Blog

Well that’s it. The system is completely off the telescope. The NAS with the WFS and VisAO is safely packed away in the Aux, as is our intrepid Clio. The ASM is all wrapped up on the floor of the Clay dome, ready to be trucked down the the cleanroom tomorrow.

If you’ve seen the last several night’s posts, you’ll be up to speed on the comings and goings of our new friend Hedwig, a Magellanic Horned Owl that has been using the all-sky camera as a night time perch. To try to make sense of the somewhat distorted perspective the all-sky gives us of our friend, Katie and I headed down to the area near the Swope telescope where the camera lives to check it out.

The all-sky camera sits on top of the pole you see above the building.

Hedwig has a nice view of the Magellan telescopes from that perch.

Jhen posted some pics from our GMT tour. Here’s another one, which captures the almost lush look of the place after this winter’s precipitation. Povilas is insisting that it’s just like Ireland.

Over the latitude > 0 summer, I’ve been listening to a band called “The Dead South” quite a bit. With a little editorial license, I think their eponymous song is a perfect summary of the run:

Oh pass the rum [ed: Pisco please] on down the line it’s getting pretty cold
It’s been nine [ed: 13] straight days of hell and burning fires in the snow
And I haven’t seen my baby since that old black ship [ed: the NAS]set sail
Still we’re holding out ’till winter dies and hoping our strength prevails

The full moon peaks around the clouds [ed: every night] as the grey wolves [ed: owls] cry
The hour’s getting late and we’ve drunk every bottle dry [ed: ummm….]
Just one more march [ed: flight] from dusk ’till dawn ’till we finally arrive
At the gates of those who long ago burned our houses and took our lives

And we’ll sing
“We are the Dead South who came across the sea
To take back our lives and leave this land of misery
Our will is our weapon our hearts forever bound
Come on now tilt your bottle back and let’s go grab another round”

The wind is at our back [ed: literally] the ground is shaking at our feet [ed: literally]
Marching for the gates we pray our lord my soul to keep
For if we ever get ourselves out from this mess alive
I’ll be singing this song for years to say I’m happy we survived

We’re now starting the long slog back to a day schedule. So here’s an encore from them, called “Delirium”:

A blog post mostly in pictures.

From yesterday:

Tonight was the last MagAO night of 2017B. The night was split between Matias Diaz observing for Blake Pantoja, and Amelia Bayo with her student Daniela Grandon. Mauricio Martinez brought us a giant chocolate bar as a welcome to the Turno and the End of Run gift. Thanks Mauricio! It was great working with him, Matias, Amelia, and Daniela tonight. Even though there were some thin clouds, we were doing mostly astrometry and the seeing was good, so it was a great last night!

When Amelia Bayo first got here, I was reading a paper about the Virtual Observatory by A. Bayo. So I asked her, “Are you A. Bayo?” (At first my English-accent ears heard her name as “Emilia”, but I knew “Bayo” was on the telescope schedule for tonight.) And she is! So it was great, because while I gave her a little tutorial on running Clio, she gave me a little tutorial on using the Virtual Observatory! 🙂

We were so happy that Hedwig came back tonight:

Loop is open.

Dome is closed.

End of night.

End of run.

This is the best — extremely accurate, educational, and fun!

If someone reads this before I wake up and has some spare time and doesn’t mind going down to the basement, would you please turn off the Clio pump? Thanks!

Update by Jared: If someone reads this after waking up, I went down into the bowels of Clay, into the deep dark tunnel, and I think I turned the pump off. But while I was bent over the pump, the door slammed behind me. It was probably gravity, but I didn’t take any chances and just ran for it. I’m not going back down there to check, so we’ll just have to see if the pump is off next time we come back.

Before dinner today, Jared, Laird, Alycia, and I visited the GMT site (thanks Dave!). I had been looking at GMT’s two weather towers in the distance from the LCO lodge since I arrived last week, so I’m glad the tour request went through. The site is still under construction, and it’s pretty much filled with rocks, construction equipment, two towers, and trailers.

As you readers may already know, “las campanas” translates to “the bells” in English. The reason for this is because the rocks here have a particular structure such that they make a bell-like sound when struck with a regular rock. The GMT site has many of these rocks present, even with the site cleared out. They did keep one rock for visitors to play with!

Giddy with glee, Alycia, Laird, and I went on complete exploration mode to find una campana de piedra. We managed to find small ones to keep. When we were leaving the main site, we stopped on the side for more exploring. Laird… well, Laird went all out and hauled a large stone.

Upon arrival back to LCO, Laird unloaded his new pet rock. He claims he’ll keep it by Jared’s hotel door and bang it in the mornings to wake Jared up. It makes me wonder if that’s a better sound to wake up to than the extremely noisy burros. Alycia claims that her campana de piedra will bless her with a night of excellent seeing.

I’ve been learning a lot these past 3 nights driving the AO. Katie, Laird, and Jared have been super patient with teaching and helping me through the whole task, even when I forget sequences and do the wrong thing. Shoutout to Alycia for her patience while I fumble around trying to reclose the loop and dealing with a ripped shell. However! Tonight looks super promising with clear skies, low wind, and seeing at one point dipped down to 0.6″!

Tonight has been going so well that I managed to get an awesome PSF on VisAO while driving the AO! (Michael, if you see this, can this get me an A in OPTI 528? kthx)

The winds were pretty insane yesterday that I was pretty amazed at how the ASM stayed in place. The idea alone for structural engineering astounds me. I have been listening to a lot of Broadway tunes while I have been working on the Fresnel propagation analysis for MagAO-X. So, after the howling winds of yesterday, this was the song that came to mind for me:

There wasn’t a quote yesterday, so I’ll include it now:
Jared: You can even choose the jewelry!

Today’s Quote:
Laird: The way these rocks work is like magic!
Dave: Yes but with science!

EDIT: Look who came back for a visit!

Another long night of high winds, high seeing, and generally no good for astronomy conditions.

Jennifer Lumbres is here learning how to run the AO system. Tonight she got to experience her first earthquake as AO operator.

I think this should count for quite a bit in the Adaptive Optics course she’s taking this semester (someone forward this to Michael).

The most exciting thing to happen tonight, alas, was the return of our friend the owl. You can see her or him silhouetted nicely here against that white background known as clouds. Note the red and blue dots representing where the telescopes are pointing are straight up overhead — that’s because both domes are closed with both telescopes at rest.

We were wondering tonight about the attraction of the all sky camera to the owl. Does it reflect some light so it looks like the eye of a small edible critter? Is the owl vain and looking at its reflection? Is the camera just conveniently located on the ridge where there are plentiful mice about? Is one of the staff baiting the camera to keep us entertained? In this era of fake news, my own son accused me of making up the Magellanic Horned Owl, because it seemed too much of a coincidence to him that I’d be sitting at Magellan and seeing the Bubo Magellanicus.

In other wildlife news, today I saw a herd of (loud) burros, one small vizcacha, and a lot of (loud) birds. I had a lovely walk this afternoon when the sun was out, the birds were tweeting, and I was still optimistic the clouds would clear. There seems to be an exceptional amount of greenery and flowers around, as you can see below. During a public outreach event a couple years ago I made a joke about how green plants were bad for astronomy, meaning of course, that plants need water and open domes don’t. OK, so it wasn’t funny and apparently also went over the head of at least one member of my audience who the asked why the stars cared about the plants.

“And there’s something bout the Southland in the springtime.” This wasn’t the South-land that the Indigo Girls had in mind (Texas this is not, and I’m happy to be a Yankee – but not for baseball!), but it does appear to be spring time.