Author: Sebastiaan Haffert

MagAO-X 2025B Day 8: It’s time for some face masks

You wouldn’t guess it but it was already our third night at the telescope. Which means it was also my third day (night) here at Las Campanas Observatory. I arrived as an extremely fresh (and hopeful) astronomer on our first observing day. It was quite though to go through an almost 30hr journey to immediately observing. However, EFC duty called and I had to respond. I thought I would have been able to slowly ease into it, but I have been EFC’ing already for 3 nights straight. Luckily, the next 6 nights are also EFC nights. This means no breaks for me for at least the next week or so!

Me taking my power nap during my first night.

After two nights of great observations, it was time to do some engineering. This engineering block was all about commissioning our new Phase Induced Amplitude Apodization Complex Mask Coronagraphs, or PIAACMC for short. The PIAACMC is one of the most performant coronagraphs (if you can actually make it an align it). The PIAACMC has two sets of aspheric lenses that were designed by our one and only Warren Foster, MSc. These are mounted in only the most beautiful of optical mounts that one can imaging. They are also fully remotely controllable, which makes it possible for other people to actually use them. Since last year, Elena Tonucci has been working on getting the PIAACMC to work on-sky. One of the crucial missing pieces was the CMC (CM?) part of the PIAACMC. She uses fancy 2-photon polymerization additive manufacturing to make the focal plane complex mask.

Measuring the manufactured CMC masks in the clean room.

All our troubles, or Elena’s troubles (I was just vibing along), were not for nothing. The new phase masks that were made resulted in much better performance! We were able to to get an order of magnitude better on-axis suppression than last year in the lab.

Our next step was to go on-sky. The first part of the night was great. However, just around the time of switching from Parker’s amazing Tau Ceti program to ours, the seeing started to cause problems. This was not great. We were going to try and image a challenging exoplanet target. Luckily, the seeing started to settle after about 10 minutes into our part of the night. We got really good data and I am excited to see some results.

It’s a double face mask picture! LCO can be quite dry so its good to hydrate. Skincare is important, you will thank your younger self if you take care of yourself.

It is not always fun to look only at speckles. So, our night ended with about an hour or so of imaging close binaries. This was to convince ourselves that PIAACMC actually worked.

Again, I failed to document our great work by not taking phone pictures.

At the end of the night, I was passing on my wisdom of observing as many photons as you can each night. No photon left behind! Every photon is precious! The TO was getting a little nervous and started to ask if she could close the telescope because the sun was rising.

Learning from the best.

Fun fact: “Moretta muta”, an oval mask that women wear for Carnival in Venice has no straps to be fastened to the head. Instead, it has a button on the inner side that is held in the mouth and with that mask is held to the face.

MagAO-X 2025A Day 19: A night to not remember.

Much Strehl that once was is lost, for none now observe who remember it. It began with the forging of the Great Weather forecast. Dark clouds were given to the day crew, immortal, wisest and fairest of all beings. Dark clouds were also given to the astronomers, great miners and craftsmen of the starry nights. And nine, nine dark clouds were gifted to the race of the night crew, who above all else desire Strehl. For within these clouds was bound the strength and the will to govern all observers. But they were all of them deceived, for another weather pattern was made. Deep in the land of Chile, in the Fires of Mount Las Campanas, the Dark Lord Sauron forged a master pattern, and into this pattern he poured his cruelty, his malice and his will to dominate all astronomers.

The prediction of tonight.
The reality of tonight.

One by one, the targets of MagAO-X fell to the power of the Clouds, but there were some who resisted. A last alliance of night crew and bright stars marched against the armies of the Chilean Clouds, and on the very slopes of Mount Las Campanas, they fought for the Strehl of MagAO-X.

And some things that should not have been forgotten were lost. History became legend. Legend became myth. And for two and a half thousand years (that’s how long it felt), high Strehls passed out of all knowledge. Until, when chance came, it ensnared another bearer.

During this night we struggled to keep the loop closed because our targets fluctuated in intensity by 5 magnitudes. This is an enormous amount. Eden bravely fought against changing conditions and sometimes she prevailed. But most of the time it was just a blood bath.

At the end of our 16th night everyone was slowly losing their minds. This led to a long string of making Maggie-O-X tell us jokes. Here is a fine selection of amazing jokes:

“Why did the AO system miss the coronagraph? Because it overdrove.

“What do you call an observer who is waiting for the sun? A dreamer.”

“Why are AO operators never scared? Because they already saw their own 3 AM face.”

“How many photons do you need for high Strehl? More than we got this night.”

“What is brown and sticky? A stick.”

“This night was not completely useless. It will forever serve as a bad example.”

“How do you talk to Italian ghosts? With a Luigi board.”

“What’s black and white and red all over? The tweeter.”

“No more adaptive optics for you!”

At least I saw a cat today.

I think I have added enough movie quotes to the blog post today. At least this music might give us hope for another night.

MagAO-X 2025A Day 5: It’s time for a change.

Today was a special day; barbecue day. The saddest thing about this was that we just had our 24hour installation and observation marathon. Which meant that I missed barbecue lunch TT_TT. However, I realized that I hadn’t send it my night lunch form yet and I requested a dinner plate. I was still on time! This was a happy little accident as Bob Ross would call it.

An impression of barbecue at Las Campanas Observatory. Taken in 2024.

Jared told everyone that we had to be together in the telescope control room at 19:30. He was very strict about it. We all wondered what that was about, probably to take a group picture? One of the major upgrades during this run is the addition of a differential polarization imaging mode. We added a polarization beam splitter to our science camera beam splitter cubes. And we made a remarkable discovery. Our 50/50 science beam splitter created the g-band ghost we have been chasing for a couple of years now. We put a left-over g-band filter and a post together to create our new g-band imaging mode that we can use without the beam splitters!

It’s crazy but this was a $0 upgrade.

Another special part about the night was that Chile changed from summer time to winter time. I think this was the first time I ever had this happen during an observing run. This was a lucky streak for me because Duo the owl is always out to hunt you if you haven’t done your daily exercises. It became midnight and I was about to lose my streak but at the strike of midnight the clock shifted back by an hour! I was saved! I could keep my streak. It was also weird that the clock here goes back an hour at midnight instead of 3AM. Chile actually had a lot of interesting things happening with switching daylight savings. You can read all about it on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Chile .

I also saw a great Vizzy hopping around the Aux building. They are really cute animals!! Are you not entertained? Well back to beginning of today’s story. I got my barbecue fix during the night. It was great. But back again. Jared had all of us together at 19:30 because there was a big announcement:

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Not it’s the New Horizons in Physics Prize.

I am really happy that I was awarded this prize for my work on adaptive optics up to now. And, I also want to congratulate my fellow awardees Maaike van Kooten en Rebecca Jensen-Clem. There is still much to look forward to in AO over the next 2 decades. So, stay tuned!

I watched Gladiator II on my flight to Santiago and I really enjoyed it. Gladiator is also one of my favorite movies. You should be able to find a famous quote from the movie if you read the blog post closely. For now I will just drop in the song “Now we are free” from the Gladiator movie. So all in all, lot’s of special things today and this is it for now and see you next time.

MagAO-X 2024B Day 17: Is this the second to last observing night?

It’s been almost two weeks since our first night started. We have been through many adventures and there are two more nights to come. Today was an eventful day and night. Today is our last night with an engineering block. Elena and I had to tumble out of bed to do some daytime engineering. Astronomical instrumentation is not a typical job from nine to five. The engineering is for a new coronagraph, the Self-Coherent Camera, that we are developing for MagAO-X and I am excited about its prospects.

Here you see a typical astronomer during the day outside of its normal temporal habitat.

The Self-Coherent Camera creates an self-referencing interferometer out of starlight using a coronagraph mask. This allows us measure the amplitude and phase of the electric field of the star! If the electric field is known, we can destroy it by injecting the opposite electric field (in phase). This technique is called Electric Field Conjugation or also known as digging a (dark) hole.

A successful demonstration of digging a dark hole with the self-coherent camera.

After dinner with went on-sky and first did some ADC engineering for the one and only Katie Twitchell. The atmosphere is a real piece. Not only do we get all that turbulence, we also get a lot of differential refraction. This messes up our images by dispersing them. Luckily, after the engineering observations of today we know how to fix the last residual bits!

The second engineering task was applying the SCC on-sky and trying to diggy diggy dig a dark hole. This proved to be tricky because of the large amount of fast seeing. The digging did not pan out, but we were able to get other interesting on-sky observations. Such as this image of Alpha Eri.

Elena taking data of her observations. It is clear that taking cellphone pictures is a better way of recording groundbreaking results than using the actual cameras.

After the engineering it turned into a night for our Michigan collaborators. Sadly, the seeing picked up again and we gave up roughly 2/3rds into the night. This allowed us to try something never done before with MagAO-X. We tried to observe solar system objects! We imaged Neptune (very badly) and Europa. It was a fun experiment.

OMG. The first solar system photons that MagAO-X captured!

While the night continues I have to swing off. From today on, Elena and me will be switching to a day schedule to finish day time engineering and to prepare for instrument de installation on Friday (which is tomorrow!). So thank you for keeping up with our blog and we are almost done. Hurray!

Today we have a song that is a tribute to dark hole digging.

MagAO-X 2024B Day 5: the awakening

Yesterday, we did an amazing job in setting up MagAO-X. Even without direct presence of the PI. Go team! We got the system working at sunset and we spent the whole night performing engineering tasks. One of the last tasks of the night was testing the first coronagraph that Elena made. Below in the picture we see Elena performing her first observations with a successful test of the PIAACMC! Can you find the two planets in the picture?

Elena celebrating her first observations!

After a long day of almost 24 hours, we al were very tired and decided to go to bed. I was looking forward to a long day of sleep because I stay out too late if we observe. However, the Earth had other plans for us.

This amazing picture shows a recent overview of earthquakes in Chile. I have highlighted a specific one to show what an earthquake looks like that could wake me up from my beauty sleep.

First I thought the Earth was just being rude but then I realized it just wanted to wake us up in time for lunch. So a short 20 minutes later a large part of the team was having fun at lunch.

The earthquake lunch crew. Having fun for everyone else.

After a nice lunch, I went up to the telescope for calibrations and engineering work. We are preparing to make MagAO-X smart by adding all kinds of AI. The most important one that gave MagAO-X its voice was of course already added by the amazing Dr. Long. And now, it’s time to give it brains for AO. Yesterday we noticed that we were missing the most important ingredient in the kitchen (or at least to me). We were very short on our supply of coke zero (“observing runs are fueled by coke.”). Somehow the observatory staff was able to read our minds and stocked up the kitchen with about 3 gallons of coke zero. You can not imagine how relieved I was when I stepped into the kitchen and saw the picture below.

Our night started off a bit rough with seeing up 1.7 arcseconds. For those that are not astronomers – so much seeing makes me want to give up. But Laird was sayin’ it’s gonna be alright because the start of the night is often rough. And he was right, the seeing started to come down and we actually had an amazing second half of the night. Our observations this night were taking for guest observers from Michigan. We had a great observing guest to keep us motivated and on our feet.

At the end of the night, I stayed up after the rest of the crew went down to sleep. This precious morning time was used to take data to get MagAO-X its brains. Hopefully, I took enough data and we will see in a couple of days if it will actually work! But I stay out too late thanks to these engineering tasks and I got nothing in my brain anymore so I will head off to bed. But just before that I got this music in my mind that I need to share with you all.

How many times did I quote the song?