The days continue to be productive with engineering and tests in the clean room. Katie and Laird started the day with some optical alignment/arts and crafts that involved printing out a too scale version the filter wheel.
Josh has been working hard on his self coherent camera (SCC) project, and the crew was able to align a new phase-induced amplitude apodization reflective Lyot stop with SCC pinhole, shown below.
Sebastiaan and Elena arrived safely from the Netherlands, despite the horses trying to block the road again.
The first of some potentially cloudy upcoming nights is unfortunate for the observing, but does make for some pretty great sunsets.
It feels a little strange to call this post Day 1 because by now we’re in the full swing of things in the cleanroom. Today, the big instrument alignment tasks revolved around the Atmospheric Dispersion Correctors, a.k.a. ADCs, which are somehow both my arch-nemeses as well as my best friends. Laird and I had to improvise a bit, but we successfully added in another wedged plate to undo some of the dispersion we see on the pyramid tip. It might not look like much, but hopefully it helps MagAO-X’s pyramid wavefront sensor to function better.
Not pictured is the progress Josh has made on aligning his visitor instrument in his own corner of the cleanroom – more on that in the coming days.
Speaking of corners of the cleanroom, there’s a spot where we keep all of our lab gear where, over the course of a few years, we have accumulated a fair number of lab coats. Call it hoarding or call it pragmatism, we seem to bring a few down every trip but are always reluctant to throw the old ones away. Well, today our excess of bunny suits came in handy. This afternoon a group of VIPs, hosted by GMT, came into the cleanroom to see a real-live adaptive optics demo. Naturally, we had to ensure that we all wore matching outfits (because dust has no respect for visitors):
And while the graduate students weren’t cool enough to get an invite to eat world-famous fried chicken with the bigwigs, we did get to piggyback on another treat for our visitors: eyepiece observing. Late last night we hiked it down to the 1-meter Henrietta Swope Telescope and looked at a few objects including a globular cluster, the TarantulaNebula, and a familiar object that Parker was able to get a decent phone photo of:
Song of the Day
Unfortunately, the number of bugs up here seems to have super bloomed alongside the flowers:
Springfield, or Bobby Got a Shadfly Caught in his Hair – Sufjan Stevens
The core team has loaded up for our trip to Chile to start the 2026B observing run! The travel started bright and early with a 6 a.m. departure from Tucson to Atlanta. We had a 9-hour layover in Atlanta so a few of us decided to take the MARTA into the city.
One of the stops we made was the Georgia State Capitol building (where we saw the replica Statue of Liberty) and we appreciated the architecture, statues, and the displays of Georgian culture and history.
Unfortunately, the fun started diminishing after we arrived to Santiago. The leg from Santiago to La Serena ended in an unintentional (temporary) loss of PI…
Dr. Males had an adventure traveling through the bowels of SCL to assure customs that his gear was safe for air travel, but during this escapade the airline decided there would be a man left behind, and we had to abandon our brave PI continuing on our own.
The rest of us carried on with the trip to Las Campanas and got to appreciate the lush altiplano fed from winter storms caused by the current El Niño system.
To finish off our travel up we witnessed an incredible traffic jam between a bus, 3 cars, and a ragtag crew of horses and donkeys
Song of the Day
The rule for this run’s Song of the Day is that each song must be about a creature of some kind.
Sorry the goal for me was to try to get one of these out every night, but here is a download of my notes fro this run.
Goals
IRWave front Sensor
Skipped frames
Larger Gains
Flat and configuration file.
CACAO/Do Crime
Push beyond 50 modes.
Telescope Alignment
Coordinated moves for mount and AO system
Nights
Night 1
Alignment
There was another offset on the secondary. We could not offload all of it to the hexapod and where caring about -40 arc secconds on the mount. And the hexapod was at its limits at zenith
Did not have to use the paper where able to slew the telescope in the elevation in and was able to find it.
Calibration
Started off with a fresh calibration 3 modes 2026_10240 91018. NOt from the past calibration. The unit did seem to be a little more stable.
Able to close the loop on 20 modes. The images seemed to be improved, but the images did seem to not be stable and would go in and out. Boot strapped from 3 twice and then up to 20 modes and bootstrapped that one also.
Problems
z stage motor did not home when it was comanded to be moved.
Night 2
Weather
There was high humidity from the start of the night. And able to get on target for the first of the night.
A lot of clouds where blowing over and this made it impracticle for any AO work
Did a cordinated move through REDIS and confirmed that a command was sent to the AO System and the Telescope mount.
Night 3
Started off by looking at the flats and closed the loop and then created a flat from that position
Then pushed the mirror with robin s maximizing flux algorithium
For better pupil ilumination
This took a lot of current on the mirror to make themoves
Then santized the flat and used this to start a new reconstructor
This was abanondend because the mirror was not stable and a lot of current was bing put to the mirrror.
Created a new calibration with the new on sky flat.
Bootstapped 2X 4 modes 2X 20 modes 500 iterations each. The 20 modes we doubled the amplitude and for the 50 we 1.5 the first 3 to 20.
Boostrapped to 50.
Bootstraped to 100.
This did not have very good results
Turned focus offloading on.
Closed early the seeing had really gotton behone 3 arcseconds and the ao loop could not improve.
Night 4
Started the night with very nice seeing condtions. The min. was around 0.53 arcseconds. Did a 100 mode calibration
Avalanche implemented gain on a 9th magnitude and it the closed the loop.
0.6 v K9 star able to close the loop 100 m
12.4 v k6 star able to close the loop 100 modes
Ross 614
Night 5
mflt loop limit was used to keep it more consistent kept large commands from being sent to the mirror.
hr8799
Tested new flats to see which one would work better
The 100 modes from last night had a problem that above 50 modes it did not work. We just turned on the 50 modes and trying to bootstrap from there.
The system does seem to struggle after 50 modes. Its starts to elogate the image.
Z stage in the periscope where able to get it working and map out what kind of motion is needed for a focus adjustment on ARIES
