To prepare for install tomorrow, we had a whole lot going on. Laird and Katie had some alignment work, me and Eden were finding new focus positions for the camsci stages, Rob and Viktoria worked on camdurham, and of course there were still grad students in the library working on their code as usual.
Maybe they know we’re observing soon… because we got lots of visits, including one from Roburro!
At 5 pm we had our safety brief for packing and installation on the telescope, after which we went right to the clean room for clean up.
With a couple of us new to the procedure, there sure were a lot of helpful hands. We got to work de-cabling, wrapping up the instrument, and moving it in place for tomorrow’s transport further up the mountain.
Sebastian & his work!Just a couple of twins
Song of the day
Welll apparently Jared says he plays a version of this song very often..
Color of the day
Aureolin / #fdee00
Color of that Super K fiber optic cable I learned about today.
They say every day is a school day and despite it being a Sunday in sunny Las Campanas I would definitely say it’s been another good day for learning!
Lesson 1, Size matters: My first lesson of the day was that a 32 oz cup (946 mL to those metrically minded) exists and is considered a normal drink size. To prove this point, Parker was on his third refill by 9am. I have to say I was very impressed, as that’s a lot of liquid for a person to hold. I was even more impressed to find out that 64 oz cups are a thing, though unfortunately one was not on the mountain to demonstrate. Luckily AI is your friend and has shown me what I truly believe will be the next sensation to sweep Las Campanas.
Lesson 2, With great power comes great responsibly: A day of vibe coding was fun and I’ve never been so close to solving a problem for so long. However, at the end, the main thing I have learnt is that copilot and I do not fully understand each other.
Note: this application didn’t even compile…
Lesson 3, As we work to create light for others, we naturally light our own way: Today the team were exploring vignetting in the system. Now, I’m not talking about motorway tolls, short stories or an allowance to enter a country, but where your light is cut off in an optical system by things getting in the way! Through some valiant efforts the team have proven that you can add a whole bunch of extra tubes to an optical bench and still not cut off the light from the beam.
I wish you all a pleasant end to the weekend and a good week of learning ahead.
Sparkles 🙂
Colour of the day:
Song of the day (points for how many song titles you get):
You know it’s optical alignment day when you open your camera roll to write a blog post and it just looks like this:
“why don’t we take a picture of it, just to be safe”
It’s been an all-hands-on-deck kind of day. Our activities have ranged from the very low-tech (cardboard tubes) to the very high-tech (new infrared camera in the visitor port) to the sort-of-medium-tech (refractometer to measure glycol concentration). While all that’s going on, at any given moment there are a handful of graduate students in the library furiously writing code to do any number of things when we go on-sky soon.
he’s baffledgood news, our battery fluid is “fair”r u seein this
This morning, Laird and I monopolized the instrument to obsess over cubes. MagAO-X has three different science beamsplitter cubes, which allow us to create an image on two cameras at once. Last run, we replaced our old 50-50 beamsplitter with an r-i beamsplitter, which gets us more throughput by splitting the beam by color rather than just sending half in each direction. A couple days before heading down to Chile, we noticed the r-i cube behaving oddly, so today we took a crack at fixing it. Long story short, we learned two things: 1. If your clamp is too loose, bad things happen. 2. If your clamp is too tight, worse things happen.
smile if you can’t stop accidentally making fabry pérot etalons!
Around lunchtime, we got some really exciting news: the infrared camera from our Durham collaborators finally made it onto the mountain! My roommate Viktoria and I swapped spots, and the joint Durham/Leiden team has been gowned up in the cleanroom working tirelessly all afternoon/evening.
three cheers for CRED2!
it must be wear-matching-outfits-with-your-advisor day
And, there’s nothing better than getting to see the fruits of your labors:
Now that’s an Airy disk if I’ve ever seen one.
Honestly, I think this means the color of the day should technically be “infrared.” But humans, unlike snakes, can’t see that far into the electromagnetic spectrum, so I present to you: beamsplitter-cube green – a color that makes an appearance on the left side of the middle cube in this photo.
Today started with Tiffany putting in some plumbing work for MagAO-X. We added a new glycol port to go into the side instrument panel to cool the new IR camera being installed within the next week.
In order to make space for the new IR camera, Sebastiaan and our collaborators from Durham University, Rob and Viktoria, performed surgery to remove VisX from its home in the instrument. The goal of this upgrade is to allow for first ever IR imaging with MagAO-X and to measure the overall throughput and strehl ratio of the instrument at IR wavelengths to drive design considerations for a future spectrograph.
Luckily, we are still working in the cleanroom since some healthy-looking clouds are making tonight look unpromising for observations.
Despite a rather brisk and windy night last night, I was able to take advantage an extremely dark night and get some pretty impressive pics of the Milky Way and Small/Large Magellanic Clouds with just an Iphone14.
Color of the Day
First, I have to give a shoutout to AZ for having the largest margin win in nearly 3 decades in the tournament. But more importantly, BIG RED is one step closer to making the trip to Indianapolis for the national championship game! With the being said, the color of the day is BIG RED!
The 26A run is well and truly moving along now. We had our first sunburn, a visit to a fellow Clay instrument (Lightspeed) and some more of the team (Katie, Parker and Tiffany) joining today.
On our first and second day of work, Sebastiaan and I targeted the vibes of the instrument – tip/tilt dominated residuals that limit what we can do at our science plane. These aberrations could come from several sources – heat differences from warm motors/cameras causing convection, turbulence from fans/the blower and/or vibrations on the bench. The hunch from the team was more on the former, but we named the tests about the latter since the name sounded cooler. Sebastiaan and I came here armed with some high tech equipment to try and reduce these effects – about €20 of poster tubes and some old posts.
So read on to learn more about what could be the most bang-for-buck improvement to MagAO-X…
Back to kindergarten…
Yesterday we did arts & crafts. This involved measuring distances, sharpy-ing hole locations and opening/closing the instrument many times. Every time we made a significant change we took some data for later analysis to see if things actually improve rather than doing rms-by-eye.
Sebastiaan becoming a surgeonNeed to tape up those dusty edgesThis photo deserves to be alone in a rowThe tubes in the instrument. They block convective currents from warm elements and turbulent air from fans between the focal plane masks (left end) to the Lyot mask (right end).
In the theme of going back to primary school, we also had a petting zoo visit after dinner.
Bench seeing results
Today I did the analysis of the data. TLDR: We found a 6x reduction of the bench seeing effects with just a few pieces of cardboard! This translates to a ~50x improvement in raw contrast for a second order chronograph.
Each column is a different direction. Top row is the power spectrum density, bottom row is the cumulative standard deviation (square root of integral of PSD up to frequency). Units are in mas assuming 5.98 mas/px. Blue: using or not using FLOWFS doesn’t change much when there is bench seeing (no FLOWFS case not shown for clarity). green/red/orange: both the tubes and the blower status seem to matter, consistent with the blower being the next most dominant turbulence source after area covered by tubes.
Color of the Day
“Woodland Hearth” a.k.a Cardboard brown a.k.a Burrow fur
Song of the Day
Sticking with the theme of the anti-vibes tubes, I present Paint Tape it black (the Westworld instrumental since I slightly prefer it!)
