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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:

After that horrible beginning, we’ve now had a solid run of clear calm skies. Almost relaxing. This is Day 14, and it’s also blog post #360. Did we come back around yet?

Last night we had some fun with a surprise binary. This is at H-alpha:

One of the clean room Vizcachas is still around. We just saw he/she for the first time a few days ago. Pretty skittish so far, maybe it’s a new tenant.

Toto blessed the rain, and Clint Black likes it now.

I’ve seen Clint live, great show.

Well, we hope you enjoyed yesterday’s blog post as much as we did! Amali’s clever and amusing artistry prompted us to develop the first-ever MagAO blog prize, and a new category of Award Winning Posts (at right). Here we present the 2015B MagAO Blog Award to Amali Vaz for her creation entitled A Post That Cannot Words:

Well, we did have a bit of excitement, with the ship trying to give out on us, but Jared is not one to give up the ship, so he got to work on his RAID-1 array and the AO supervisor computer was none the wiser:

And we opened at sunset and had a good night for TJ:

Mr. Psy Boone Bean worked out an issue with some J-band image elongation we had at the start of the night, which was related to aligning the camera, and not homing the camera lens:

And we had a great night of good seeing and beautiful PSFs. Amali is on the next transport out of here — thanks for keeping the loop happy and the blog amusing! Safe travels and see you in Tucson!

For some reason, Men At Work singing about Down Under reminds me of Toto singing of Africa: