Blog

So the last two or three nights we’ve been using MagAO at its geometric limits. By that I mean the various angles and rotations and cable contortions that the exciting science targets required. There was a conversation like this last night (accuracy not 100%):

Francois: “What’s the elevation limit?”

Jared: “Thirty degrees.”

Francois: “So I can go to thirty point zero zero zero zero zero zero one?”

Katie: “It’s not really a goal.”

Tonight Jordan flipped our system upside down about 25 times. It’s designed to do this, of course, but it makes for lots of fun keeping all of the precise alignment from primary mirror to secondary mirror, and down the PyWFS optics. Kate did a fantastic job keeping up with all of the camera lens re-alignments and axis changes on the pyramid. Still though, after a couple of nights of defending MagAO from marauding observers I feel a little like Captain Jack:

We forgot to post this last night. Here’s Francois Menard and Jos de Boer with the MagAO team.

And Jordan hard at work with Clio.

And our usual assortment of day-in-the-life pretty pictures.

I had some good metal picked out for tonight, but I think we need to just relax a little. Here you go.

That’s better.

Tonight started rather auspiciously with the best green flash that I’ve ever seen. Unfortunately, neither Jared nor I got a good picture, but here’s one I took during an  early commissioning run. Trust us – it was epic.

During twilight, Jared and Povilas added gaffers tape to the guider CCD. In the end though, they decided that the glint we saw yesterday during acquisition of new targets was probably the moon.  Still, it never hurts to have more baffling.

It was also discovered that when you immerse a roll of tape in liquid nitrogen, its adhesive properties are substantially altered. The details of how this experiment came to be conducted remain somewhat mysterious, and the result is awaiting independent verification.

I got to try my hand at operating the AO system today, which was fun for me and largely uneventful. The system runs so nicely these days (knock on wood), that I had lots of time to be mesmerized by turbulent patterns moving across the mirror at 200-1000Hz.

I learned that the main barrier to smooth AO operation is actually lack of real estate on the computer screen. So many GUIs have to be open at once that strategic placement is required, and everyone has a different opinion about where the “right” place for each one is. Here’s what I arrived at tonight with some help from Jared and Katie.

Note that there are lots of windows peeking out from behind. That’s so that I can get to them quickly when I need them.

I also decided that it was time for a promotion on the MagAO team. You see, everyone else has a nice mug with their name and role on the team monogramed on it. Here are Jared and Katie holding theirs.

Luckily, we have a nice label maker, and some blank mugs, so I was able to correct this egregious oversight.

Quote of the Day:

Francois, in reference to a newly discovered triple system (see pic): “Let’s see what color it is”

Jos, looking at the image in an orange/brown color table: “It’s a bit brown actually, but if you want I could make it blue”

My husband is home alone with our son this week, and the poor guy has food poisoning, so the song of the day is for my family. Thanks boys for letting me be here!

 

My duty here on this run is to give Jared and Katie a bit of a break, which includes taking over some of the blogging.

Tonight we started the night by swapping out the batteries in the wind monitor, which meant that we had to tilt the telescope over so that we could get to it. Jared and Katie have done it many times before, so they’re old pros now, and it was fun for me to climb up on the catwalk and look at the backside of the secondary up close.

We had a brief hiccup at the very start of the night because there was a power outage on the mountain during the day. We just had to restart our software, so it was a pretty minor setback.

Hector Canovas and Adam Hardy started off the night with a continuation of their program from yesterday, then we switched over at midnight to observers Francois Menard and Jos Deboer. Things went so smoothly that we had a little time to analyze our blog stats from the last month. Here are the results for the US, broken down by state:

This triggered an argument regarding whose family loves them best. I’d say it’s pretty well tied between Katie and Jared’s families, but as you can see, I clearly lost. Step it up Brutlags!

Otherwise, not much to report tonight from Las Campanas. Trust us, that’s a good thing!

I’m told that I have to pick a song with deep astrophysical meaning to go with my post. This probably dates me, but here goes…

We had an action packed night, with many more targets than we’ve been observing so far on this run. The AO system wasn’t on its best behaviour, but we have learned to recognize most of its bad moods quickly and we can usually slap it back into shape right away.

Kate Follette is here, ready to help take up some of the operations load. Our visiting observers tonight were Hector Canovas and Adam Hardy from Universidad de Valparaiso. Here’s a shot of the bleary eyed “aoistas” this morning right before we quit, minus Katie who’s behind the camera, and minus Kate who went to bed too early to get her picture took.

In Kate’s defense, she made it to the half-way point after 24 hours of travel from Tucson.

Most of the targets we looked at for our new friends Hector and Adam were faint and red. When we set up the system for such targets we need to have a good guess how many photons per second the pyramid wavefront sensor (PyWFS – following the obviously correct conventions of Guyon 2006) will get. This can be tricky because our PyWFS has a very wide and very red pass band, something like R+I. So if you use the R magnitude on an M5 star, you’ll set up to run slower and with fewer modes than you need too. It’s worse if you give us the V magnitude. So tonight I whipped up a set of synthetic color corrections, and compared them to our PyWFS’s own estimates.

UPDATE: A day later, we have investigated why the R band colors were weird in the first version of these plots. We are now using a self-consistent set of VRI magnitudes, from the USNO UCAC4 catalog, transformed from APASS gri (AB). I think we can now declare the MagAO WFS pass band done. I’ve updated the next two plots to the latest, most correct version.

Here’s a fun set of bookends on the night. We took flats at evening and at morning twilight. During this, you can see a really cool pattern on the PyWFS. You can also see the secondary mounting structure lit up by the sun. See the difference?

Here’s a just-after-dawn shot to the west, towards the Pacific Ocean.

Though you might think this was about the ASM supports being too reflective, the song of the day is for Veteran’s Day.

Our T.O. for the last week, Jorge, has dubbed us “the aoista operation”. Tonight was pretty calm – no major technical problems, a few scientific discoveries, and a pretty relaxed night. The clouds rolled in a couple of hours before dawn, so we closed out with some minor engineering tasks.

Tonight was TJ’s last night. So long. Kate is (possibly) arriving today, and tonight is the first night for our Chilean observers. We’ll have some new faces on the blog this week.

This is not the greatest blog post in the world.

Nay. We are but men.