Blog – Extreme Wavefront Control Lab

MAPS Feb. 2025 Night 4: Oh Connection, where art thou?

Hey everyone, I realized I didn’t introduce myself properly in my last blog post, sorry about that. I am Krishna, 3rd year PhD candidate at ASU. I am working with Jenny and Katie to characterize MAPS AO performance 🙂

It was a night like any other except we started on a little bit of rough patch. There was a brief connectivity issue with the WFS. So, the citizens of AO nation (Amali, Lauren, Bianca) worked hard with Andrew to get it back on track. It was not just this but also the WiFi that was being a troublemaker today. While this WFS issue was being worked on, Alyssa and I took organized exposures of darks and sky backgrounds at different bands.

A screenshot from Jarron showing that our ping speed of our WiFi connection was 200ms!

Eventually, after the WFS fix, it was realized that the pupil position was offset from yesterday, so we had to go to lower than 100 modes of AO correction like we did yesterday. Well, that’s a bummer.

Despite all the trouble, we were able to successfully observe 4 targets with varying R magnitudes at a constant(-ish) airmass. Hoping everything goes smoothly with the reduction, this would allows us to see Strehl as a function of magnitude (fingers crossed). We pushed as much as we can to the end of the night but clouds, once again, put a limit on our happiness.

As Sting would say – “He looked at the chart but he look in vain
Heavy cloud but no rain“

Song of the night:

MAPS Feb. 2025 Night 3: “Clear Skies”

Hello! I’m Alyssa, and I am new to this blog. I am a visiting grad student from the University of Michigan that joined the MAPS team on this 6-night run. This will be my second observing run ever!

The MAPS team headed up to the summit tonight! The skies looked more promising than previous nights.

We had some clouds here and there with periods of high winds. But that quickly died down from up to 35 mph down to 0 mph over a span of a few hours. When aligning the pupil for MIRAC5 and co-aligning with the AO WFS, we have initially found that the source position was barely on the field of view of the detector. Since there is a new dichroic lens in the optical system, Manny and I went up to adjust the actuators near the dichroic to see if we could center the source as much as possible. Luckily, this had solved the issue to a good degree, and after getting through the cloudy and windy moments in the night, we were fortunate enough to start taking some science data tonight with some targets.

With some progress tonight, I want to take a moment for some notable quotes given out from none other than Krishna:

“What is the name of the dog in Scooby-Doo?”

“Is the loop looping?”

“Also, Manny, you look like a Rapper.”
Krishna

Manny and Krishna strike a pose as your local MMT rappers — Manny and Krishna pose as your local MMT rappers

Song of the night featuring one of my favorite bands:

MAPS Feb. 2025A Night 2: The Fog

As much as I hate to report it, the MAPS crew is once again trapped in a cloud. For a few days now, the forecast has consistently predicted high cloud coverage for all of tonight. To be sure, we performed our own professional survey of the sky at sunset. Yep, those clouds look cloudy, and it seems like they want to stick around with us.

We decided it was best to make ourselves cozy in the dorm common building while waiting for any break in the clouds. Bianca and I took this time to practice AO/CACAO set up . ݁₊ ⊹ remotely. ݁˖ ⊹ ݁. We have ran through this process four times between the two of us so far this run without making any dire mistakes. Amali has trained us well! Additionally, we properly troubleshooted an issue with the visible wavefront sensor camera, which was reporting a frame rate of ~2000 instead of the expected 500.

Unfortunately, there is not a fireplace here. Instead, we turned on all of the “cozy” lights (minus the lamp that had exposed wires in place of prongs on its plug) and a space heater. For some ambient noise, we turned on the tv to the H&I channel. This was not by choice, but the remote wasn’t working. Walker, Texas Ranger (5.7 stars on imdb), featuring Chuck Norris, was playing. I think the cheesy acting and ’90s aesthetic of the show really helped set the vibes for the night.

Our cozy setup. Note the 94% humidity reading.

I made a few trips outside throughout the night. The fog that engulfed Mt. Hopkins was quite dense, and I could not see further than five feet in front of me. Around 2 AM, we declared the night to be unobservable.

The song of the night is “Clouds” by One Direction, which is featured on their best album (in my professional opinion): FOUR.

Bonus song because it is February 14th:

Sorry No news

System is ready, but Weather is here.

Last night we started the night with clouds above and over 30 mph winds. We got the system ready for on sky time and then waited for the wind to die down. Hopefully it will all clear out and we will start doing some AO’ing soon.

Let’s Get Down to Rigging…

…to defeat…chronic back pain. Or something like that. Yesterday, the MagAO-X team partook in rigging and crane safety training (or craining for short).

“Why do we need a blog post about rigging? I just don’t get it!” ~ Anonymous MagAO-X Team Member

Fair point, anonymous group member. However, plenty of excitement occurs during crainings.

I have included a list of famous crane operators below:

Tony Ullakko (former world champion crane operator)
Katie Kelleher (top 100 women in construction and owner of katiecranes.com)
Tom Gordon (former crane operator at 1 World Trade Center)
Jared Males

Our craining day began with Maggie modeling the iconic Sketcher’s work boot.

We then embarked on a drive up to Mt. Hopkins where a few of us had an in-depth discussion on life, interpersonal relationships, and the critically acclaimed film Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising.

I forgot to take a picture depicting the conversations in question, so here’s an image of the observatory sign that I took.