We were waiting eagerly on any news about the arrival of MagAO-X while the trucker strike continued. The first good news we got was that MagAO-X was cleared through customs and we got visuals.
MagAO-X somewhere around Santiago. People with keen eyes might see that certain Tip-N-Tell’s are not attached anymore. The Tip-N-Tell’s are used to see if the instrument has been tilted. Last semester we also noticed some of them disappearing. Who can tell what tipped it now?
We also got the message that we were waiting to hear. MagAO-X will arrive on the mountain on Friday morning! It will arrive before our observing runs start. But as happy as this makes us, we will only have 2 days to fully prepare the instrument for on-sky work. Meaning that we will have a couple of very busy days coming up.
Another exciting update is that the food menu has been diversified. The first new dish was also a mystery dish. It was some kind of mediterranean and chilean fusion cooking. They made shawarma and wrapped it in tortillas. I think it was a nice dish but the garlicy sauce that was added was a bit heavy. And another surprise came today, maybe because they know we have suffered enough due to the truck strike, we actually got some very nice French fries. So overall the first couple of days have been nice to acclimatize on the mountain and get us rested before we start the hard work.
We thought that we would go on-sky with MagAO-X for 14 nights when we left Tucson nearly 4 weeks ago. However, after some heated debate we realized that we never checked the official schedule of the telescope. Well, we got another night coming up. Luckily we build in a day of contingency and we can actually observe the real last night too.
This run was full of new problems and challenges as time went on. It has been over two years since MagAO-X was on the telescope, and we had forgotten many things that had to be fixed. Over the past four weeks we have fixed so many things to make a smooth runnig system. And, that is something we noticed last night. MagAO-X worked without any problems or hiccups. We had great performance and a very robust setup. And to quote some random person, “MagAO-X is working surprisingly well. I never expected this”.
An on-sky coronagraphic image of MagAO-X! So many things going on here. A dark circle in the middle that shows the blocking mask, the control radius. Calibration sparkles close in and DM speckles far out.
MagAO-X is now one of the first, if not the first, visible AO system with a coronagraph. An image behind a Lyot coronagraph is shown above. Coronagraphs are used to block star light while letting exoplanet light pass through. So its a way to ‘turn off’ the star. However, speckles often mess us up. According to wikipedia; a speckle is a granular interference that inherently exists in and degrades the quality of the images. We don’t like speckles, they add light in places we don’t want and they look like planets. So speckles have to go. Though, sometimes they can also be useful. The image above shows a set of speckles in a cross close to the center of the image. We use these to add artificial calibration stars because the real star is removed by the coronagraph. These are useful speckles! The term speckle is not correct for these set of calibration spots, because speckles degrade image quality and we use it to improve our image quality. Therefore, from now on we will call them sparkles. And we have been using our Calibration Sparkles quite a lot over the past two weeks.
Our fake last sunset before we start working.
Our bonus night will be coming up tomorrow, or today ? I don’t know anymore what to call everything. We have been here so long that we have survived several crew rotations, and at least we will be going up for our 4th and last Empanada Sunday.
The song of today is from one of the more famous Dutch rap formations called “De jeugd van tegenwoordig” (The youth of today), who sing about stardust.
It is quite a late morning while I am writing this blog post. We had a very successful first night of commissioning of VIS-X. VIS-X is the Visible Integral-field Spectrograph eXtreme (VIS-X). Of course everything we do is extreme. So the spectrograph also had to be extreme. VIS-X is the project that I have been working on in the last two years. Its goal is to take spectra of exoplanets and use that to characterize what’s in them (of course everyone wants to search for signs of life ;-)). After multiple day of aligning, I finally was able to get everything up and running. And we were able to use VIS-X on-sky!
The first light images of VIS-X!
One of the challenges with VIS-X is the acquisition on-sky. MagAO-X already has a small field of view of a couple arcseconds and, the field of view of VIS-X is even smaller! We can only see things with 0.55 arcseconds, that’s about 1/7000th of a degree.
The first multi-spectral images of VIS-X + MagAO-X. The colors correspond to the wavelength range of 450 nm (blue, left) to 950 nm (red,right). The next few night will be very exciting when we will try VIS-X on more challenging targets.
Using new instruments and observing is always exciting. However, sometimes observing is just a lot of waiting and it can be very tiring. Everyone deals with that in their own way.
Graduate student Joseph Long ‘working’. He claimed that he could see perfectly well.
VIS-X has two different observing modes. A low spectral resolution mode and a high spectral resolution mode. We did the commissioning of the low-res mode last night and to switch to high-res, I have been aligning after a full night of observing. My current feelings are well captured by this dutch song of today.
Two and a half years ago, I came to the University of Arizona to work with MagAO-X. The plan was that MagAO-X would go to the Magellan telescope twice a year. And then suddenly a global pandemic appeared. However, right now we are really at Las Campanas Observatory preparing for an observing run! We arrived here on Monday and we entered the Bubble Mode for 3 days. In the Bubble mode we had to stay away from the other staff and got food delivered by room service. Our initial expectation was that we had to stay in this bubble mode for 72 hours after arrival at LCO. But, the clock started counting from arrival in Santiago! We learned this after missing our special breakfast room service. The kitchen staff thought we were already good to go for normal breakfast. So for the final procedure to break out of the bubble, we went to the medical unit to get our COVID test 8 hours earlier than planned.
Here we can see the PI checking in for his COVID test.
All three of us agreed that this was quite an unpleasant nose swab. I think they were trying to scrape out some brain material. So for all other MagAO-X observers; be warned! After getting our clearance, we were allowed to eat in the actual cafeteria during lunch.
The MagAO-X forerunners having their first post-bubble mode lunch together.
With the covid-free clearance, we were allowed to come in contact with other humans. I could finally get a tour of the Magellan telescopes.
Me checking out the Magellan Clay telescope.
And because we were allowed to meet other people, we could actually start unpacking MagAO-X. We met up with the great technical staff of LCO to crane the electronics box that contains the driver electronics of pretty much every part of the instrument. This required a very delicate procedure and took a couple hours. But, we are very happy with the results; the electronics box is unpacked and plugged in.
Taking the electronics box out of its shipping crate.
A happy PI with his electronics box.
But what is a commissioning run without any challenges? Apparently our graphics cards found our plan to observe most disagreeable. Luckily, more team members are flying out tomorrow and they have quickly scavenged the lab in Tucson for more spare graphics cards. We still have more than a week to go for our first night, and enough work to do. It is going to be an exciting run with many interesting projects. Stay tuned!
Today is the largest national holiday in the Netherlands, Kings Day. Kings Day is a bit of a difficult holiday to describe. It originates from the 19th century when the great-grandmother of the current king was reigning. The government decided that it was necessary to have a national holiday to celebrate the monarch. And so, Queensday was born. The holiday is held every year on the monarch’s birthday. Except during the reign of the previous queen, who wanted to keep it during her mother’s birthday to honer her.
Since 2013 we have king, which didn’t have for over a century the previous three monarchs were all queens. Nowadays we celebrate the kings birthday on the 27th of April. While I say we celebrate the king, we actually just use it as an excuse to have the largest party of the year. In the video below you can get a bit of a feeling of what Kings Day means.
For us in the USA we sadly can not party on a boat. That is especially difficult here in Tucson where we are getting or first 40+ C day of the year this week, pfoeh. So we decided to make and eat the traditional Kings Day pastry, Tompoes. The Tompoes is a pastry that consists of two layers of puff pastry with custard cream in between and colored icing on top. Tradition dictates that the icing is pink, and this is a pretty hard rule. You can not do something else without getting some disapproving Dutch eyes on you.
CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=362413
Except on Kingsday, then you are allowed to switch to orange icing on top. So we made some orange Tompoezen for ourselves. The recipe is relatively easy but takes a bit of time. You need to make the custard a day before so that there is enough time to solidify a bit. The next day you bake some puff pastry sheets that are cut into rectangles. You grab one sheet of baked puff pastry and you just put some custard on it. Then you add the second sheet and you color the top with some icing. And well that is it. You can add whipping cream on the top according to your own preference.
Our home made Tompoezen with orange icing. They were great.
The most difficult part of the Tompoes is the whole thing. Because the pastry sheets are crispy you can not really cut into it. Usually what people do is take off the top and it eat. Then they use a fork or spoon to eat the custard. And finally, they eat the bottom pastry. But there are many different variants. Here we have a video that shows 12 different ways that people can be classified into based on their way of eating a Tompoes (commentary in Dutch).
With this I end the blog post of the day. The song of the day is the Dutch National Anthem, which is one of the oldest national anthems in the world. It was composed in 1572 during the 100 year war against the Spanish king.
