“Maria makes the mountains sound like folks were up there dyin'”
We’ve already used up some of the best wind songs, and we’re just getting started. I saw at least one gust of 64 mph on our wind gage up here at Clay. The LCO weather page doesn’t go that high:
Winds at Magellan were off the chart (it only goes to 50) several times tonight.
Down at the 100″ DuPont telescope, they were getting hammered by high 60s (mph) for hours. We still haven’t reached the MagAO record. Maybe tomorrow.
It was screaming at DuPont tonight. Mauricio called to check on them, and they had to put weights behind their doors to keep them shut.
I made this recording in the dome tonight while winds were over 50 (it’s not your computer, the lights were off).
The sky at sunset, as Katie was heading up to sit around and do nothing all night. Click for the full cloudiness.Tonight’s dessert was Sopaipilla, which Mauricio says Chilean grandmothers make when it rains. It hasn’t rained yet . . .
OK, I’ve had enough winter. Look at all these clouds! Cloudy clouds, clouded view
And the winds, and still the clouds! Cloudy and windy
So we didn’t even open tonight, at all, ever.
Well, at least that meant it was a good time to fix Clio. So I’ve been aligning the camera by hand lately, but not anymore! Now TJ and I don’t have to align the pupil images by hand anymore
Here was us last week… Pato Pinto helped us by soldering a jumper to bypass the broken motor so that we could move the other ones with the gui from the warmth of the control room, and only had to go out to the platform to move the field stop: Pato Pinto last week soldering the jumper for the broken motor
Thanks to Jenny Greene who delivered the necessary tools to us today, Jared and I went out to the cold platform tonight to tear into Clio once more. We replaced the broken motor controller with a working one, including setting up the dip switches and adding thermal paste: Jared and I put the new motor controller in Clio
Before and after: Left: Before / Right: After
So … now it works! Here it is working… see I can put in arbitrary field stops from the gui, such as the slit!
Good night! Ahoy there
Song of the day:
Taylor Swift liked this song so much she did 2 covers — here’s a few people who followed suit:
It was clear tonight, which was nice after last night. But seeing was pretty bad (for LCO), and the winds kicked up again. We’ve had a few days respite from these winter gusts coming from the NE, but now we are again huddling with our back to them, pointing to the SW.
I saw the clean room vizzies on my way up. They look like they aren’t speaking.A nice panorama at sunrise. The sun is peaking around Baade, and that’s Las Campanas itself behind the lodge.
Today was T.J.’s first night, which means the start of good solid breaks for Jared and me. It was pretty cloudy which made for a quiet night with no disturbances: Cloudy clouds are clouding the stars
Since it was my first break in a long time, my brain was mainly up for a lot of youtubing of Namibian folk songs. If you are also spending your weekend waiting for the clouds to clear, enjoy this long playlist of beautiful music from Namibia:
First song of the day:
!Nosa !Oes Ge Nesa /translated “It’s a quiet night there are no disturbances”
Cover:
(Also stick around for the fun song “Sponono” at the end, I love that one!)
The person who posted this to Youtube claims it is also called Sponono, but it’s not the one (above) that I know as Sponono. It’s still a nice one. Perhaps our Nama-speaking readers can help us with the title of this one:
Third song of the day:
Tuaza Kokure
No covers to be found, and I listed long and hard — I love this one. The second song in the Tuaza Kokure video is a cover for the…
Tonight went smoothly… for 2015A. We were doing some of the MagAO Key Project which are the types of observations the system is optimized for, including pointing mostly South out of the wind, and taking deep high-contrast imaging data. Still a bit of weather… but overall quite a calm smooth night in the control room. Mauricio made sure we had chocolate cake with our plates of dinner for our midnight lunch and the telescope stayed pointing, Jared made sure the loop kept closed and VisAO kept running, and I made sure Clio saved all the right photons in all the right places.
A 3-course dinner including soup and chocolate cake!
