Author: Parker Johnson

MagAO-X 2025B Day 10: Too Close for Comfort

Tonight started with Katie, Tiffany, and Josh as our dedicated graduate student MagAO-X operators. They were tasked with assisting Logan with her observing program in the first half of the night. While the conditions started out rough, they stabilized after an hour or two on sky.

When 1:30AM approached, it was time to switch to Eden’s observing program. She is on her second of 5 half nights during this run and is taking super interesting scientific observations using the newly commissioned PIAACMC which Elena has spent a lot of time getting to work on sky.

Exciting discoveries are already being made in our short time here at Las Campanas Observatory. Below are images in the z and r bands of two little guys hanging out around a star:

On top of spotting faint objects on sky, preliminary data reduction has shown there to be a super faint little guy hanging out near it’s host star:

Prior to the night beginning, our TO was nice enough to off to point the telescope towards the horizon so we could get some pictures with the primary mirror.

Miles was back at it with taking some phenomenal Chilean wildlife photos. Expanding our wildlife content beyond our beloved Vizzy.

While Miles was capturing amazing photos of the smaller animals, I was back with the burros. Most days, they are very welcoming when I come by, but this time was the opposite of welcoming. Let’s just say, this was the last face I saw before I had to pack up and leave:

I can’t believe it is already December, but the holiday decorations are starting to pop up to remind us of what time of year it is.

Fun Fact

Many people picture North Dakota as just endless farmland and cows, but here’s a fun fact: it actually has only 2.24 cows per person, ranking it as the third highest state for this stat. South Dakota, Jared’s home state, takes the top spot with an impressive 4.00 cows/person, while Nebraska follows closely behind at 3.31.

Song of the Day

MagAO-X 2025B Day 0: We’re Back

It’s that time of the year! The start of another MagAO-X observing run. For Jared, Katie, and myself that meant 3AM alarms for Thursday morning. Shortly after arriving at the airport, a wise man said, “a little airport milk never hurt anyone”. 30 grams of protein later, I was energized and ready for any wild adventure Delta had in store for us…

Turns out, Delta was nothing but good to us. Sure we had a 9 hour layover in Atlanta, but if you know an extremely loyal and important Delta customer, there is a chance you are lucky enough to enter the prestigious Delta Sky Club. Thanks to Jared, we were able to work in a comfortable spot and have a productive 8 hour layover with an all you can eat buffet.

After smooth flights to Santiago then La Serena, we went directly from the airport to LCO just in time to catch dinner.

After dinner, Katie and I made our way to the gym to get our bodies moving again after a long 36 hours of travel.

I know some of you may be thinking, that bench doesn’t look the nicest or the safest for that matter. Well, good thing the kids aren’t picky, but rumor has it LCO is building a workout complex with an indoor basketball court, mini soccer field, and full gym!

No Vizzy content just yet, but a couple of beautiful Burros greeted us upon arrival.

Wishing safe travels for the rest of the MagAO-X team coming throughout the next week! Also, since I am writing the first blog post of the run, I have the honor and privilege of choosing our blog rule. For each blog post, the writer must include at least one random fun fact. My fun fact is that the Chilean Patagonia region is home to the densest population of Pumas anywhere in the world.

Song of the Day

AO Summer School Part II: Labs and Laundry

Another couple of days of AO Summer School are in the books! We’ve moved well beyond introductions and into the core of adaptive optics, exploring topics like wavefront sensing and reconstruction, atmospheric turbulence, and deformable mirrors. Alongside the great lectures, we’ve also had the chance to put the concepts we learned into practice through hands-on labs. In one of our labs, we explored different types of wavefront sensors (WFS) including the Shack-Hartmann WFS, and the Pyramid WFS. Below is Katie and Marcus’s groups setup for the wavefront sensor lab.

The rest of the afternoon was spent touring labs, starting with the Santa Cruz Extreme AO Lab (SEAL). From there, we got a sneak peek at SCALES (imaged below), an upcoming Keck instrument built to probe the compositions of exoplanet atmospheres.

The next lab space we visited was UC Santa Cruz’s massive marble test bed, and their shop where they test new techniques to make shells for deformable mirrors.

The final place we stopped by had a bunch of cool history about UC Santa Cruz’s involvement with optics and astronomy. In the photo below, you can see the 3 meter telescope (yellow structure) at Lick Observatory that was commissioned in 1959. Compare this to the more modern 10 meter Keck telescope structure commissioned in 1985.

On a more serious note, a washing machine was located and disaster was avoided with regards to Josh may or may not having anymore clean clothes halfway through the workshop….

While I’m sure the people are dying for some much needed Vizzy content, the campus turkeys and deer with have to suffice for now.

Song of the Day

AstroTech 2025: Building Community and Building Instruments

For those unfamiliar with AstroTech, it is a weeklong summer school at UC Berkeley designed to teach the next generation of students how to design and build astronomical instruments, while being collaborative and inclusive.

The first few days of summer school started with multiple lectures on astronomy and optics-based content, along with a number of hands-on labs that taught us some of the specialized skills needed to build an instrument including: optomechanics, software design, calibration hardware, detectors, and electronics.

Once everyone had a solid background of the specializations we broke into teams of five to brainstorm science cases that spectrographs would be useful for. In an attempt to think of a unique science case, our group settled with a spectrograph design capable of covering the entire optical spectrum to classify asteroids by their spectral shape but also be able to distinguish between CN and CO signatures. This led us to a more complex design that involved having optical components moving on stages.

While this may sound trivial, the challenging part came when we were only given 10 hours over the course of two days to design, build, test, and present this working spectrograph. This is where the topic of collaboration and teamwork are of the utmost importance. Hence, one of key objectives of the summer school and something we spent time learning and practicing everyday was inclusive teamwork.

Within our teams, each person was responsible for one of the five specialty groups. I worked on developing the software pipeline the read in flats, darks, and science fits files, and processed raw science data. The code then plotted the entire spectra, identified known emission lines in our calibration source, and determined the wavelength solution that maps the x-axis from the pixel domain to the wavelength domain.

One of the most valuable takeaways from this experience will be the opportunity to build connections with a wide range of individuals from leaders in academia, government, and industry to my peers who will shape the next generation of astronomy instrumentation.

While the days were packed with learning and networking, I still found time in the early mornings and late evenings to explore. One highlight was reconnecting with a high school friend who works for the Cal football team. He gave me an incredible tour of the stadium and locker rooms, which resulted in my closet being overstocked with Cal shirts. I also spent most evenings out with the great friends I made during my time there, including one excursion that led to an underwhelming visit to the Golden Gate Bridge.

I will wrap this blog up and leave you with a couple photos from the beautiful Berkeley campus!

Song of the Day

MagAO-X 2025A Day 8: Telescope Tours

After very little sleep, I decided to wake up and treat myself with a scenic run around the mountain at noon. This was admittedly more of an excuse to go see some telescopes up close and personal.

After my makeshift tour of the exterior of some of LCO’s beautiful telescopes, I returned to find out Alycia was kind enough to take the time to set-up and bring a group of us on tours inside of both the Henrietta Swope telescope (1 meter) and the Irénée du Pont Telescope (2.5 meter). The Swope telescope is especially interesting because it was the very first telescope built at LCO back in 1971. It was also the one of the first, if not the first, telescope named after a woman. Henrietta made great contributions to work on variable stars and was a trailblazer for women in the field. The du Pont telescope is also one of the older telescopes at LCO, built in 1977.

Here is a look at the interior of the Swope and du Pont telescopes.

The night went smoothly, and Jay/Alycia were able to get some quality disk data shown below. We are also getting closer to correlating the accelerometer data with the wavefront sensor data. At this stage, the best approach is simple “you just begin. You do the math. You solve one problem… and you solve the next one… and then the next. And if you solve enough problems, you get to come home. All right, questions?”

Unfortunately, at the end of the night we had to say adiós to our new friend, María Eugenia, who is headed back to the Netherlands. Safe travels home and thank you for joining us on this run!

We are also looking forward to the next wave of people arriving the next day or two, and hope their travel goes better than our 50-hour ordeal!

Two skittish Burros were very hesitant greeting me on the way up the mountain.

After a long, hard, struggle to try to remember a recent/favorite movie of mine, it wasn’t till I remembered a conversation I had with Laird about UA’s Biosphere2 project/experiment that reminded me of one of my favorite movies, The Martian.

Song of the Day