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Well, the last FITS data files of 2015A have been read out, and MagAO is in the process of being tucked away for a cozy rest until 2015B. I had the last night of the entire run, and just like back in November, we observed well into morning twilight — no photon left uncollected! I’m so excited to see what these data have in store.

Here are some highlights from the last science night:

– We finished the last night on MagAO with nice steady 0.5” seeing — really great conditions, especially at the end of the night. Cerro Manqui and its surrounding atmosphere continued to smile upon us!

– Pyramidal chocolate (Toblerone): the ideal confection to consume while using a pyramid wavefront sensor. Thanks Katie and Laird!

– I got to run Clio and the AO system at the same time! (briefly.) I’m not up to TJ’s triple-threat AO-VisAO-Clio skills yet, but hopefully next time I can learn to run VisAO too. 🙂

– Jordan learning to run AO with Laird, and running the system for my program (awesome tiger hat sadly not pictured), which was super helpful.

– Sniffles throughout the control room… Not a positive highlight, but since almost everyone caught the same cold virus, we did have quite the symphony of sniffles going on.

– Jared unwittingly demonstrates his VisAO spidey senses: To start putting everything away, the team had staggered waking shifts: Laird at 8 am, Jared at noon, Katie in the afternoon (after she ran VisAO and AO for me at the end of night). Therefore, everyone departed the summit at different times during the night. Jared went back to the dorms and to sleep around 3-4 am, but woke up spontaneously a couple hours later and asked us how things were going… precisely when we ran into some camera/GUI issues with VisAO. The uncanny timing can only be attributed to his innate connection — shall we say a sixth sense — to VisAO and subconsciously hearing its cry for help.

After taking the last dark frames of the run this morning, I went up to the chamber to see what Katie and Laird were doing to put Clio away and start taking off the adaptive secondary mirror. Many hot-pink zip ties were detached (the zip ties holding up wires/cabling are color-coded, so you know exactly which ones to remove at the end of the run — so clever!)

I also got to see the telescope tip down, as Laird and the many amazing engineering folks started to safely remove the secondary:

Then, well into the morning, it was time to head back to catch a couple hours’ snooze before taking the van back to the La Serena airport.

Jordan and I had the same flight to Santiago, so we had some extra time to grab lunch at the airport (best place to get gigantic sandwiches!):

As Jared and Katie mentioned in the blog, I arrived a few days early to help with observing before my night. Other highlights have included:

– The first-ever sunny day I’ve seen in La Serena (from the Las Campanas Observatory headquarters, where the astronomers wait in between landing at La Serena and heading up to the summit):

 

– My first-ever Cerro Manqui viscacha sightings! So precious.

 

– Some fantastic sunsets (Venus too), though not given proper justice with only my cell phone camera:

This has been an really exciting opportunity for me to learn lots more about MagAO! And it’s been great fun to overlap and interact with the other observers on Clay and at Baade: Alycia, Amanda, Atom, Jordan, Dave, Nestor, et al. And of course, a great experience to learn some new skills from the resident AOistas. Thanks again for having me, and for providing excellent support during my science night too. 🙂

Time for music! It’s probably safe to say that MagAO+VisAO+Clio2 is one of the “pride and joy”s of Magellan/Arizona, and so I leave the last science night with an excellent blues piece along these lines. But first, you MUST listen to the wonderful cover, performed on nothing less than a child’s Cars™-brand guitar from Walmart:

And the original by Stevie Ray Vaughan:

Alas, no Daughtry or Weird Al covers were available in this case. But never fear! There’s always some of that Weird Al brand of magic to be found:

Until next time! 🙂

Home is where I want to be… Guess we must be having fun… Feet on the ground, head in the sky… Cover up and say goodnight… Hiyo… I got plenty of time…
I guess that this must be the place…

And the run is almost over… I think we’re going to make it! We’ve had some good guest bloggers lately so I’m going to be posting some new and old pics, since I haven’t blogged in a week.

Also, I’d like to shout out a happy 45th anniversary to my parents today! <3 Here we go: Cerro Manqui delivered a gorgeous night to us tonight -- like a gift to Jared and me for these 6 weeks of hard work, we got some really good observations on some of the MagAO Team's top targets: [caption id="attachment_7612" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Cerro Manqui delivered for us tonight — other than a few weird waves of seeings, probably caused by the low winds — the slowest turbulence we’ve ever seen making its way across the shell — no winds, no clouds, and amazing seeing for almost the whole night![/caption]

Jared made a video of the loop closed and then open again, also showing the visible-light PSF:

Laird taught Jordan how to close the loop on a pyramid wavefront sensor and adaptive secondary mirror, and I refreshed Kim on running Clio:

But just a few days ago, Kim was closing the loop, and Amanda and Atom were running Clio:

It was a bit cloudy during some of Amanda’s time, so she suggested we lock on Saturn’s moon Rhea — here we are with the rings on Clio! See more of the planetary science we did in her post.

Larid brought some treats:

I saw Vizzy a couple days ago:

Sunset on one of Amanda’s/Alycia’s nights:

Home is where I want to be… Feet on the ground, head in the sky… Cover up and say goodnight… Hiyo… I got plenty of time…

Song of the day:
Music Video:

Live:

Cover:

Home is where I want to be
Pick me up and turn me round
I feel numb — born with a weak heart
I guess I must be having fun
The less we say about it the better
Make it up as we go along
Feet on the ground
Head in the sky
It’s ok I know nothing’s wrong… nothing

Hi yo I got plenty of time
Hi yo You got light in your eyes
And you’re standing here beside me
I love the passing of time
Never for money, always for love
Cover up and say goodnight… say goodnight

Home is where I want to be
But I guess I’m already there
I come home — she lifted up her wings
I guess that this must be the place
I can’t tell one from another
Did I find you, or you find me?
There was a time
Before we were born
If someone asks, this is where I’ll be… where I’ll be

Hi yo We drift in and out
Hi yo Sing into my mouth
Out of all those kinds of people
You got a face with a view
I’m just an animal looking for a home and,
Share the same space for a minute or two

And you love me till my heart stops
Love me till I’m dead
Eyes that light up, eyes look through you
Cover up the blank spots
Hit me on the head, I got
Ah ooh

Imagine you’ve got an invisible treasure in a shopping cart with two broken wheels. You’re blindfolded, and you can only keep the treasure if you can push the broken cart to an exact location on a giant noodle flopping in the wind. That’s MagAO/Clio spectroscopy.

Since I want to take spectra of “faint” companions to nearby young stars, I have to carefully set the angle of my targets to be parallel to the slit. The slit angle changes a lot.

Throw clouds and power-outages into the mix, and suddenly trying to limp a star onto a moving target becomes quite the challenge.

I did get some good photometric data and perhaps some usable spectra. I’ll have to wait and see how the spectra turn out.

Maybe I’ll learn to compile target lists of 0th magnitude stars and observe without the rotator. But until then, I’ll be pushing instruments to their limits!

Here’s a video of the Clio Slit:

And here’s a video of Clio’s star nudger:

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Edit by the Blog Administrators to comply with The 2015A Blog Rules:

Dress classy, Dance cheesy.

So you may have heard that we have had lots of things to fix on this run. From the very beginning there was an issue with one of the motor shafts in Clio: you might remember that Clio wasn’t ready on our first night. Everybody but Jordan Stone would have been fine without that motor shaft being connected.

Then there was the motor electronics failure — turns out it was the same wheel in Clio. We could have done 99% of the science on this run without it.

Next it was the X stage. You’ll of course remember that we replaced a motor at the beginning of the run. That was specifically because of Jordan Stone’s science. Lately, we’d been having trouble with that same motor. I stayed up late to replace the controller, which didn’t fix it. Eventually, with help from Emilio, we traced it to a loose wire on a connector (we think, verdict isn’t final). Again — everybody else would have been happy with the old X motor, and everybody else could have just worked with the faulty wire.

You would think that after all of this bad news, all of the ways in which the system keeps almost breaking in a way that affects only Jordan, that he would just give up. But he came anyway, and with the exception of some clouds it looks like he’s getting lucky with MagAO.

Laird wandered into the control room today. I guess that means we get to go home soon.

Edit by the Blog Administrators to comply with The 2015A Blog Rules:

This is the final night of my 7-night run at the Clay on MagAO, sharing nights with Alycia & TJ.  I have a few hours per night to image Pluto and Charon with Clio and VisAO, to get their separate photometric light curves in many filters over their 6.4-day period. We’re also doing some astrometry and high-res imaging to prepare for a stellar occultation by Pluto on 29 June. This event will be visible from the area around New Zealand, Australia, and Antarctica, and we have the good fortune of having SOFIA for this event.  The prediction webpage is here.  Even though we’re not observing a Pluto occultation during this run, I’ll give a little background on occultations.

When we observe a stellar occultation, we observe the brightness of the star and how quickly it changes as Pluto moves in front of it. From a SNR point of view, it would be optimal if the occulting body were invisible so it wouldn’t add background noise to the observations. For this event, we get pretty close to that as Pluto is 2 mags fainter than the star.

With occultations, we can probe the temperature of Pluto’s atmosphere as a function of altitude but using the known refractivity of component gasses. As Pluto’s atmosphere passes in front of the star, it bends the light thereby dimming it. Using this method, we can detect and measure Pluto’s microbar atmosphere from more than 30 AU away.

Here’s another example of refraction: moonset on Sunday morning. You can see the shape of the moon contract and expand as it passes through different atmospheric layers. With slightly different temperatures (as well as scattering and absorption), the refraction changes from layer to layer.

Some other photos from last night and tonight:

And now the song.  I had to get a primer from Katie, with a run-down of all the various rules.  This is the only song I’m aware of that mentions Pluto specifically.  A quick google search of song lyrics shows that of course there are more, but I’m too tired to listen to them now.  So I’ll give you Christine Lavin’s Planet X:

Sadly, Chris Daughtry does not seem to have covered this (yet).