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I fell asleep trying to write this blog last night, if that tells you anything about how hard we’ve been working now that we’re back down here at LCO. That’s right — all good things must come to an end, and MagAO-X’s first experiment with remote operations has finally called it a wrap. Uninstall day started bright and early (well, dark and early) at 5AM, where we briefly regrouped with the home team on Zoom before the telescope closed up. Once the telescope was safely parked, we took a few measurements on the platform for posterity and began the familiar procedure of undoing all of our hard work from install day back in March.

It hasn’t been overly cold here but it has been super windy! That made it even more important to bundle up our instrument real tight for the ride down the hill.

Despite only having three of us here, we were able to stay on pretty much the same schedule as we do when the whole gang is lending a hand. Everything was moved into the cleanroom and all but the DM cables were complete before dinner, which is a lot more work than it sounds like. Our smooth progress came to a grinding halt, however, when we started to have serious problems with the drives on one of the computers. While Jared and Joseph tried to diagnose the issue, Parker and I packed up the infrared camera for our friends Rob and Viktoria back in Durham.

At this point, I can’t really remember what exactly happened the rest of the evening. That’s my bad for waiting so long to write this blog. But by looking at the random photos in my camera roll I can tell you that we did the following in some order at some time after we brought everything to the cleanroom:

• Uninstalled and packed up the HDFS to bring back to the HCAT lab
• Removed the y-band filter from fwpupil
• Back-flushed the glycol system and cleaned the filter
• Drained the CRED-2 of glycol
• Checked the ADC alignment
• Removed the infamous cardboard tubes

And before we knew it it was already 11PM.

Colors of the Day

Since we pulled an enormously long workday, I’m choosing two of my favorite contrasting colors from the sunset.

Song of the Day

Alright, here’s the scoop: I’m beginning to write this blog at the start of observations and I predict median conditions or slightly better. My qualifications for making these types of predictions is a 100% accuracy rate so far for this run and I intend to keep it that way! Though I admit I’ve only made one prediction so far…. we’ll see how the night turns out. Keep scrolling to find out the outcome 🙂

Before opening up the telescope for the night, we had Sebastiaan and Joseph assisting remotely with instrument setup and calibrations, which went more or less without a hitch and we were able to conjure up a pretty nice dark hole on-sky at the start of the night.

Anywhose, half the team (including our fearless leader Jared) is en route to Las Campanas Observatory to work on taking MagAO-X off the West Nasmyth platform. As I write this, they are currently on a Delta flight to Santiago. Let’s check on their progress, shall we?

Ah, delayed… situation is normal, it seems. Hope the rest of the trip goes smoothly !

An update on the dwindling snack stack in the remote ops control room, with a nice fresh blueberry coffee cake delivery courtesy of Mel :-d

With observations going smoothly during the first part of the night, we were able to spend a bit of time sprucing the place up a bit. The camsci monitors are now under a very watchful set of eyes…

First target and set of observers are done, and seemingly pretty happy with their data.

Well, unfortunately the satisfied observer trope came to an abrupt halt towards the middle of the night with conditions taking a turn for the worse. As I write this, we’re currently closed for wind. And before that, we were struggling to keep the loop closed due to bad seeing. How it’s going:

I guess I’m 1 for 2 for predicting how the observing conditions will go for this run *shrug*. Not great, but not bad either.

Colors of the Day

It’s Memorial Day, so the swatch of the day is to honor the memory of fallen soldiers.

Song of the Day

In this blog, we celebrate observing in good conditions! The astronomical seeing at Las Campanas was ~0.5″ or better for the whole night!

Using this time, I managed to get a very nice sequence of coronagraphic data on a circumstellar disk with the polarimeter.

The crew celebrated such a good night of observing with a pool party!

Color of the Day

As Logan is off to the Grand Canyon for her summer residency, I decided to pick a color reminiscent of the stratified canyon walls at sunset–if you’re in Northern Arizona this summer, be sure to stop by to say hi to her!

Song of the day

And a song (err, playlist) to match

You’ve tuned into a Laird Close takeover night! That’s right folks, only Laird, all night night long. If you know one thing about Laird, it’s that he’s our #1 H-alpha fan. Which is valid if you designed a whole instrument to make it happen.

Things went smoothly, happy skies and clean PSFs. So smoothly, in fact, we had to bring some of our own entertainment. It’s a real BYO affair in the control room these days.

Also today, if you disrespect your sleep schedule enough, you made it to Logan’s origin’s seminar talk! She’s doing some cool things with future high contrast imaging and with JWST right now.

Color of the day:

CACAO good-to-go green!

Song of the day: