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MagAO-X 2025A Day 2: We’re so back

The Leiden team is so back! It is now the Europeans’ turn to tell you about their magical journey to LCO. Throughout the full blog post, we will also play a little game: Find the differences!

We left Amsterdam without delay and got to Madrid 6 hours before our next flight. Plenty of time to waste and not check properly our next gate yeyyy! To pass the time, Eugenia and I went on a mission: Getting to the medical center of Madrid’s airport because she had to get an injection done. We left Sebastiaan working on a proposal due literally one hour later, and he barely realized we were gone, so we set sail for an incredible adventure. You might remember from the past run how intricated Madrid’s airport can be. If you don’t, I suggest to check it out here. After asking a bunch of people and mistaking our way a couple of times, we found the way to get to the medical center: We had to go through passport control machines, go to floor 0 (basically a basement), then come back up, go through passport control again but in the opposite direction (the policeman had to let us through manually) and then go through a security check (??) to be able to go back to the cafe’ where Sebastiaan was waiting for us. Pretty scary that the medical center of an airport is so inaccessible, right?? Well, and then people ask me why I hate Madrid’s airport. In my favorite movie ever, Donnie Darko, Gretchen asks Donnie “What if you could go back in time and take all those hours of pain and darkness and replace them with something better?”. Well, I know which hours of pain and darkness I want to replace in my life: All the hours spent in Madrid’s airport. With what? With a group of happy viscachas chilling in the sun.

Anyways, let’s bring in some fun: Find the differences between these two pictures of Sebastiaan before we left and when we came back (hover on the pic for the solution).

We then had a relaxing dinner, since there was so much time to go to the wrong gate afterwards. Let’s continue to play with another before-after spot the differences game.

We then proceeded to gate S16 and waited to board. Eugenia even gave us the idea to make an April’s fools joke to our fellow Leiden people saying we have lost our plane. Ah ah ah! So funny! We then tried to board the plane but our tickets didn’t work for some reason. That’s when the Iberia lady at the gate looked at us and said “You are flying with LATAM, gate S44, RUN“. Now, can someone please explain why two airlines that are partners have two flights to Santiago from a same airport at the SAME EXACT TIME (23:55)? In our defense, yes, we knew we were flying with LATAM and not Iberia, but they are partners and also our tickets were printed by Iberia so they had their logo on it. I am honestly surprised we were the only people who were deceived by this badly designed schedule. After running for our lives, we were the last people to board the flight. Pretty scary. So, this is the story of how we were about to loose a flight while chilling for 6 hours at the airport.

The journey proceeded smoothly and we got to Santiago surprisingly rested after a lot of sleep on the plane. Again, try to find the differences between our arrival in Santiago for the 2024B run (on the right) and this run (on the left):

A few hours later we got to La Serena safely together with Joseph and Jeb. Laird was right after us, coming up with the following car. Not tired enough from our long trip, we headed right away to the clean room to (successfully) install new PIAACMC and align new prisms for the Self-Coherent Camera. Laird was also working with Tiago and Rodrigo on the polarimeters.

Right after, we have witnessed not one but two (!!) incredible events: One of the best green flashes ever seen in history – which we have slightly captured in a picture as well – and three foxies together!

Finally, I want to leave you with this hyper-memeable picture that you didn’t know you needed. Simply replace “ribs” with something else. You can thank me later.

The song of the day is a song that a random dude on my last plane made me listen to with his headphones. I don’t know if he stalked me and so he knew my name or if it was just a funny coincidence… But the name of the song is Helena. Enjoy or be creeped out. Cheers! I am going to sleep.

Helena – My Chemical Romance

MagAO-X 2025A Day 1: Back in the Saddle

Hey it’s ya boi, JK. No really, Jay here with the latest updates pertaining to the 2025A run. We experienced a very colorful and interesting journey getting here, as we saw in Parker’s previous post. That entire expedition had us pretty much saying to each other out loud, ““Where are you Going? So full of Hope? There is NO HOPE!”.

In my opinion, one of the more interesting aspects of our trip was our serendipitous run-in with a fellow astronomer– Dr. Susana Deustua. This run-in happened as we were waiting for our hotel vouchers on the early morning of March 31st. As we were commiserrating with the others in the line around us, she caught wind of the fact that our group of obvious Americans were trying to get to La Serena and put together the fact that we were also en route to an observatory. We ended up at the same hotels, and she ended up accompanying us all the way to the La Florida airport in La Serena before needing to part ways to visit many of the other observatories in the area. What’s crazy, but ultimately unsurprising, is that she knew a lot of my old colleagues at NAU and Lowell Observatory, as well as some faculty at UA and Carnegie; Astronomy is such a small world.

We facilitated the healing of our battle wounds incurred from the journey to LCO with a classic Babcock Breakfast combo.

So good! The red stuff is a viciously hot (but tasty) mixture of some kind of chili paste in a mason jar that I’ve never seen before, but allegedly floats around the dining room from time to time. I’ll definitely be looking for this stuff more often.

We continued the work day with many Carlos sightings. He has been just hanging out in the front yard of the lodge for the entire day, and seems a lot less skittish than usual.

Some improvements to the Observatory are being made. By the Magellan telescopes, they’ve started what appears to be a roadway to a new instrument storage facility. As well as a w i n d s o c c ….!

The most exciting quality of life upgrade that they’re implementing here is our very own grocery store and taste of home!!! Can’t wait!!!!!!!!!!!!

As it is Tuesday, we experienced all the hustle and bustle of the weekly tourneaux. Along with more Carlos sightings.

As for lab work, Parker has been hard at work with the calibrations associated with the new accelerometer project. It turns out that it’s the classic physics lab experiments that will hopefully make short work of this calibration phase. Back to basics! To construct the pendulum setup, Parker had to get creative and make use of materials on his person to get optimum results.

We ended the day greeting our Brazilian colleagues Tiago and Rodrigo. Welcome to LCO!

Today brought on a solid start to the run, with a lot of tedious but really important lab work completed. Tomorrow is another solid day of engineering and we’re hoping that Laird is able to arrive after being delayed to weather-related issues. We’re also wishing luck and safe travels to Joseph and the first of the Leiden crew (Sebastiaan and Elena).

To comply with this run’s new blog rule, the movie quote I used is from Mad Max: Furiosa, which was something I watched on the long plane ride.

Song of the Day

Song unrelated, but a cool music video from one of my faves, Kaki King.

MagAO-X 2025A Day 0: When Delta Delays Take Over

Our travel adventures started in Tucson with joy, enthusiasm, and most importantly, an on-time departure to Atlanta. We carried this positivity through lunch, where we stopped at Jared’s Go To spot. We followed that up with some grease from TGIF’s.

As they say, all good things must come to an end, and sure enough our flight to Santiago got delayed by an hour making our already close call connection impossible. Luckily, Jared with his platinum status has people to call to move some flights around, and was able to push back our connection in Santiago by 4 hours. This gave us plenty of breathing room to get through customs and security. However, Delta had other plans for us. They proceed to delay our flight again by 3 hours, leaving only an hour the catch our connecting flight to La Serena.

To blow off some steam, Jay finds a corner to rep out countless textbook pushups as I am trying to enjoy the beautiful Atlanta view.

Our already extensive layover of 9 and half hours, turned into a crazy 14 hours! This left plenty of time for Jay and I to explore all the greatness Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport has to offer. This led us to explore the secret tunnels under the airport. They start off rather basic, but get progressively more unique and intriguing, displaying history, art, sculptures, and finally the Atlanta Forest.

The pain from Delta didn’t stop here. We patiently waited in the airport for our 2AM flight, only to have Delta delay it again till 10AM last minute. This prompted hundreds of angry customers demanding compensation. We later received a $12 food voucher (covered half my breakfast), and hotel vouchers. All three us opened the link to select our hotel and clicked it at the same time. However, Jay got the last room forcing Jared and myself to split up with him and select the other hotel 19 miles from the airport. We take a 40 min uber there making it around 3AM at this point and arrived at a “hotel” (basically a bunch of cabins in the woods). After waiting in line for another half hour, we made our way to our room. Just as we think we are at the end of our troubles, Jared received the wrong directions to his room and after searching the woods for some time he found it, only to discover his key did not work. After all of this we got to lay down for a much needed 3 hour nap.

After a disappointing day of travel, I woke rejuvenated after not 1, but 2 cold glasses of milk and this tasty hotel breakfast to get my day going.

After breakfast we catch an uber back to the airport and continue on our way to Santiago. With little to no trouble we arrive and check in at the Santiago Holiday Inn.

It didn’t take long for Jared to sniff out the empanadas in the hotel to continue the tradition of empanada Sunday.

After what appeared to be a delicious dinner, we had to return to the reality Delta delays had created for us. We luckily got the last hotel room with two “queen” beds, which turned out to be two full beds. The only problem is me and Jay are two full grown grad students… It is what it is, and ‘sometimes you have to take what you have and make it work’. It was extremely nice being a two-minute walk from the airport.

After a short flight, we touched down in La Serena and only had a minor scare when I accidently left the check bag area to use the restroom, and the security guard refused to let me back in. I didn’t tell Jared or Jay where I was going so they presumed I had been kidnapped. They walked out with all our bags to find me brutally attempting to communicate with a baggage claim worker with my extremely less than fluid Spanish.

After 52 hours of travel, we finally made it to the summit and the work began. I spent the day prepping the mounting of the accelerometers and working to characterize the signal we are receiving from them. Meanwhile, Jay and Jared were productive working with stagebs and the computers. They also managed to complete a backflush of the GPUs and clean the filters.

The new monitor stand has also been installed and mounted!

Finally, to give the people what they are really here to read about and see, is some Chilean wildlife. Enjoy a couple photos of Carlos who said hello to us after dinner. Unfortunately, no viscacha content today, in order to provide incentive to come back and read tomorrow!

I was told I am the one who decides on the blog rule for this run. Since I often get made fun of for how few movies I have seen (Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Titanic to name a few), so I have decided to make the rule that you must include a recent/favorite movie you have seen at the end of the blog post and insert a quote from it within your post.

The movie I recently watched and enjoyed on the plane to Santiago was “Hidden Figures” which is about the story of the Black women who worked as human “computers” for NASA in the 60’s and ultimately played a pivotal role in the success of John Glenn becoming the first person to orbit the Earth.

As always, the song of the day is required and this one which pretty much sums up our trip:

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: