Author: Parker Johnson

MagAO-X 2026A Day 14: Back Online

The day began with the LCO engineers troubleshooting an issue we were having with the telescope last night. After spending many hours during the night and 10 hours during the day, they were able to determine there was an open loop somewhere in the motor through electrical measurements. They found the part that was causing the issue and replaced it with a spare. Big thanks for the great work and quick work done by all the LCO engineers and staff to resolve this and allow us to get back to normal operations in the evening.

The night started off with a former MagAO-X group member, Logan Pearce, joining us from Michigan for the first half of the night. She was able to successfully observe multiple stars with potential white dwarf companions.

The next part of the night we were joined by another former MagAO-X member, Lauren, who is now in New Mexico. We spent the majority of the time working on imaging and using AO on extended objects, which will be an important feature for GMagAO-X since it will be resolving objects.

We ended the last couple hours of the night back with Logan, as well as her student, Emi. There final target was a very interesting observation of a binary star system with the potential for an additional brown or white dwarf gravitational bound too.

A day at LCO isn’t complete without reviewing the local wildlife encounters.

About a dozen Burros refused to let me walk up to the summit, and a few of them even began walking up the path toward me trying to intimidate me, which worked.

Color of the day: Guy Fiery Flavor Town Donkey Sauce

Song of the Day

MagAO-X 2026A Day 6: Big Red and Big Upgrades

Today started with Tiffany putting in some plumbing work for MagAO-X. We added a new glycol port to go into the side instrument panel to cool the new IR camera being installed within the next week.

In order to make space for the new IR camera, Sebastiaan and our collaborators from Durham University, Rob and Viktoria, performed surgery to remove VisX from its home in the instrument. The goal of this upgrade is to allow for first ever IR imaging with MagAO-X and to measure the overall throughput and strehl ratio of the instrument at IR wavelengths to drive design considerations for a future spectrograph.

Luckily, we are still working in the cleanroom since some healthy-looking clouds are making tonight look unpromising for observations.

Despite a rather brisk and windy night last night, I was able to take advantage an extremely dark night and get some pretty impressive pics of the Milky Way and Small/Large Magellanic Clouds with just an Iphone14.

Color of the Day

First, I have to give a shoutout to AZ for having the largest margin win in nearly 3 decades in the tournament. But more importantly, BIG RED is one step closer to making the trip to Indianapolis for the national championship game! With the being said, the color of the day is BIG RED!

Song of the Day

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