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.
Our travel adventures started in Tucson with joy, enthusiasm, and most importantly, an on-time departure to Atlanta. We carried this positivity through lunch, where we stopped at Jared’s Go To spot. We followed that up with some grease from TGIF’s.
As they say, all good things must come to an end, and sure enough our flight to Santiago got delayed by an hour making our already close call connection impossible. Luckily, Jared with his platinum status has people to call to move some flights around, and was able to push back our connection in Santiago by 4 hours. This gave us plenty of breathing room to get through customs and security. However, Delta had other plans for us. They proceed to delay our flight again by 3 hours, leaving only an hour the catch our connecting flight to La Serena.
To blow off some steam, Jay finds a corner to rep out countless textbook pushups as I am trying to enjoy the beautiful Atlanta view.
Our already extensive layover of 9 and half hours, turned into a crazy 14 hours! This left plenty of time for Jay and I to explore all the greatness Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport has to offer. This led us to explore the secret tunnels under the airport. They start off rather basic, but get progressively more unique and intriguing, displaying history, art, sculptures, and finally the Atlanta Forest.
The pain from Delta didn’t stop here. We patiently waited in the airport for our 2AM flight, only to have Delta delay it again till 10AM last minute. This prompted hundreds of angry customers demanding compensation. We later received a $12 food voucher (covered half my breakfast), and hotel vouchers. All three us opened the link to select our hotel and clicked it at the same time. However, Jay got the last room forcing Jared and myself to split up with him and select the other hotel 19 miles from the airport. We take a 40 min uber there making it around 3AM at this point and arrived at a “hotel” (basically a bunch of cabins in the woods). After waiting in line for another half hour, we made our way to our room. Just as we think we are at the end of our troubles, Jared received the wrong directions to his room and after searching the woods for some time he found it, only to discover his key did not work. After all of this we got to lay down for a much needed 3 hour nap.
After a disappointing day of travel, I woke rejuvenated after not 1, but 2 cold glasses of milk and this tasty hotel breakfast to get my day going.
After breakfast we catch an uber back to the airport and continue on our way to Santiago. With little to no trouble we arrive and check in at the Santiago Holiday Inn.
It didn’t take long for Jared to sniff out the empanadas in the hotel to continue the tradition of empanada Sunday.
After what appeared to be a delicious dinner, we had to return to the reality Delta delays had created for us. We luckily got the last hotel room with two “queen” beds, which turned out to be two full beds. The only problem is me and Jay are two full grown grad students… It is what it is, and ‘sometimes you have to take what you have and make it work’. It was extremely nice being a two-minute walk from the airport.
After a short flight, we touched down in La Serena and only had a minor scare when I accidently left the check bag area to use the restroom, and the security guard refused to let me back in. I didn’t tell Jared or Jay where I was going so they presumed I had been kidnapped. They walked out with all our bags to find me brutally attempting to communicate with a baggage claim worker with my extremely less than fluid Spanish.
After 52 hours of travel, we finally made it to the summit and the work began. I spent the day prepping the mounting of the accelerometers and working to characterize the signal we are receiving from them. Meanwhile, Jay and Jared were productive working with stagebs and the computers. They also managed to complete a backflush of the GPUs and clean the filters.
The new monitor stand has also been installed and mounted!
Finally, to give the people what they are really here to read about and see, is some Chilean wildlife. Enjoy a couple photos of Carlos who said hello to us after dinner. Unfortunately, no viscacha content today, in order to provide incentive to come back and read tomorrow!
I was told I am the one who decides on the blog rule for this run. Since I often get made fun of for how few movies I have seen (Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Titanic to name a few), so I have decided to make the rule that you must include a recent/favorite movie you have seen at the end of the blog post and insert a quote from it within your post.
The movie I recently watched and enjoyed on the plane to Santiago was “Hidden Figures” which is about the story of the Black women who worked as human “computers” for NASA in the 60’s and ultimately played a pivotal role in the success of John Glenn becoming the first person to orbit the Earth.
As always, the song of the day is required and this one which pretty much sums up our trip:
Today was dedicated to removing MagAO-X from the platform and safely returning it to the cleanroom. It feels like just yesterday we were taking it out of the cleanroom, but time sure flies by when you are surrounded by great company and beautiful mountains. However, Elena and Sebastiaan started their journey back to Leiden around lunch. For the rest of us, it is just another day in paradise.
The day crew started bright and early after breakfast to get the instrument prepped for transport. This included removing earthquake bars, bumpers, geophones, and building the cart.
Once the prep work was done, we proceeded to wrap the world’s most expensive present in saran wrap and two emergency blankets.
After craning MagAO-X off its legs, it made the journey down the elevator and onto the Isuzu.
Following the instrument, legs, and electronics rack making it down the mountain, one last task remained for the day crew. We needed to put everything back on the way it was before the transport. Within a few hours, we completed all tasks prior to our deadline of 4PM, which is when the night crew took over operations.
MagAO-X made it back to the cleanroom in record time, so we took the opportunity to train the kids how to cable the DMs. To be honest, I expected this to be a high stress learning experience, but with the expert guidance from Eden, the process went smoothly and efficiently.
Fast forward many hours and everything was re-cabled and set-up for remote operations. By this point, delusion was setting in and it was time to get some sleep.
Only one thing remained on our checklist at the end of the day and that one thing was some MagAO-X plumbing. Stay tuned for Jay’s overview of the plumbing work.
Song of the Day
Today’s song reminds me to appreciate where we are, what we’re working on, and who we are with.
With us finally getting used to working on the night shift, it sure feels like we have been racking up the overtime hours. However, we still find time to get our daily Vizzy content. I have decided to start this blog post by giving the people what they want…Viscacha’s and behind the scenes footage.
After capturing the cutest photos of those little guys, we continued our content creation with some beautiful photos of Clay. Thank you Jialin for taking this timelapse!
Prior to making our way up the mountain we spent some time pondering the great science advancements we are all going to make.
Alright, now onto the actual science. Tonight was dedicated to Laird and Jialin. The setup went smoothly, and we were quickly ready to start collecting data. The primary science goal for the first half of the night was to search for binary stars and planets in the i and z bands. We began with a target that has been indirectly observed to host a ~5 Jupiter-mass planet. With this data set, we hope Jialin will be able to confirm its existence.
The second half of the night transitioned into H-alpha science targets. This allows us to observe specific emission of ionized hydrogen (around 656nm). This is particularly interesting as it provides valuable insight into accretion activity in binaries or planetary systems.
While we captured some excellent observations, the highlight of the night was pushing the telescope’s limits. As morning approached, we continued observing a target star as it reached an altitude below 23 degrees—remarkably low, considering our telescope operator had previously noted that the scope is not designed to operate below 21 degrees.
Hello all! I am excited to have received the opportunity to write my first ever blog post and we have had a jam-packed Day 4!
Today was the real deal of installing MagAO-X on the platform. We started the morning by splitting into two crews: one to get the instrument on the platform, and the other to get the computer rack on the platform.
Laird and I tackled many of the hardware tasks, which required us to be in some less than comfortable positions.
This photo not only described our mental state after many hours of installing MagAO-X, but also may cause future nightmares. Thank you Katie.
The greatest cabling team ever assembled, flawlessly carried out the cabling operations with little to no mistakes. Shoutout to the girls!
The computer rack loaded up diligently onto the Isuzu and made it up to the Aux safely!
A great picture after a long successful morning of getting both the instrument and computer on the platform. Laird looking photogenic as always.
One would think this is a staged photoshoot for an ad showing off the latest and greatest tool sets. However, it is just a natural Laird picture.
We headed off to lunch after a satisfying morning of work, only to stumble upon unsatisfied reactions to Joseph pulling out a blob of peaches from a mysterious juice.
Despite everything running smoothly for the most part, Jared’s face talking to Joseph said otherwise. I am not sure the context of this conversation, but it had me slightly worried.
MagAO-X installed on the platform!
After working day and night, we achieved a beautiful PSF of Beta Pic @875nm.
After nearing the 24 hour mark of being awake, I started hearing people singing songs they had stuck in their head. One of which was, “Say you can’t sleep, baby, I know”. This is probably because we’ve had so many Espressos today.
All in all, this was truly a great learning experience for me, and the team as whole. We checked off many of the engineering tasks planned during this first night including star acquisition, testing focal plane masks, calibrating the ADCs, and working on PIAA’s. Oh, and don’t think I forgot the fan favorite… Viscachasssss!!!!!!!!
