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You’re never going to believe this, but our night started out with troubleshooting. More about the details later, but for now I’ll just note that we have a sign in the control room saying “MagAO has not troubleshot anything for X hrs”. Yeah hours, not days.

But the big story tonight is wind. And not even that much wind, considering recent weather.

As Kate pointed out yesterday, she’s now working for GPI. I think it may be time to consider the possibility that she is now actively trying to sabotage MagAO under orders from Bruce Macintosh (published evidence).

Any time the winds get high (20 mph), we start taking precautions. One concern is contamination of the gap, that is dust could get in between our thin shell and the reference body. In very high winds (say 25 to 30 mph), we start to worry about physically damaging the shell. The telescope limit is 35 mph in any case. This time of year, winds here can be pretty high, and in fact we see winds higher than 25 mph just about every night.

So when this happens, our observers generally accept the rules with good grace, decide on a backup target out of the wind (which usually means to the South), and we keep going for as long as we can. This isn’t good enough for Kate. Tonight, we were observing her highest priority target, which was about 30 degrees off a stiff wind which started to rise above 20. Now I’m really motivated by Kate’s science, and wanted to get good data on this target, so I kept my weather eye on the wind rose, and waited to see if it was just a temporary increase. But alas, the wind steadied out above 20, so I opened the loop and we swung to 180. Now about 5 minutes later, the wind came down a few mph. Our rule is that there can be no gusts above the limit for 15 minutes before we’ll point back into the wind. So this is what the control room was like:

“one minute” — Kate Follette (making sure I knew how long wind had been below 20 mph)

“two minutes” — Kate Follette

“three minutes” — Kate Follette

“four minutes” — Kate Follette

At this point, there was a 20.1 mph gust, which reset the clock. So the rest of these are straight lies.

“five minutes” — Kate Follette

“six minutes” — Kate Follette

“seven minutes” — Kate Follette

“eight minutes” — Kate Follette

“nine minutes” — Kate Follette

“ten minutes” — Kate Follette

“eleven minutes” — Kate Follette

At this point I went downstairs to get some coffee. When I came back she’d somehow talked Katie (and Laird remotely) into pointing back to the North. Granted, I had managed to fight her off for long enough that the target was now on the other side of the wind and moving away.

Well we survived another night of LCO winter observing, and this was all really in good fun. The fact that we’re still laughing and teasing each other is a good sign, and we’re not going crazy yet. The night did actually end a little early as winds started heading to 35 mph — nobody argued with that.

“Why do you hate science?!?!” — Kate Follette, to me. Actually pounding her fists on the VisAO desk.

“Don’t let him re-point. And don’t make up any more rules.” — Kate Follette, to Katie, as she was heading downstairs.

“Some part of me knows it was the right decision.” — Kate Follette.

“Winter *is* coming.” — Laird Close, trying to console Kate.

With much regret, I begin my first blog post of my last run as a Magellan observer.  I’m taking a brief hiatus from my new role as a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford (working on the very exciting Gemini Planet Imager) to rejoin the MagAO team this week.

My goal for these three days is to complete second epoch observations for the Giant Accreting Protoplanet Survey (GAPplanetS). Here’s a diagram showing the basic idea, but with an accreting star rather than a protoplanet. The top image is in a filter that’s centered on an emission line of hydrogen called “hydrogen alpha”. Accreting objects glow at this wavelength. The bottom image is a so-called “continuum” image, at a wavelength where nothing special is happening so we just see normal stellar emission. Notice that the relative brightness of the two stars is reversed in the top and bottom images. That’s because the secondary star in this system (top) is accreting, so it’s brighter at H-alpha than the primary (bottom) is. We’re trying to use the same trick (plus many more complicated processing techniques since planets are much fainter than stars) to detect forming protoplanets.

In keeping with the spirit of this 2015A run, we had a couple of minor glitches this evening (dead wind monitor, software slowdown), but nothing Katie and Jared couldn’t handle. Weather-wise, we were a bit better off than yesterday. No clouds, but we did have a bout of high winds. Jared forced wisely advised us to close for a while during a particularly bad spike of high winds and poor seeing, but I wore him down with my minute by minute countdown of improving conditions.

On the verge of reopening, Katie introduced me to the term “sucker-trough”. Much like a sucker hole, a sucker trough is a respite from bad observing conditions (seeing in this case) that is just long enough to convince you to do all the work of reopening before the bad conditions return.

 Luckily, conditions got incrementally better after that so we never quite had to close again.

On a personal note, this has been my first observing run ever where I got off a plane and jumped right into observing (rather than arriving a day or two ahead of time and getting acclimated). I think this is the new normal now that I’m a parent, but luckily sleep deprivation is one thing I’ve gotten better at since having a child!

I’ve only been here for a day and already need to clarify some nasty lies inaccuracies from yesterday’s blog.

1) My website does not contain ads anymore for anything except an awesome Quantitative Literacy assessment instrument for general education science courses.

2) I am not afraid of scorpions. See the following text exchange with my husband for an explanation.

The song(s) of the day today are by the lovely and talented Anais Mitchell, my former college suitemate, now a successful folk singer. I actually set out to be the first to post a song without a cover, but even Anais’ early songs, the ones she was singing when we were in college, have been covered. Of course they have, because she’s amazingly talented. Enjoy!

Here are three of Anais’ songs:

And, per official 2015A blog rules, three covers of those songs:

 

Mal Reynolds about sums it up:

Here we go.

So to kick things off, we got a good shake from a nearby 5.1 magnitude earthquake. For perspective, it was big enough that it woke me up rattling things in my room, but it didn’t wake Katie up right next door. That would probably take at least a 6.

Earthquakes make us nervous, because our delicate thin shell is at the top of a large tuning fork telescope, which means even a gentle shake like this one could give it a good rattle.

That’s important context for when the ASM electronics decided to be slow to wake up at sunset. Now, of course, our first thoughts were “the Earthquake!”.

Once we let the secondary think about it for a bit while we talked things over with Enrico “How Many Watts RMS?” Pinna and Guido Brusa (thanks for the help guys!), it eventually came up and behaved itself for the rest of the night. I think it’s because we told it that we would sick Anna on it again . . .

But of course, the clouds rolled in. So we spent lots of the night ducking in and out of “sucker holes”, which is highly technical astronomer speak for when you fool yourself into trying because “this one might last for a while.”

We did get a break from the clouds, though, when the network went down. As recently as two nights ago I declared “I think I’ve found all the places we use the domain name servers.” Umm, I was wrong.

Dr. Kate Follette, one member of the greatest class of PhD students Steward Observatory has ever had, arrived today and started her GAPplanetS observing program. [Notes: Kushal and Kyle, you guys need to get it together, it’s 2015, you could at least join Myspace. Also, this is not a MagAO endorsement of any of the advertisements on Kate’s website. You’ve been warned.]

We finally went more than 2 hours without troubleshooting something later in the night, and took a really nice deep astrometric calibration on Baade’s Window:

We’ve seen our friends at the cleanroom quite a bit. They seem happy.

I like seeing scorpions and other critters right outside a door, because that’s clear evidence that they could never ever ever get inside, where we keep our shoes, and where our beds are.

Sunsets like this never really get old, no matter how much work they mean for us poor AO operators.

“we have been threatened by the zombies…” — Roberto Biasi (referring to software zombies)

“I think I’m going to cry.” — Kate Follette (it was scorpion related)

“yikes that is close!” — Laird’s reaction to news of the earthquake.

To be honest, this run is starting to feel like an epic battle and at this point I don’t think we’d be surprised if real zombies showed up. I’m sure we’d find a way to keep the loop closed.

Remember Jared’s Trouble post from a few days ago? He offered a free MagAO sticker to the first person to email what was wrong with Fig. 1. We got a few submissions that noticed the repaired fiber cable — actually that was from a couple years ago — read Marco’s hilarious post about how we repaired it in a garlic-powered session. But no, the problem this time was the LC4 fiber connection was not communicating. Well, have no fear, MagAO’s favorite sister Anna saves the day. Not only did she email us to identify the problem, but she fixed it too! Now that is some initiative right there! A true engineer! Thanks Anna!!!

Related to Anna’s fix, Jared decided it was a good day to tear apart the computer that supervises all the processes going back and forth to the adaptive secondary:

He took out some RAM — apparently there were a few too many GOATS causing the Trouble — and tonight we had a much more stable AO loop!!

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LCO, sometimes you make me feel like I’m the only girl in the world.

As Rihanna says:

And LCO says back:

I was not expecting the majority of the top Youtube hits to be men/boys rather than women/girls covering this song… huh. Well, OK, Daughtry, when are you going to cover this?

This is the end of our three-night run with MagAO. We’ve seen a little bit of everything this trip: our first night featured high winds, while the second night contained several hours of thick clouds. These things aren’t unexpected in Chile in late autumn, but what is unexpected is to be visited by aliens during an observing run! We’re pretty sure that happened tonight, and the all-sky cam caught them in action:

 

The red dot shows where we were pointing, and the blue dot shows the Baade telescope. We had a visitor, and Baade was looking right at it! For some reason (definitely not because it was a moth on one of the filters), it only shows up on the red image and not the blue one. Our hypothesis is that it’s an alien spaceship visiting from a planet around a red M dwarf. We’ve been looking at these stars all week, so it’s only fair they come out and look at us.

Overall, this has been quite a run. We had the aforementioned weather and aliens, and yes, even the occasional MagAO software problem. However, the beauty of observing on a winter night is that even if you lose a third of the night to problems you still get 8 hours of data. Whenever any issues arose, Katie and Jared rose to the occasion, as did our TOs Mauricio and Alberto. With a team like this, there’s never any need to worry.

(Or, if you prefer Bollywood interpretations)

After a too-short time on the mountain (at least we got more than our share of empanadas) we’re headed back home tomorrow. Thanks to the full MagAO team for all the support this week, turning a possibly frustrating run into a successful one, despite the problems. I’m really looking forward to seeing the Nature paper on the close encounter!