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We had another good night. Some thin/patchy/high clouds blew in after about 2 am, but we were on a bright star and really didn’t notice. It was “Empanada Sunday”, and we all had empanadas for our night lunches. The most exciting part of my day was getting to see Vizzy at the clean room on my walk up to the telescope. I skipped dinner (too soon after waking up for that much food) so I went up earlier than usual. And one of our friends was hanging out. It’s been really skittish the two times I’ve seen it, but I moved slowly enough to get some good pictures.

There are really many fewer Viscachas around compared to our previous visits. This wikipedia article says they do not hibernate, but they are “prone to wide swings in population due to adverse weather conditions.” It is spring down here, so maybe the winter was hard.

There may not be a spider shortage here though. I think we can apply a thumbrule that says the number of live giant terrifying spiders in your immediate vicinity that you can’t see is 10^2 to 10^3 times the number of dead giant terrifying spiders you can see.

Luckily I think they’re too big to get under our doors. There are some gaps in the wall behind our gas heaters though, and I don’t know about the vents over our beds. Sleep tight everybody, and remember “Gilthoniel A Elbereth!” might help (but I think you have to pronounce it right).

We’ve been having some fantastic sunsets. Sunset is a bit of an event – the observers at both Clay and Baade gather on their respective ends of the catwalk along with our telescope operators to watch the proceedings. The first of many cups of coffee is sipped, yarns are spun about glorious green-flashes of yesterday, and much hypothesizing occurs about the optimum conditions for the elusive flash.

Did you know AC/DC has a new album coming out in 4 days? This should get you ready for it.

My blog post for tonight was inspired by the coincidence of Katie searching the online astronomical database SIMBAD for a bright star near where I wanted to point on the sky and finding “AO Men.” No, Laird and Jared haven’t been honored with entries in SIMBAD. As I said, it was coincidence.   Variable stars, as they are discovered, are designated by capital letters starting with R, followed by the constellation name (or abbreviation). But there are lots of variable stars (in fact, when you get into the details with Kepler, there are hardly any stable stars, but let’s not go there right now), so after R-Z, then variable stars are called with double letters RR-ZZ and then AA-RR. So, AO Men is the 69th (or something like that; there are a lot of arcane rules of the naming, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable_star_designation) variable star discovered in the constellation Mensa. As I said, there are a lot of variable stars, so all the constellations I had the energy to check had an AO.

This led me to consider these stars as friends of AO:

AO Men – Unfortunately, there’s no constellation Womensa, but if we consider “men” in the sense of “humans”, Katie and Jared certainly qualify as AO Men (get it — yeomen), as they do an incredible amount of work up here to make this run a success.

Quote of the night: Jared, bragging about his hand strength — “That’s AO Men right there.”

AO Car – the little manual transmission Toyota that I drive up to the dome in when I’m too tired to hike it.

(Note: the coordinates are not exact for the named stars in the little Aladin-Lite images because of how I did the screen shots. If you want to observe these AO stars, look up your own coordinates first!)

AO Cap – the hard hats the team has to wear when working in the dome (modeled here by me in a selfie)

AO Pup – The vizcacha, of course. Sadly, I haven’t seen her on this run yet.

 

AO Cam – The wavefront sensor detector. The system has been running so smoothly that it’s been largely ignored. See — no one is in front of the AO Cam in this picture from tonight. In fact, as I was writing this, the screen saver on the computer went on.

And finally, the star as my favorite question, “What is ‘AO For‘?” Tonight, the answer is that it’s for producing awesome images of young stars so I can image their disks and planets (if they have any). Of course, the night wouldn’t be complete without a binary star (it’s not AO For, but it’s what AO is for):

Here’s one thing that doesn’t vary: MagAO is awesome.

Katie is insisting there be a song. I chose this for the lyric, “After changes upon changes
We are more or less the same.” And because I just really like Paul Simon.

Tonight was great. Good AO loop, good weather, good science. Last night, though, the internet was down for a few hours in the middle of the night, so we weren’t able to investigate the airglow until tonight, which we saw last night as fringing on the all-sky cam. Yuri Beletsky, Magellan Instrument Support Scientist and Astrophotographer, shared with us the following images he took of the airglow at LCO:

https://500px.com/photo/27927395/amazing-airglow-by-yuri-beletsky

https://500px.com/photo/81325491/airglow-and-the-milky-way-by-yuri-beletsky

Check them out, they’re gorgeous pix!

Yuri also shared with us this link describing the phenomenon of airglow.

In our cell-phone-camera pictures, you can see some fog from a couple days ago (the terrible horrible no good very cloudy night) at dawn, reminiscent of some of the fog Yuri saw in his Amazing Airglow pic:

And some more goings-on:

Typical breakfasts 1 and 2 — like hobbits!

We opened our blackout curtains to a cloud-free sky yesterday evening. And then we had a long relaxing night in 0.5″ +/- 0.1″ seeing. We feel much better about life this morning.

After 26 days of continuous MagAO, we have a few corrections and clarifications to make:

First of all, I did not change my code. We are FTEs of action, lies do not become us.

Second, Francois Menard insists that he was misquoted. I agree that he only took the telescope to 30.6 degrees elevation, not thirty point zero zero zero zero zero zero one. He also writes “You guys are the best. (you can quote me on this too!)”

A third area where the record is a bit spotty is the infamous graph of familial love by Kate. Several relevant correspondants have chimed in:

– Both Anna Morzinski (Katie’s Sister) and Josh Males (Jared’s Brother) report that they consume their MagAO news mainly via Feedly, which likely doesn’t show up on our site hits. That explains the low number of hits (5) from Nebraska, perhaps, and argues that the Morzinskis deserve a bit more credit. It does lead to the question of who else in Seattle is reading.

– On the other hand, it is not clear that Jerry Morzinski (Katie’s dad) has read to the end of a single post to date.

– Futher on the subject of the Morzinski family dedication to MagAO, we received (indirectly) an apparently very passionate objection to the entire Arizona count being credited to Laird. Katie’s brother Mike Morzinski and family (who live in Tucson) should also have been credited with a significant fraction of those hits. I also suspect that Buell Jannuzi can’t go more than a day without checking on us. In fact, it is no longer clear that Laird even remembers us, let alone looks at this blog.

– [redacted] also expressed some concern about [redacted] privacy being violated. I assure you that no personally identifiable information is reported to us, only the number of hits. It’s too bad, selling that stuff might be a good way to fund MagAO.

– It appears that the Brutlags have no excuses. They just don’t care.

Alycia arrived today, and is ready to push MagAO around for the next several nights. Other than misquotes and inter-family squabbling, the only real problem we had tonight was complete loss of internet for several hours. It’s amazing how many little things that affects. Computers started running out of memory (I thought Macs just worked?), we couldn’t check star catalogs, etc. A fun game to play is how do you use VoIP phones to report that your internet doesn’t work?

Finally, you should know that there aren’t really any limits on MagAO’s availability. Here we show the loop closed (300 modes, 1 kHz, full gains) with the Sun up. Maybe we haven’t even stopped yet . . .

Long boring night tonight, sitting around waiting for clouds to clear. We started out ok, but after about 2 hours the clouds rolled in. We closed for several hours, and then opened but couldn’t get anything done with extinction jumping between 0 and more than 5 mags.

The only other noteworthy event was that we changed the batteries in the wind monitor, which means another week has gone by. The wind monitor continues to report 0 m/s, correctly.

We had high hopes for tonight after seeing 0.34″ seeing last night. You should know that’s an upper limit – it was from one of the guiders, which can’t make images much smaller than that. So here’s a great song, which fits the disappointed clouded out mood. “This world is only gonna break your heart.”

And here’s an awesome cover of Wicked Game by Daughtry.