Author: Sebastiaan Haffert

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?

MagAO-X 2024Aa Day 19: The Happy MagAO-X Bunny

Today was our second to last night and our last engineering night. We all woke up (or went to bed) with a happy surprise because today was Easter. We all got some chocolates and some unknown piece of candy.

The bag of candy that everyone got.
The interesting textured candy that is not chocolate.

The night itself went all over the place. We did a lot of coronagraph engineering and EFC tests. These went well for the conditions that we had to work in. And, we were able to squeeze in some time for on-sky testing of the Holographic Dispersed Fringe Sensor (TM). It is the sensor that we are developing to phase the segmented primary of the Giant Magellan Telescope.

The HDFS showing off all its barberpoles. Each fringe here is sensitive to a differential piston between segments.

After the HDFS engineering, we went to A Cen. One might think that this is Alpha Centauri but this is definitely not true! We observed A Cen and it was not Alpha Centauri, it was a random other bright star. We only realized this after aligning the whole system. The telescope operator was quickly given a new catalogue that contained only Alpha Cen so that we did not make the same mistake again. We stayed on Alpha Cen for almost the whole night. The night was wrapped up with some Baade’s Window and another accelerating star with a low-mass companion. All-in-all a pretty good night, even though we had some setbacks.

Today, Carlos was sneaking around the lodge. Eden was on the ball and shot some incredible pictures of Carlos. It is trying to sneak around and find food around the lodge. A little bit up the road to the telescope, Jared encountered a horse together with its baby horse.

Today was a good day for animal viewing. In a couple of months you will find our Andean wild life documentary on Netflix.

For today we are going with an astronomy themed song!

MagAO-X 2024Aa Day 4: A day of firsts and lasts

Today was an eventful day. Almost every blog post by me has mentioned VIS-X, the beautiful integral field spectrograph for MagAO-X. And, every run up to know had me doing optical alignment on the Nasmyth platform during morning shifts (after observing 🙁 ). This time the optical alignment finally did not drift during shipment! I only had to do some minor alignment of VIS-X to the MagAO-X output beam. Everything was aligned by the middle of the afternoon. No more mornings full of alignment for me!!!!

While I was doing the alignment on VIS-X, Laird was leading a small group to check on the MagAO ASM. The MagAO ASM is going back to Tucson after many years of living at LCO.

Cleaning the clean room before the ASM could be moved and inspected.
Laird is very happy while showing off the ASM to everyone.
One last look before it was put way again.

Laird invited everyone to have a last look at the ASM before it goes off to it’s new destination. Jared was not interested and tried to ignore the existence of the ASM. We now have MagAO-X which is a lot of fun! The MagAO-X OCAM2K was recently updated with new binning modes that should improve our performance on fainter targets. Jared was busy trying to figure out how the new binning modes could be calibrated. This was not straight forward.

Jared after dinner lamenting the bad performance of the new calibrations of the pyramid wavefront sensor.

The animal of today is Carlos and he showed up during dinner as a nice surprise.

After dinner, Eden took all the LCO first timers to see the other telescopes on the mountain top.

Much telescope so wow.

Song of the day:

MagAO-X 2023A Day 13: The night of exoplanet science.

Last night was an exciting night! MKIDS was working really well and we observed the exoplanet Beta Pictoris b. This was one of the first directly imaged exoplanets and its quite well studied. The picture below shows an animation of the orbit of Beta Pictoris b during a 5 year period. Hopefully we can add some images from the MKIDS to this animation!

Look at all them orbital motion.

The New York Times also visited us to take some pictures of us in the control room. Luckily, we were not prepared at all and we will look like astronomers a week into their observing campaign. It did seem like Avalon was the main character of the photo shoot. The photographer left as quickly as he came, leaving us with some dread about what they are going to write about us.

While we are waiting for a new picture of Beta Pictoris b, MagAO-X was able to take an image of YSES-1 b. This planet is orbiting around its host star at a very large separation. YSES-1 is a star in the Musca constellation. Today I learned that that is the Fly constellation. I don’t know why anyone would ever make the Fly constellation but we have the people in the past to thank for that. Okay I looked it up: https://www.maas.museum/observations/2008/08/18/who-named-the-southern-constellations-is-it-time-for-some-new-ones/ Apparently we have the Dutch to thank for the Fly constellation. I apologize for the crime on astronomy of my fellow country man.

YSES-1 is a solar mass star and has two know companions orbiting around it, YSES-1 b and c. We could not image c because it is outside our field of view, which already tell you that it has an enormous orbit. The inner companion orbits the star at 162 AU, this is 31 times the orbital radius of Jupiter in our solar system. At such radii an orbit will take 2051 years. That means it completed 1 YSES-1 b year since Julius Ceasar was killed!

The LOWFS loop closing to remove NCPA. The closing of the loop is announced by Maggieo-X our new AI assistant.

Song of the day

For the song of the day I chose Per Spoor from Guus Meeuwis, who is a Dutch pop/carneval singer. He became famous in the late 90’s and my mother was a big fan of his at the time. My mother took me to a concert of his in my hometown when I was 5 or 6 years old. This was my first concert ever! He mainly makes very festive music.

Per Spoor (Kedeng Kedeng) translation “By train track (Kedeng Kedeng)”. I can’t really translate the Kedeng’s because it’s a onomatopoeia for the sound a train makes in Dutch.

In the beginning, Guus is disappointed that the train was delayed by no less than 10 minutes, because he would prefer to spend this time with his girlfriend. Several things happen to him on the train. For example, he is addressed about the fact that his feet are placed on the couch, which, although Guus had the entire couch to himself, is not the intention. From the train he discovers the world and places that are new to him. Guus is impressed by the train’s discipline and hard work. He is also offered something to drink, which he did not expect at first. Although he is thirsty, he does not take anything to drink because the train arrives at its destination. From that moment on he already lurks outside, looking for his girlfriend. Once at his destination, he expects his sweetheart, his girlfriend, on the platform, but unfortunately she is not present, which leads to great sadness for Guus. At least, so it seems. Soon enough, however, it becomes clear that his love was playing a trick. She had hidden behind a pillar for comic effect, to the confusion of Guus Meeuwis. Once reunited on the platform, the train departs again.