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!
I crossed the equator for the first time 3 days ago. In the Caribbean we were greeted by a magnificent light show in the distance — fireworks stochastically set off in a dense mass of ominous clouds. But by sunrise we have arrived in more congenial territory, mountainous country with a jagged horizon as far as the eye could see, whose majesty is paralleled by few sights on the planet. I had a good feeling — of my friends who hail from the southern hemisphere, all are extraordinarily hearty. Something about the down-under latitudes and the inversion of seasons. We took off in May and landed in late November. Lol Earth.
Chile is not exactly as I had pictured. This is not surprising considering outside of astronomy, my impression of this country has been chiefly fed by Alejandro Jodorwsky. The airport at Santiago is very modern and filled with familiar sights like Dunkin’ Donuts, apparently popular with the locals considering quite a few have transported boxes of donuts onto the next lag of the journey to La Serena. Prices are jaw-dropping before division by the currency exchange rate, and even then they are comparable with their American counterparts. The drive through La Serena gave a glimpse into town life — neat, bustling, and not impersonal. The road along the Pacific was oddly reminiscent of California’s HWY 1. At some point we left civilization behind to be engulfed by the endless desert, taking the fork away from the ESO site at La Silla, nearly running into road donkeys, and finally stopped next to the LCO lodging. Megallan just beyond on a local summit.
Life as an observer here is spoiling. The chefs and staffs are always eager to greet and help with any need one may imagine to voice. One can always count on learning some phrases in the Chilean style of Espanol during their stay. Be sure to order scrambled eggs in the morning — an absolute delight. In terms of local products, Ben and I are constantly imbibing Minute Maid peach nectar. I was sick of Empanadas after Sunday but this is apparently a very localized phenomenon (see previous posts).
The hike up to Magellan never fails to be a lesson in atmospheric scale heights. Ben says that up here the pressure is about 0.7 atm (hmm I should like to test the boiling point of water). My breathlessness at the top is grossly disproportionate to this claim. Nevertheless, the ascent beats having a Stairmaster in the basement any day! Our pilgrim every dusk is rewarded by a glorious sunset.
The remarkable things about the best sites for professional astronomy are the silence and darkness. The environment is so free of the white noise one is accustomed to in an urban settings, that it is at first startling but by no means unappreciated. The darkness is prerequisite — this is where you come to verify that there is indeed ‘milk’ in the Milky Way. When the moon is down, it is dangerous to navigate without a flashlight.
For somebody with minimal observing experience (but thanks to Ben this is now less the case!), Katie, Jared, and the operating team at Clay are perfect — alert, knowledgeable, easy-going, making these long nights enjoyable. In between buzz phrases like ‘probe is moving out’, ‘do you want Shack-Hartmann with that?’, ‘AO locked!’, clouds, winds, the collapse of Internet, and software issues, we are having decent runs of good fortune, even if it meant to chase a few sucker holes. I learned that aliens are very commonly sighted in these parts of the world. Seeing an AO system in action is also something. Some of the PSFs and angular resolutions are stupendously impressive. We kept on bagging clean red dwarf binaries at sub-0.5” separations. Sir Wilhelm Herschel would have been proud.
Which is why symphonies composed by the father of stellar binaries capture the spirit of this observing experience well:
And a cover with slides of Uranus:
(I guess by definition symphonic performances are covers)
Look forward to being back in this beautiful part of the planet!
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 !
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:
Free MagAO sticker to the first person who emails me what is wrong in this picture.
And in the afternoon included this: 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!
Thanks guys!
No green flash, but it was nice to see a clear-sky sunset. 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
Tonight started out cloudy and we had some difficult times.
So here are some pictures for our various mothers:
Laird and Jared at El Pino, on our way up hereHere was Jared searching through the cabinet for a spare motherboard last weekMoon rise last weekLast 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: LCO Green 1 by Yuri Beletsky
LCO Green 2 by Yuri Beletsky
And my photo: 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
VizzyVizzies
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:
