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MagAO-X Day 17: Always something fun when satellites are involved

Lauren Schatz, XWCL alum here! I flew in from Albuquerque, New Mexico to observe GEO satellites with MagAO-X to see if coronagraphy is possible with an extended source. It sounds simple enough right? “Put dot on top of satellite, done”, but turns out it is more complicated than that.

The first thing you have to do is to actually find the satellite, and we spent some time trying out different methods of determining AZ/EL coordinates. Some were more accurate than others, but all required some noodling around to find the satellite. One thing we tested out was Tiffany’s spiral search code, which worked great!

We had some head scratchers though. Some satellites that should have been visible weren’t! And then we had a real shock, we were trying to see one satellite, but accidentally found a second! (see pic below). Predicting satellite conjunctions is really hard so to stumble upon one accidentally was pretty crazy. The satellites are separated by about 45 arcseconds. Assuming they are at about the same range from Earth, this would be a distance of ~7.8 km. This is a good reminder that space is getting more and more crowded which is why we need the Space Force 🫡 haha. So who is this mysterious second satellite? Aliens? Spies? Direct-TV??? We might never find out. Well I might. Maybe I will tell. Maybe…

Acquisition camera image of two GEO satellites. Shame we couldn’t record the images.

Step two of doing coronagraphy on a GEO is to close the AO loop. The sky had other plans however, as the seeing bounced around from 1 arcsec to 2 arcsec and worse. There was a lot of griping about this in the control room, but to me this was excellent seeing compared to Starfire! It was really interesting to see how different AO systems can be and how highly optimized they are for a given site. Average seeing at Starfire is 6 cm r_0 which is about 2.6 arcsec in I-band. The personal best I have ever seen was 11 cm r_0 which is about 1.6 arcsec in I-band. And yet we are able to get meaningful AO correction while tracking LEO satellites screaming across the sky. My personal philosophy is that all problems can be solved with more laser beacons and more AO… so maybe think about LGS-MagAO-X someday…

So I wasn’t able to get the data I needed so this trip ended up being an excuse to binge all my favorite food and shopping I have been missing. It has been really wild to realize I graduated and moved out of Tucson 5 years ago, which is almost as long as I spent living here working on my PhD. Having that context gave me a little bit of an extistential crisis. What have I accomplished in 5 years of my professional career compared to what I did in grad school? Not as much as I would have liked… It is hard to get support when you are a small fish in a big organization so you end up stumbling around trying to get things done by yourself. I have a new appreciation how fast MagAO-X is able to implement new ideas because of the close knit team. Keep on keeping on~

The song of the day is Möbius Chicken Strip by Origami Angel

MagAO-X 2026A Day 16: And Nothing Else Matters

I heard you guys are finally leaving?

Well here we go, on our way home. Wow this run felt long, even though we only had 7 nights. The first group of us got here 10 days early, though as is typical we mostly sat around waiting for a shipment to arrive.

This captures how it always feels when we careen back down the mountain, hoping to find a sign of our old civilization somewhere ahead.

In truth we did an unreal amount of work. From overhauling our instrument’s glycol cooling to fixing all the vibrations to installing a new infrared camera, this has been action packed. And it all works!

A big accomplishment was all the people who got their driver’s license on this run.

Our last day/night was not without excitement. Over the last two nights our AO Operators Computer (AOC) has been randomly freezing up. My little buddy (read as either GPT-5 or Joesph, your choice) had lots of ideas. After a dawn reboot it was still spewing disk errors when I woke up this afernoon, so we decided to do some troubleshooting.

I feel like there is always a wrong choice made about “do it right, move it and have full access” vs. “touch as little as possible so you don’t break it more”. You never know until you’re done.

In the end we didn’t actually learn anything. We did stop the freezes, but not the disk errors, so we have fewer ideas than when we started.

At least the computer came back up and is operational except for a [_UUU] we have to fix before we leave.

The official group photo. We’re missing Miles (who left a few days before) and Laird (who I left a few minutes before).
MagAO-X will be here for you even after we’re gone.

Here’s the craziest part: this isn’t even the end of the run. We have 13 more nights coming up, but we’ll be driving MagAO-X from the friendly confines of Steward Observatory. Another adventure begins.

The color of day is a moonlit-sky-blue

The song of the day is Nothing Else Matters by Metallica

This makes a good lullaby (except for the yeah-yeah! part)

MagAO-X 2026A Day 15: It’s the final countdown

This is my first blog post of the run even though I have already been here for nearly two weeks! It’s great to be back again at LCO. After being here for so many observing runs it is starting to feel like a second home. And it is almost time to go back because tonight was our second to last night of in person observing at LCO. As is tradition, we ensticken the instrument before we start observing. This is a tribute to please the weather gods and grant us good seeing. Due to some unspecified reason, we did not ensticken the instrument until last night. And miraculously, we had good seeing for the whole week! So to make certain we continue this streak, we finally added the 2026A sticker onto the instrument.

The PI is very carefully adding the run patch to the instrument.

And how we hoped that the amazing seeing would continue. Yesterday was great again after the telescope was back on its feet after a brush with a motor. So, today what could happen? The instrument is performing really well. The telescope is back in action. Our team finally switched our biorhythms to the night schedule. We had great food. There was fun. There was excitement. And then the atmosphere took a big dump on us.

The night started off great. The seeing was dropping. Justin Homs was observing remotely. And he was for the first time getting amazing MagAO-X data for his exciting Roman vetting campaign. And then that happened. The seeing went officially off the charts. And that was not the end of it.

According to chatgpt: “The only thing MagAO-X is resolving in bad seeing is the emotional limits of the observer.”

Throughout the night we had extremely variable seeing with patchy and thick clouds rolling over our observations. The atmosphere did try to convince us that it loved us. Look at the nice heart-shaped PSF we got from the atmosphere.

It was only between 2:00 and 3:00 (24h format FTW), that the seeing started to settle and give us a chance at correcting the atmosphere. And my dear readers, that is exactly the moment it switched to my observing time for the night. The second half of the night was used to do some new controls engineering. We had two exciting success stories. The first is that we finally got the ADC control to work robustly !!!

A very excited Katie that was finally able to robustly control residual atmospheric dispersion.

And the final excited result is that we got predictive tip/tilt control working! This has been a pet project of mine that I started working on in 2018 after reading Olivier Guyon’s paper on Empirical orthogonal functions. So, stay tuned and I will show some results soon at a conference near you.

Song of the day:

The color of today is red because of the atmosphere’s love for us. And therefore, the song of today is Be My Lover from La Bouche.

MagAO-X 2026A Day 15: Another day (or night) at MagAO-X

Algunos años han pasado desde mi última colaboración con este blog, aunque ya no son tan populares, este sí mantiene su vigencia con el aporte constante de sus integrantes. ¡ FELICITACIONES !

NIEVE
El años pasado tuvimos algunas jornadas con nieve, se cubre el paisaje de blanco, blanco invierno si buscamos en una ferretería el color exacto.

CÓNDORES
A fines de año, durante semanas, nos visitaron los cóndores, andaban las hembras con sus crías, no vi los machos asique rescaté una foto anterior para presentarlos a ambos. Los machos con un cuello blanco los distingue.


GUANACO
Este guanaco es campeón, apareció en el mes de Marzo Calendario LCO 2026.
Cada vez que nos encontramos uno de ellos se siente su majestuosidad, su tranquilidad al vernos, conviviendo en este desierto.


CIELO
Las coincidencias de Luna y nubes ocurren durante el año, a la distancia las últimas podrían confundirse con signos de guerra, la Luna la paz.
Esperar que los vientos de guerra lleguen a su fin, que podamos disfrutar de este planeta que nos permite contemplar las maravillas de los cielos nocturnos.


LUNA saliendo
Comenzando a despertar, la Luna aparece tímidamente por el Este, mientras su amigo el Sol se va a dormir.

Color of the day

El color nos lo entrega la última imagen, un amarillo esperanza para todos nosotros.

Song of the day

La canción, acorde a la temática, Scorpions – Wind Of Change (Official Music Video), porque hoy más que nunca, a cada instante vivimos los cambios.

MagAO-X 2026A Day 14: Back Online

The day began with the LCO engineers troubleshooting an issue we were having with the telescope last night. After spending many hours during the night and 10 hours during the day, they were able to determine there was an open loop somewhere in the motor through electrical measurements. They found the part that was causing the issue and replaced it with a spare. Big thanks for the great work and quick work done by all the LCO engineers and staff to resolve this and allow us to get back to normal operations in the evening.

The night started off with a former MagAO-X group member, Logan Pearce, joining us from Michigan for the first half of the night. She was able to successfully observe multiple stars with potential white dwarf companions.

The next part of the night we were joined by another former MagAO-X member, Lauren, who is now in New Mexico. We spent the majority of the time working on imaging and using AO on extended objects, which will be an important feature for GMagAO-X since it will be resolving objects.

We ended the last couple hours of the night back with Logan, as well as her student, Emi. There final target was a very interesting observation of a binary star system with the potential for an additional brown or white dwarf gravitational bound too.

A day at LCO isn’t complete without reviewing the local wildlife encounters.

About a dozen Burros refused to let me walk up to the summit, and a few of them even began walking up the path toward me trying to intimidate me, which worked.

Color of the day: Guy Fiery Flavor Town Donkey Sauce

Song of the Day