Author: Sebastiaan Haffert

MagAO-X 2026A Day 15: It’s the final countdown

This is my first blog post of the run even though I have already been here for nearly two weeks! It’s great to be back again at LCO. After being here for so many observing runs it is starting to feel like a second home. And it is almost time to go back because tonight was our second to last night of in person observing at LCO. As is tradition, we ensticken the instrument before we start observing. This is a tribute to please the weather gods and grant us good seeing. Due to some unspecified reason, we did not ensticken the instrument until last night. And miraculously, we had good seeing for the whole week! So to make certain we continue this streak, we finally added the 2026A sticker onto the instrument.

The PI is very carefully adding the run patch to the instrument.

And how we hoped that the amazing seeing would continue. Yesterday was great again after the telescope was back on its feet after a brush with a motor. So, today what could happen? The instrument is performing really well. The telescope is back in action. Our team finally switched our biorhythms to the night schedule. We had great food. There was fun. There was excitement. And then the atmosphere took a big dump on us.

The night started off great. The seeing was dropping. Justin Homs was observing remotely. And he was for the first time getting amazing MagAO-X data for his exciting Roman vetting campaign. And then that happened. The seeing went officially off the charts. And that was not the end of it.

According to chatgpt: “The only thing MagAO-X is resolving in bad seeing is the emotional limits of the observer.”

Throughout the night we had extremely variable seeing with patchy and thick clouds rolling over our observations. The atmosphere did try to convince us that it loved us. Look at the nice heart-shaped PSF we got from the atmosphere.

It was only between 2:00 and 3:00 (24h format FTW), that the seeing started to settle and give us a chance at correcting the atmosphere. And my dear readers, that is exactly the moment it switched to my observing time for the night. The second half of the night was used to do some new controls engineering. We had two exciting success stories. The first is that we finally got the ADC control to work robustly !!!

A very excited Katie that was finally able to robustly control residual atmospheric dispersion.

And the final excited result is that we got predictive tip/tilt control working! This has been a pet project of mine that I started working on in 2018 after reading Olivier Guyon’s paper on Empirical orthogonal functions. So, stay tuned and I will show some results soon at a conference near you.

Song of the day:

The color of today is red because of the atmosphere’s love for us. And therefore, the song of today is Be My Lover from La Bouche.

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.