Blog – Page 122 – Extreme Wavefront Control Lab

2015A Day 15: Huevos con aceite

MagAO run all by myself, smooth and enjoyable week, despite the clouds the high winds and one (that could have been not so small) problem.

After 7 nights I’m ready to go home… I gave some serious thought about a song that would express exactly how that feels, after a short search I found the perfect one, one that of course complies with all new blogging regulations…

its corresponding cover…

https://youtu.be/s0XGLnEhvwg

But then I realized that the AOistas have a whole bunch of days left, I did not want to cause a massive home sickness wave so I changed it, hence the title of my entry…

The full version…

https://youtu.be/3N5FwBIGLV4

and the cover in Spanish by a Chilean band, no rule against that !

https://youtu.be/eEUU2rtupc8

See you in one week !

2015A Day 14: Trouble

So Francois Menard finally left, and everything got better. We had our first clear, calm, good-seeing night of the run.

That being said, we had a communications problem with the ASM last night that probably can’t be blamed on the weather. As always happens, such events happen after midnight on Saturday in Florence. It is also worth noting that we end up performing fairly major interventions as soon as Laird goes home. Anyway, Katie and I got up after about 5 hours of sleep to run some tests with advice from Italy. After a couple of hours of testing with the help of the LCO day crew, everything seemed to be fine and so we grabbed another hour or so of sleep.

Winds did pick up again right before dawn, and right now it’s averaging around 30 mph with some gusts to 35 mph. But for about 11 straight hours, everything was MagAO-like!

Our troubleshooting two nights ago started here:

come on Anna, I know you can do it. — Free MagAO sticker to the first person who emails me what is wrong in this picture.

And in the afternoon included this:

a fickle beast — The secondary checked out ok today. We aren’t completely sure what our problem was.

One of the amazing things about LCO is how well they take care of us. The Chefs noticed that Katie and I didn’t show up for dinner (we were napping!), and sent plates up for us. Our TO Mauricio also made sure we had plenty of empanadas. Thanks everybody!

No green flash, but it was nice to see a clear-sky sunset.

It took 3 tries, Katie kept blocking the Sun. — A sunset selfie, looking happy because we finally had good weather.

Mauricio, just after we opened for the night: We have a problem (every head whips around). . .oh, it’s empanada related.

Katie: there are so many empanadas down there I can’t tell which is which

2015A Day 13: Happy Mother’s Day!

To the Various Mothers!

Sigh — Tonight started out cloudy and we had some difficult times.

So here are some pictures for our various mothers:

for the mothers — Laird and Jared at El Pino, on our way up here

Happy MOTHERSboard DAYboard — Here was Jared searching through the cabinet for a spare motherboard last week

The light that shines but doesn't what? — Moon rise last week

The problem has been taken care of. — Last week we had a bird in the clean room… here it is in the vestibule as we were trying to chase it out. Later, Juan and Nelson patched up the hole and no more birds got in the clean room.

There was a big rain storm in northern Chile in March. The grass is green and growing on this typically brown mountain. Here are Yuri Beletsky’s beautiful photos:

Thanks Yuri — LCO Green 1 by Yuri Beletsky

So talented! — LCO Green 2 by Yuri Beletsky

And my photo:

From all the rain — The Baade telescope with rye grass growing along the path, and a river eroded into the path too

Quotes from last week:
Asking the observer on Baade about her night:
“How was your night?” -Katie
“Good, but we lost two hours to a FIRE issue.” -Gwen
“A fire issue?!?!?” -Katie
“Not fire, FIRE — Folded-port InfraRed Echellette!” -Gwen

Our new rain protocol is to put the moon screen at 82% to cover the shell:
“So that’s waterproof?” -Laird
“Well it’s the most waterproof spot…” -Povilas
“Actually Clio’s probably quite water proof. It would probably float.” -Laird

Night lunches:
“They wanted to know if we wanted empanadas… I think I just ordered us 14 sandwiches and ALL of the empanadas they currently have…” -Jared

This song has been on the blog before but it’s a really wonderful song and perfect for today:

The performance that made it popular:

The original writers:

Beautiful:

Powerful:

We think the moms will like this one:

The hipster version — Farmdale: country before it was cool:

2015A Day 12: Laird Misses Us

This is the 300th blog post. ~40 posts per run adds up quick.

The word of the day is wasabi. They served sushi tonight, which was great, but for some reason several people (all of whom should have known better) thought the thick green paste was just a harmless spread and applied it accordingly. It was somewhat amusing. Also, our wasabi pea supply is holding up just fine.

I’m keeping this short so that Jerry Morzinski doesn’t have to read a long post on his birthday. Also, no random graphs.

sorry KT, you have to be faster if you want to see the flash. — A gorgeous sunset. I didn’t get a picture tonight, but it was a great green flash.

2015A Day 11: Pretty Hurts

The word of the day is windy. Tonight was so windy we could barely open. From the night report by TO Mauricio Martinez:
3.- 23:40 UT High winds for MagAO, Closed. /MMa
4.- 01:56 UT Opened. /MMa
5.- 02:18 UT High winds for MagAO, Closed. /MMa
6.- 03:59 UT Opened, SH Conemode enabled, with better sky condition, better EL SH performed better. /MMa
7.- 06:08 UT High winds for MagAO, Closed. /MMa

And what does that look like?

We kept trying to peek through the wind anyway:

alas — Here you can see all the “sucker troughs” that kept us awake and hopeful throughout the night

Well after all the work last week and this week to travel here, tear Clio apart, put Clio back together again — we finally have some pretty images on Clio. This is the new Brackett Gamma filter: