Author: Elena Tonucci

Today people discovered I am just an average girl who loves astrology. No offense, but why having to choose between astronomy and astrology when – guess what – you can have both? Not only that, but I like to entertain myself in a variety of spiritual practices, for example, I am currently charging my tarot cards under the light of this gorgeous full Moon. My favorite childhood anime was Cardcaptor Sakura… What did you expect?

Since today marks the moment when everyone has arrived at LCO, and we are about mid-way, I have decided to proudly present the members of our group who joined the run this time, in Elena’s own special way.

The girlies

Elena: Temperance
The creator of this bizarre blog post, carefully mixing science and magic, continuously balancing opposites: Enthusiasm VS crippling anxiety, aligning PIAA lenses to highest precision possible to mitigate pineapples.

Eden: The Star
Eden brings a delicate touch and kindness to anything she does. Carefully handling DM cables and the AO system, she is like the trump card of the group: Give her something do to and she will turn it to being successfully completed. Also, she gave us sparkles. Twinkle, twinkle.

Katie: 8 of pentacles
Katie is not afraid to handle delicate optics. With patience, firm hands, and arms that can extend for multiple hours in a row, she can manage any practical task the big bosses throw at her. Recently crowned the new manager of MagAO-X’s uninstall, she is ready to surpass master Laird.

Tiffany: 3 of pentacles
Tiffany is the new addition of the girlies group. She is carefully observing every move of the more experienced members to learn as much as possible about the delicate and complex system MagAO-X revealed to be.

American bois

Josh: The Moon
Josh is fighting against Zemax just like the dogs in this card bark at the Moon. But hey, at the end of the day, isn’t the Moon almost like a big form of cheese in the sky? Also, he loves sticks.

Parker: Strength
Parker befriended the donkeys and tamed the vibrations of the telescope. Hand-working and tireless, he is always down for a run up the hill or some benching. I only wish he could eat his food without mixing it all together in a disgusting mush.

They say life goes on after obtaining a PhD

Joseph: The Magician
Joseph is the wizard that installs the software on your computer. Knowledgeable and resourceful, he is full of tools and tricks to compromise the entire group and save the day approximately four times per day – one time for each element – just like an expert magician.

Miles: 2 of pentacles
Miles simply enjoys taking cute pictures of animals and stars. Two polarization states, one difference: Guaranteed success! He can also juggle pretty well (when he is not taking pictures and he is not sleeping).

Matthijs: The Sun
Matthijs was revitalized by vitamin D like never before in his entire life. Feeling the Sun on his Dutch face every day after waking up made him a new man. If only the cooks were not trying to poison him, he would have already solved every possible problem of MagAO-X.

Rico: Knight of wands
Rico has just arrived at LCO and has already observed closely how to drive the instrument. Inspired by our science, he has already planned to do some daytime engineering tomorrow to make his neural network smarter. Always moving forward!

The final bosses

Sebastiaan: The Fool
Sebastiaan is always in a good mood, even when he is extremely sleep deprived. He finds joy in the little things of life, like shaking the mouse and seeing the cursor becoming full screen size. He also loves to continuously start new adventures: He has endless hope and endless data to reduce, piled up since 2021.

Alycia: The Empress
Alycia knows everyone around and no one wants to mess with her. If something is not quite right, just let her know and she will have it sorted out. She is basically the true owner of this observatory. She says the word, and Chile answers.

Laird: The Hanged Man
Laird is the giant on whose shoulders we all stand. He has sacrificed himself again and again for the sake of MagAO-X: Positioning himself in the most bizarre ways – almost break-dancing – unscrewing countless nuts, and making peanuts disappear throughout the years.

Jared: Universal Judgement
Jared has to manage all this circus. That’s quite the task, especially when there are so many things going on at the same time. But hey, remember? Having more things just means… Peeking from the sky with a huge trumpet (?) deciding when people can finally get a PhD.

Special

Vizzy: The Hermit
Vast mountains, rocks, and silence, under the perfect night sky. This, the setting where vizzy spends all her time pondering about the meaning of life. The Universe made her a cute, little animal without a way to communicate with us humans, because it knew she would be too powerful otherwise.

Fun fact

Did you know that Black Jack’s mother, Judith Love Cohen, was an aerospace engineer that is credited to have helped save Apollo 13? Shooting for the Moon.

Song of the day

Welcome to the first blog post of this run from the Leiden team! It’s great to be back up at LCO. Matthijs and I are starting to feel the seasonal depression leaving our bodies thanks to the good old vitamin D we are soaking up these days. Incredible what such a small thing is capable of. Speaking of which, today we talk about many small things that make a huge difference: From optics to spiders. There must have been some confusion lately… Sometimes even small details can change everything! For every picture of today’s blog post there is something right or wrong. Check hover text for the solution.

Many new additions to MagAO-X today. Last night, after a long journey and before going to sleep, I have installed my new PIAACMC masks. I am very proud of my cute little babies, and I hope I will show you some nice results in the next nights of observations. Katie and Laird have worked relentlessly today and brought important improvements to the instrument! First, they have installed a brand new periscope mirror (ttmperi) that is now much smaller and has a much higher stroke. Katie designed a stage plate so that our beloved heroes, Sebastiaan and Laird, won’t have to walk up the platform anymore between observations to pull in or out a mirror to use VIS-X: Now this can be done automatically with a stage that moves up and down! They have also added an old telsim aperture stop (that re-creates the Magellan aperture) and rotated it so that the lab and on-sky alignment are much more similar and consistent. Finally, they have put in a new mount, new filter, and the shutter for LLOWFS (Lyot low order wavefront sensor) with an extra contribution from Parker. What to say, team… Excellent work!

We have also found some small friends (but not the ones y’all were hoping for) around the observatory today. Let’s review them together.

And now we can really say it, Katie has become the queen of the 2025B MagAO-X upgrades. Really bopping to the top.

At the end of the day, Miles and Matthijs also took lots of flat field data (Miles is still working as I am writing).

All the many recent “small” changes to the instrument added up, leading us to have to refocus the science cameras on the coronagraph masks, so tomorrow we will have to work on that. We only have a few more hours before we start packing up the instrument and move it up the mountain top. Stay tuned for the next blog post to see MagAO-X bop to the top as well together with Katie!

Fun fact of the day

Before being an astronomer I was an aerospace engineer. Before I was an aerospace engineer I studied languages about 16 hours per week in high school (yeah, I changed my mind quite a few times in my life). This means I know random facts about literature from different countries. So, today I’m gonna share with you my favorite literature+sciencey fun fact: The etymology of the term “quark”! It comes from one of my favorite writers of all time, James Joyce. In his book Finnegans Wake (which, by the way, still keeps professors and translators awake at night after more than a century!!) he writes:

"Three quarks for Muster Mark!
Sure he hasn't got much of a bark
And sure any he has it's all beside the mark."

This book is full of puzzles, jokes, puns, words spelled wrong, and words literally invented by Joyce that he doesn’t bother to explain – sometimes they can be understood from the context. This is why this book is very difficult to understand or translate. Again, very in line with the theme of my blog post today…

The discoverer of quarks found this term in the book and decided to use it to name his newly-found particles, since you need three quarks to make a proton or a neutron!

Song of the day

I have recently seen Radiohead live, and I must confess this song was my inspiration for the theme of the blog today. But for my elite Radiohead fans, I must also say something like Daydreaming (gorgeous song, among my absolute favs) or Fake Plastic Trees, could also do with today’s theme.