Blog

Today was dedicated to removing MagAO-X from the platform and safely returning it to the cleanroom. It feels like just yesterday we were taking it out of the cleanroom, but time sure flies by when you are surrounded by great company and beautiful mountains. However, Elena and Sebastiaan started their journey back to Leiden around lunch. For the rest of us, it is just another day in paradise.

The day crew started bright and early after breakfast to get the instrument prepped for transport. This included removing earthquake bars, bumpers, geophones, and building the cart.

Once the prep work was done, we proceeded to wrap the world’s most expensive present in saran wrap and two emergency blankets.

After craning MagAO-X off its legs, it made the journey down the elevator and onto the Isuzu.

Following the instrument, legs, and electronics rack making it down the mountain, one last task remained for the day crew. We needed to put everything back on the way it was before the transport. Within a few hours, we completed all tasks prior to our deadline of 4PM, which is when the night crew took over operations.

MagAO-X made it back to the cleanroom in record time, so we took the opportunity to train the kids how to cable the DMs. To be honest, I expected this to be a high stress learning experience, but with the expert guidance from Eden, the process went smoothly and efficiently.

Fast forward many hours and everything was re-cabled and set-up for remote operations. By this point, delusion was setting in and it was time to get some sleep.

Only one thing remained on our checklist at the end of the day and that one thing was some MagAO-X plumbing. Stay tuned for Jay’s overview of the plumbing work.

Song of the Day

Today’s song reminds me to appreciate where we are, what we’re working on, and who we are with.

It’s nearly three weeks into this observing run and being stuck on this mountain together has finally driven us to form opposing factions. Professor Laird Close fearlessly leads the “day shift” camp: holders of doctoral degrees, champions of going to bed at a reasonable hour, and cart-building aficionados. The second “night shift” faction is largely anarchist, with its leadership defaulting to whichever graduate student is the least sleepy when a decision needs to be made. Only the unthinkable, an alliance between these two groups, will grant us the strength to accomplish our next monumental task. That’s right—it’s about time to uninstall MagAO-X from the telescope.

But before we do that, we had one last night of on-sky shenanigans (and science!) to get to. Before sunset, Eden went pro-photographer on some viscachas, and Jialin caught a tender moment:

We then briefly reconciled our differences to focus on something both night owls and early birds can agree on: watching the beautiful sunset together. Sadly, this is our last sunset with Sebastiaan and Elena before they head back to the Netherlands. We wish they would come hang out with us in the Sonoran Desert sometime, not just the Atacama… “Parting is such sweet sorrow”

Tonight was an observing night for our Michigan/MIT collaborators, and we were able to get some really nice Hα images once the seeing calmed down in the second half of the night: “[MagAO-X] will make the face of heaven so fine / That all the world will be in love with night”. The day-shifters missed the best seeing due to their sensible bedtime, but on their way down the mountain they stumbled upon some critters we hadn’t yet met on this run:

Once we’d closed up for the night, the de-cabling crew took on the task of shutting down the instrument and beginning the removal process. Despite a pervasive, nagging sensation that we were under-supervised, we managed to get the instrument ready for the day crew’s craning operations.

As I write this, the day crew is up on the telescope platform picking up where we left off. Despite our differences, I wish them the best of luck in their endeavors. We’ll reunite in the cleanroom sometime later today to begin reassembling the whole thing—but that’s content for another blog post.

Song of the Day: okay, okay. This might be a bit of a stretch from this run’s blog rules. I really love classical music, but since there had to be song lyrics written into the blog post I thought I’d have to abstain this run. Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet Overture does not contain lyrics, however it is based off of a play that is rife with quotes that seemed appropriate. We’re getting close to the end of the run here, so I figured why not:

It’s been almost two weeks since our first night started. We have been through many adventures and there are two more nights to come. Today was an eventful day and night. Today is our last night with an engineering block. Elena and I had to tumble out of bed to do some daytime engineering. Astronomical instrumentation is not a typical job from nine to five. The engineering is for a new coronagraph, the Self-Coherent Camera, that we are developing for MagAO-X and I am excited about its prospects.

The Self-Coherent Camera creates an self-referencing interferometer out of starlight using a coronagraph mask. This allows us measure the amplitude and phase of the electric field of the star! If the electric field is known, we can destroy it by injecting the opposite electric field (in phase). This technique is called Electric Field Conjugation or also known as digging a (dark) hole.

After dinner with went on-sky and first did some ADC engineering for the one and only Katie Twitchell. The atmosphere is a real piece. Not only do we get all that turbulence, we also get a lot of differential refraction. This messes up our images by dispersing them. Luckily, after the engineering observations of today we know how to fix the last residual bits!

The second engineering task was applying the SCC on-sky and trying to diggy diggy dig a dark hole. This proved to be tricky because of the large amount of fast seeing. The digging did not pan out, but we were able to get other interesting on-sky observations. Such as this image of Alpha Eri.

After the engineering it turned into a night for our Michigan collaborators. Sadly, the seeing picked up again and we gave up roughly 2/3rds into the night. This allowed us to try something never done before with MagAO-X. We tried to observe solar system objects! We imaged Neptune (very badly) and Europa. It was a fun experiment.

While the night continues I have to swing off. From today on, Elena and me will be switching to a day schedule to finish day time engineering and to prepare for instrument de installation on Friday (which is tomorrow!). So thank you for keeping up with our blog and we are almost done. Hurray!

Today we have a song that is a tribute to dark hole digging.

Three observing nights left! Wait actually just two! We love it here, we really do. Our TO’s are lovely, the company is great, and the science is incredible (especially this run). But there comes a time in any astronomer’s trip where we start gazing wistfully out to the sunset horizon and thinking longingly of the family and beds and cats waiting for us back home.

First, a moment of mourning for our fridge hoard of empanadas that only survived one night of cleaning crew scrutiny. Though we did not get to enjoy as many of you as we wanted, know that you were loved while we had you.

The main course tonight was a VisX sandwich, with a filling of Jaylishus. Luckily, we’re getting good at swapping between normal operations with our imaging cameras and the spectrograph, and overheads are dropping across the board.

We looked at some sources that were sure to illuminate the high resolution grating. These systems are easy for our AO system to lock onto, but high spatial resolution data is immediately interesting, or “astrophysically unsettling” depending on perspective.

VisX imaging on such bright targets requires only a few exposures for noise, and we spent the first few hours merrily jumping between targets and interrupting our good TO’s naps.

Midway through the night, the seeing seemed to say we had overstayed our welcome. We went from a variable, but usable seeing to “AO system can’t operate in these conditions” and “it’s amazing that we’re making an image at all” in a short 30 minute span. Just in time for observer handoff.

Needless to say, we didn’t have much science we could do with chart breaking seeing. We got as far as acquiring, but the star was so far spread around the coronagraph (when we could even close the loop at all) that the hour was chalked up to wash. So we got up to some hobbies in the down time.

Two teams competed heartily on both the Wednesday and the Sunday crossword. Neck and neck, brains were steaming. But in the end, who can really say which team won, especially when one team refused to screenshot their times.

Alycia graciously handed back the telescope to Sebastiaan, and more visXing occurred. Also more neural nets. And perhaps even some trapezium camsci calibration. It feels like we’ve been here forever, but it still surprises me that we have just two days to wrap up this run.

Leaving you with some more peaceful words. Because I’ll be thinking of them even when I’m gone.

Song of the Day

Ok I didn’t do a great job with the quotes this time. But sometimes you just want a song with a beat.

The first time I operated a professional telescope, I was 17 years old; I did it for 9 years at the Cerro Tololo Observatory. Later, I continued my professional astronomy career, traveling the world until three years ago when I finally landed at Las Campanas as an Instrument and Operations Specialist for the Magellan Telescopes. Yet, as fate and vacations would have it, I found myself back in the operator’s chair last Tuesday, temporarily filling in for Carla while she enjoyed a well-earned break. And so began a week with the MagAO-X team.

The MagAO-X team doesn’t just occupy the control room—they own it, both in spirit and sound, filling the nights with a stream of ideas, laughter, and cutting-edge science and technology. This shift, we enjoyed some truly exquisite seeing, sharp stars at their best under a spotless sky (most of the time), mixed with the excitement of students and supervisors over their successful experiments and observations. Between moments of scientific triumph, we soaked in the hues of sunset skies  and occasional green flash, navigated a maze of colliding chairs, and dealt with the quirks of unreliable sanitary devices… because even the Universe has a dirty sense of humour!

---

The best friends of MagAO-X team:

superb seeing…

… and lots of food!

---

My favourite moment? Watching the team gather in the dome after a successful night, faces lit with joy and wonder, as Clay gently closed its eye to rest.

Thank you, MagAO-X team, for the vitality and good vibes, and for making me feel 17 years old again 😉 .  You have my deepest admiration for your amazing work.

яoger

---