Blog

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 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 bytes.

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.

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

The day started with Jared, Katie and I flying from Santiago to La Serena with another minor delay of about an hour. As we were driving up to the summit in the afternoon, the remote crew back in Tucson were in charge of aligning and prepping Alycia’s observations. Due to us three being in Chile the remote crew had the privilege to stay up the whole night to operate MagAO-X, which means ‘doble’ the red bulls according to Jay.

Unfortunately, it was a rather poor night for observations. The wind spiked halfway through the night to over the telescopes critical threshold. This means the telescope operator must close the dome when wind speeds exceed 35mph and must remain closed until there is 30 consecutive minutes of wind speeds under that threshold.

The telescope operator also informed us that if the wind speed exceeds 50mph, it is mandatory that we leave the control room and go back to the dorms for our safety. Despite the wind getting close to 50mph, there was still work to do if I wanted the opportunity to test predictive control using accelerometers, so the hard hat came out and we went to work.

Alycia was able to salvage the end of the night after the wind calmed down and was able to observe another target. Sebastiaan also hoped back on Zoom at the very end of the night (and right before his lecture in Leiden) to take some predictive control vs integrator data and help me test the accelerometer predictive control.

With that being said, Jared, Katie and I made it to LCO safely and got to take in another great LCO sunset after a long day (or two) of traveling.

Color of the Day

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