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The past few weeks have been full of exciting firsts* for me: first trip to South America, first real Spanish conversations, first taste of mote con huesillos, and especially exciting — first time observing at Magellan, and first time using MagAO!

*Unfortunately, there’s not been a first sighting of the famed viscachas — or any other high desert mammals, apart from astronomers and observatory staff! — but I don’t leave Las Campanas until this afternoon, so perhaps there is more time…

 

I’m a graduate student at Arizona State, but am on a fellowship in Santiago until the end of January, so I was fortunate to arrive a couple days in advance of my run to learn the ropes and help Katie and Jared on their marathon MagAO run (so I had the lovely opportunity to overlap with Kate and Jordan too!) It was great fun training to operate Clio and learning about the AO system and VisAO.

In terms of last night and tonight, everything went incredibly well — better than I could have expected! We had literally the best seeing I’ve ever encountered, anywhere. That number in the left upper corner is, indeed, 0.34 arcseconds:

These fantastic conditions, coupled with a well-behaving AO system, meant that we powered through all my science targets for a whopping 38 targets — 22 of which were observed tonight! It seems this may be a record of some sort.

Slewing to lots of targets provided many opportunities to refine the sweet-spot landing between acquiring a star from the telescope with MagAO and placing it on Clio, and Jared and Katie worked on that in addition to running AO and VisAO while I was at the helm for Clio. Our quick observing cadence also meant little time for breaks during integrations, but I snuck outside to try some nighttime photos (difficult without a tripod!):

Even at the end of a busy night, some late RA targets also meant observing well into (nearly beyond?) the morning twilight. Let no photon go unmeasured! Here is what it looked like immediately after I was finished observing this morning:

I can’t believe how quickly these past few nights went by! I am sad to depart the excellent company of Katie and Jared, who are the most stalwart endurance observers I’ve ever met. They do an incredible job of keeping MagAO a well-oiled machine! I am so looking forward to coming back and observing, and helping out with future runs.

Finally, given the fact we finished at 6:17 am, I can think of no more appropriate song than this:

Until next time!

– Kim

Well Kate, we don’t have a clever fix for you yet. But why be clever when hacking will do? The technical difficulties last night were from timeouts in the TCS communication (which mysteriously had never timed out until we tried taking data for Vanessa……). Jared implemented a workaround in which we timed various nod sizes at the beginning of the night on a test star, and used those delay times as the wait statements for the AO. It worked so great that we were able to look at 16 targets for ASU grad student Kim Ward-Duong tonight, which is a lot! We only had 1 unexplained RIP all night and recovered from that just fine. Kim is a very experienced AO observer with adaptive secondaries (MMT, LBT, and now Magellan), and has become an expert on Clio in just 3 days, so we were very efficient. It was a much better night! Here we are all looking happy to be observing with MagAO:

Povilas: Well, what did you change?
Jared: I haven’t changed my code.
Povilas: It worked fine yesterday. You must have changed your code.
Jared: I haven’t changed my code.
Povilas: That’s what everyone says. “I haven’t changed my code.” “Fezzik, tear his arms off.” “Oh, you mean *this* mount-wait statement.”

Jared: Well, at least there’s some good news… I still have an empanada left!
Alberto: Oh, you mean *this* empanada? …It was delicious!
(Haha just kidding!)
Anybody want a peanut?

Metaphorical rain in this case, not actual rain – don’t panic!

I’m told there’s a blog post like this one on every run, though I’ve been lucky enough to avoid being here for them so far. Tonight, we had a few technical difficulties. For those of you in the know, this picture speaks volumes.

In good news, today was empanada Sunday. I didn’t take a picture of mine as I was scarfing them down, but I did take a picture of my delightful dinner. Those things that look like pears are actually cheesy potatoes in the shape of pears. So creative!

I’m headed down the mountain tomorrow, and want to give one last shout-out to Jared and Katie, the heart and soul of MagAO. [Don’t worry Laird, you can be the brain.] They’re down here away from home for a whole 6 weeks, cheerfully and tirelessly supporting observers on good nights (most) and bad (very few) AND blogging about it so that us slackers who get to go home can stay informed. You guys are the best!

Here’s a picture that Jared took of the “Three Ks” tonight. Good luck guys! Can’t wait to hear about your clever fix tomorrow.

I think tonight calls for a motivational song.

Update By Jared (after the Sun came up): Well that was horrific. I won’t try to explain all the things, but we managed to get MagAO back up off the mat and get some work done. During a final round of troubleshooting as the Sun was rising, we took these images:

If you’ve been following MagAO, you’ve seen our previous images of these two stars. It looks like they’re about 4 mas closer now (caution: that’s control room astrophysics, which means it’s wrong in at least one way!).

Time for bed. Thanks for your help the last week Kate. See you back in Tucson.

Here’s another song with relevant lyrics.

Quotes:
Vanessa: “Well, if it’s a software bug, you know I’ll uncover it!”

I go back down the mountain and begin my journey home tomorrow. I had a successful night and a half with some pretty good seeing, and I’m quite pleased with my data. As Jared mentioned 2 posts ago, my observations required pushing Clio and the MagAO system to their limits. While we identified a few hang-ups (under-powered stage motors…), most of the observing proceeded pretty well. I present this video as a rebuttal to Jared’s Captain Jack video:

(If the video doesn’t load for you, click here.)

Pretty much sums up my experience.

In addition to having some good data in-hand, I’m also excited that I now have a much more well defined algorithm/approach to observing in prism mode with MagAO/clio2. A big thanks to Katie for her help in developing the prism mode routine: future runs will be as efficient as possible.

Also thanks to Jared for his help in bypassing the normal active-optics steps at the telescope. I got on sky an extra 30 mins early and was able to add an important target.

I’m just hanging out tonight since my time is done. Kate and Jared divided the night. While Kate waited for her targets to rise, Jared was observing with visAO. The stars aligned for Kate, it seems:

Other events include the arrival of Kim from Santiago and the consumption of the last coconut cookie.

I went for a walk and found some pretty purple flowers.

I’m obliged to include a song. Since I’m leaving tomorrow, how about this one:

Clio is a good little camera. It has chip defects, cross-talk, and ghosts on bright stars, but what thermal-IR camera doesn’t? It also has a lot to offer and is very popular as seen by the telescope demand for MagAO/Clio. It has a deep enough well depth to take L-band images in the wide (coarse pixel) camera without saturating on the sky, and is sensitive enough to get good images in J-band, and can do low-resolution spectroscopy, imaging of faint companions, and it records some of the sharpest speckles you’ll ever ADI out thanks to our flat wavefronts being delivered by our AO system! Clio has so many modes — Narrow and Wide cameras, Imaging in 9 filters from 1-5 microns wavelength, Low-resolution spectroscopy across the L-band, Non-Redundant aperture Masking, and Coronagraphy (hopefully to be upgraded soon). We look at wide crowded fields, close-separation companions, disks, and more. Clio has cryogenic motors with 6 filter wheels holding a range of filters, aperture masks, pupil stops, and camera lenses for focal-plane and pupil-plane imaging modes. Clio sends focus commands to the AO system and offsetting commands to the telescope. We can control it with a GUI or scripts, including nods, integrations, subarrays, and filter changes. It has a heater and cooler with a PID controller to keep the chip cold. It is lightweight and shows no flexure, while holding its liquid nitrogen for 24+ hours. Thanks, Clio PI Phil Hinz!

I’ve been taking care of Clio this run, left with detailed instructions from Phil, T.J., and Vanessa, and help from Laird, Jared, and Alfio now too. For the last 2 nights, Arizona grad student Jordan Stone really put Clio through its paces, with me helping him in this effort. It was fun because we are learning more about how to best take L-band spectra with Clio. Here is an image showing what Jordan has been doing, with the help of the whole MagAO+Magellan team:

Because of the sky background being so bright and varying on a minutes-long timescale at L-band, and in order to average out the chip defects on Clio, we nod up and down the slit throughout the observations. Then Jordan will reduce the data by subtracting pairs of nods, determining the wavelength solution, and extracting the spectra. As we were walking up to the top tonight, Jared, Jordan, and I took a picture of ourselves in the mirror at the top. And I think we should have all shifted to the left and taken another picture, so that we could have subtracted the pair of images, because as you can see Jordan and Jared got hit by some “chip defects” and it looks like there is a wind-ghost messing up my hair:

We also tried to lock on a bright star at the start of the night, when the sky was still too bright for the telescope active optics to work, so instead Jared tried closing our 10-modes 0.1-gain loop for a long time, to allow the low-order modes to offload to the telescope. It was fun to try… and it worked! But it also took a while, and maybe we could have just waited for the sun to set… Anyway, we should try again sometime and suss out the parameter space!

Speaking of the sun setting, here are Jared and Kate — 2 of the VisAO PhDs — at sunset:

When we wake up, we can see the telescopes beckoning us from the top:

Here’s more of the dorms — really pretty and comfy:

And here are some more pretty pix from around the observatory:

Quotes:
Jared to Povilas: When can we work on the offloading and/or the DIMM?
Povilas: How about Monday?
Jared: Sounds great. What day is today? When is Monday?

(“Day” is a vestigial mode of time measurement based on solar cycles. It’s not applicable.)

20 days and counting.