES aligned!
Four CACAO scripts running,
Three MIRAC/BLINCs imaging,
Two WFS tracking,
And a single ASM guiding flawlessly.

On the tenth day of Christmas, the AO team gave to me:
Ten lasers glowing,
Nine photons dancing,
Eight milks for Chai tea,
Seven Chai teas steeping,
Six RC3s pointing,
FIVE TOP BOXES aligned!
Four CACAO scripts running,
Three MIRAC/BLINCs imaging,
Two WFS tracking,
And a single ASM guiding flawlessly.

Song of the Day

In the spirit of the Holidays “Christmas Moon” · Emmy The Great · Tim Wheeler

MAPS Sep. 2023B Night 3: Wind, Wind, Wind, and much coding

As was stated in the Mary Poppins Movie “Winds in the east, mist coming in, /Like somethin’ is brewin’ and bout to begin. /Can’t put me finger on what lies in store, /But I fear what’s to happen all happened before.”

For us it has been out of the South with max of 60 mph. Which means that winter is coming and it is the only change we have in the difference between winter and summer and summer and winter.

“Winds in the south, cold coming in, /Like turbulence brewin’ and about to begin. /Can’t put me finger on what lies in store, /But I fear that AO will soon happen again.”

Was it a green flash? To began the night we started with beautiful clear skies and 30 mph winds

Wind is the worse when it comes to observing. Snow, Rain, Clouds I understand, but wind and with skies like this it seems a waste.

An advantage to having intermediate wind you have the ability to work on code and test it out when you are able to get back on sky. So there has been a lot of debugging going on and improvements the the overall MMTO AO experience when it comes to interfacing with the system.

The hints of a MMTAO GUI to control all the inner workings of this system. AO systems are like a mechanical watch the majority of people only see the face of it and never see all the gears and inner workings. We build items in the other direction we have all the inner workings first and then we add the fancy face.

Sleeping accommodations working at the MMTO while waiting for winds to die down.

Well that is all folks. A lot of coding, a lot of friendships being made. So all in all a great night and but looking for clear skies and no wind.