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Part I: At The Grand Canyon

Drs Males and Morzinski (and a little squirrel) just had the amazing honor of being personally shown around the Grand Canyon by the Grand Canyon Conservancy’s Astronomer in Residence.

Said resident astronomer is none other than MagAO-X’s own Dr! Logan Pearce. After a pleasant road trip (via Nothern New Mexico) we arrived at the Grand Canyon visitor’s center just in time to catch one of her public talks:

Logan covered a wide range of astronomy, and the audience’s rapt attention was broken only by their laughs at all the astronomy humor. (well, and a briefly fussy baby)

One of the fun facts we learned from the AIR is that the #1 treated injury at the Grand Canyon is squirrel bites.

The other fun fact is that there are no dinosaur bones in the Grand Canyon because the rocks are too old!

On our 2nd day we had another fun MagAO-X experience as MagAO-X superstar Dr. Alycia Weinberger and fam joined us. I think Logan even managed to keep it a secret until they were in line at the gate (when I texted Alycia to hurry up!) We had a great time catching up and had a wonderful sunset dinner outside of the Yavapai Tavern.

Logan will be in residence through the end of July. Here’s the schedule of night-sky events which include her talks: https://www.nps.gov/grca/planyourvisit/upcoming-night-sky-events.htm

Part II: At LCO

It was implied but never stated: MagAO-X is off the telescope and set up in the clean room for remote ops. Thus endeth our first Nasmyth-West residency on the Clay telescope.

Not much to say other than “big success”. The jury is still out on whether it was actually better for our quality of life — no one cooks for you when you are just working late on campus, and other people expect you to be awake during the day.

Song of the day:

The cover band at the Yavapai Tavern played this while we were there. It reminded me of the time I saw John Denver live — and he refused to play this song. Actually shouted “no” back at the crowd. I guess he was sick of it.

As Katie reports, we had a smooth and efficient MagAO-X removal — even though Sebastiaan and Parker collected the very last photons of the run. Everything went great, that is, until we turned the computers back on in the cleanroom. At this point we found that the data storage system on the Instrument Control Computer (ICC) had essentially melted down, apparently it got car sick. We need that working to be able to test cabling results, so instead of getting all the way to a working lab setup in 1 day (our standard) we had to pause for a night of RAID rebuilding.

So this morning we finished restoring the ICC data array, moved the important bits back onto it from our (just barely finished in time) fresh backup, and got to work. Parker and Katie cabled the DMs, and we had only one problem which was an actually failed “samtec” insert (the cheapest and easiest to replace piece of our DM systems). After replacing that we had the loop closed and got to work.

In addition to the IR camera packup, we also removed the experimental baffle tubes so we can make “professional” versions, and knocked out a few other odds-and-ends tasks to clean up.

After a dinner break, and some nice sunset jogging, we ended the night with some ADC experiments. It’s a long story, but something changed a few years ago. Katie has tried a bunch of things, which mostly just confused everyone. After a consultation with Laird, and digging through his small warehouse of optics down here, we installed a wedge to de-wedge another wedge, with encouraging results. As always, the permanent answer involves $, really $$$, but now we know what to do.

With apologies, the color of the day is inspired by a real problem: the foxes are starting to become, let’s say, noticeable for the wrong reasons.

I’ll bet it’s been a while since this has been on the blog. My advice: crank it and dance like you’re 18 mos old:

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