Blog

Hello everyone, this is the last night of my run, so it seemed appropriate to do the blog tonight.

I’ve been here for the past 6 nights. As you might have noticed, the weather (clouds, wind) has not been favorable during this time. Nonetheless, we managed to get about 2+ nights of good data. I can’t really complain anyway, having spent a lot of time at the LBT and MMT *not* observing due to weather.

During the past week, we made some cool new discoveries, imaged some interesting targets, and stared at the wind monitor. The highlight for me was actually last night. Sure, it was good to get data for most of the night, but I managed to fulfill my promise to Jared and KT by operating all three instruments by myself simultaneously. There’s no photo of this, because people would get mad if they knew I was operating Clio with my right hand, VisAO with my left, and the AO with my feet. Just kidding, Laird. Also, it would have been really hard to take a selfie, so you’ll just have to believe me.

Here is a photo from tonight, showing an actually pretty full control room. We have new arrivals Alycia and Amanda, who will be sharing the next 6 nights. Hopefully the weather cooperates for them.

Quotes:

“She’ll probably be like ‘You’re stuck? Fine with me!”–Alberto, guessing how my wife would react if I ended up getting stuck on the mountain (this all stems from the internet being down for a few hours earlier tonight).

I’m new to this song-posting thing. But the theme from the past few nights has been me pretty much by myself (not quite, because Jared and/or KT were usually also with me. But still).

Edit by the Blog Administrators to comply with The 2015A Blog Rules:

We got to open for a few hours tonight, when the winds were only 30 mph:

[Update at the end of the night]: Winds eventually came back down, and we got another 4 or 5 hours of science done. Hurray!

So instead of talking about the wind, let’s talk about our latest PhD*:
Vanessa Bailey, first discover-er of a new planet using MagAO, has successfully defended her PhD dissertation today in Arizona! Here is HD 106906 b discovered by Vanessa using Clio:

Since so many of her friends and colleagues around the world wanted to watch it, she and Amali Vaz set up remote streaming of the talk. Her dissertation is titled: “Adaptive Optics for Directly Imaging Planetary Systems”, and Jared and I woke up in the middle of the day to watch it:

And here’s the video:

It looks like there was much rejoicing in Tucson:

Quote:
Jared: That’s a lot of pictures of Vanessa, especially since she refuses to come on MagAO runs lately (even if she does help remotely).

Here’s the song of the day for Dr. Vanessa P. Bailey:

Cover:

Note that Vanessa is the 2nd graduate of Brookings High School, South Dakota to earn a PhD from the University of Arizona Department of Astronomy using (in part) MagAO images of exoplanets. Article from the Brookings Register:

*Pending submitting her revisions 🙂

“Maria makes the mountains sound like folks were up there dyin'”

We’ve already used up some of the best wind songs, and we’re just getting started. I saw at least one gust of 64 mph on our wind gage up here at Clay. The LCO weather page doesn’t go that high:

Down at the 100″ DuPont telescope, they were getting hammered by high 60s (mph) for hours. We still haven’t reached the MagAO record. Maybe tomorrow.

I made this recording in the dome tonight while winds were over 50 (it’s not your computer, the lights were off).

OK, I’ve had enough winter. Look at all these clouds!

And the winds, and still the clouds!

So we didn’t even open tonight, at all, ever.

Well, at least that meant it was a good time to fix Clio. So I’ve been aligning the camera by hand lately, but not anymore!

Here was us last week… Pato Pinto helped us by soldering a jumper to bypass the broken motor so that we could move the other ones with the gui from the warmth of the control room, and only had to go out to the platform to move the field stop:

Thanks to Jenny Greene who delivered the necessary tools to us today, Jared and I went out to the cold platform tonight to tear into Clio once more. We replaced the broken motor controller with a working one, including setting up the dip switches and adding thermal paste:

Before and after:

So … now it works!

Good night!

Song of the day:

Taylor Swift liked this song so much she did 2 covers — here’s a few people who followed suit:

It was clear tonight, which was nice after last night. But seeing was pretty bad (for LCO), and the winds kicked up again. We’ve had a few days respite from these winter gusts coming from the NE, but now we are again huddling with our back to them, pointing to the SW.

This seems appropriate.