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Last night we lost ~5 hours to the X-stage problem. Tonight we lost about an hour (of perfect weather and amazing seeing) due to the BCUs locking up and the shell doing that thing where it panics. Yet we still squeezed in some good data for our own projects. Was Vanessa Bailey here? She has the distinction of doing the most with the least bit of MagAO, as far as I can recall. On two separate occasions she had a half night with MagAO and lost most of her time due to instrument problems. Once it was the “wait for AO” problem that took us about 3/4 of her half-night to diagnose, and once — was it the Clio motor failure? They’re all starting to blur together… …yet she still managed to get data on her top targets in just 1 hour and discover a planet with some of her bare-minimum MagAO time. Well, now she’s graduated and moved on to GPI, but MagAO still misses her, and tries to bring some of that Vanessa essence back to the telescope…

MagAO is happiest when it has the most photons. It must be all that radiation pressure that keeps the mirror flat…right? When we opened the loop for the last time tonight, we were looking at the 2nd brightest star in the sky. Here’s the nice flat wavefront on the pyramid pupils:

Um, well I am not a fan of the noise and shouting in yesterday’s song of the day… All I can think of is another song with shouting… and also Shakira!:

We seem to have more problems on *our* nights than on any others. I guess that’s a great customer service policy, but we’re really in this to do our own science. So, the X stage is dead (again) and it says “Morzinski” on the schedule. We spent the first half of the night fairly desperately trying to get the motor to move to just the right spot so that we could take our observations. The problem is the optical encoder (we think — if you’re keeping track that’s about the 11th explanation we’ve come up with). This means the motor doesn’t know where it is, so I spent 3 hours out on the platform pressing “go” and the “stop” as fast as I could to try to get it to hop to the right spot.

It finally landed exactly where we want it, and it is now turned off never to be turned on again. Or at least until we can safely troubleshoot it. For now, we are in a scientifically productive state and we’re leaving it there.

Here’s some more Amazing Grace.

Jackie and the DTM Tweeps have been putting up signs about Tweeting #LifeAtLCO.

We are closed due to crappy clouds here at Magellan. So we had a little coffee party and chatted. #lifeatlco pic.twitter.com/0sc08dAcMU

— Jackie Faherty (@jfaherty) November 24, 2015

MagAO doesn’t Tweet (yet) [“Loop is open. Shell RIP. #LifeAtLCO”] but today it’s time for a lifestyle post:

And with TJ here to run all 3 cameras at once, Jared and I get a nice break #LifeAtLCO

Yesterday’s song was from Maverick. Here is the Maverick choir singing Amazing Grace. It’s pretty swinging and there are a lot of great singers in there. Enjoy!

Sigh. And also, our X stage started doing that thing again tonight. Laird, we may have to have one of our wonderful cable routing bonding sessions. You know, the kind where I hold the flashlight for 5 hours while you talk to yourself with your head inside the instrument. I can’t wait.

Since we had clouds, I bailed on the control room and went down to the astronomer’s lounge. Much comfy.

Here’s another Clint Black song. It also describes TJ’s last couple of nights.

We had a solid run of 2 nights with good weather and incredible seeing. Sadly, that run is over. Tonight the clouds came rolling in around midnight and didn’t let up. Before they came in, the wind picked up and forced us to point at a very southern star.

While we were taking data, we noticed that the Clio PSF was elongated on one side of the chip but perfectly round on the other. To troubleshoot this issue, Katie and I decided to mess with Clio’s knobs (for instrument folks: move the camera lens around). We were trying to see if changing some alignment might fix the elongation. Here’s what we found:

These images were taken with the star at different positions on the detector and the camera lens adjusted to a new value. When we put the camera lens back to its nominal value, here’s what we found:

On the whole, the images are pretty similar. And more troubling, the overall PSF shape didn’t really change, which means the camera lens wasn’t responsible for the weird elongation. More problem solving to do later!

Since I am a LEGEND (A. Vaz, Nov. 29, 2015), I am going to forego the song requirement and bring back quotes. Here’s a little convo we had when the wind started to pick up:

“T.J. will point the telescope straight into the wind if you don’t watch him.” –Jared

“It’s true, I will.”–me

Goodnight/morning everyone.

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Edit by the blog administrators:
TJ doesn’t want to play our game, so here is a video of him — the game will resume tomorrow: