Blog

This is the 300th blog post. ~40 posts per run adds up quick.

The word of the day is wasabi. They served sushi tonight, which was great, but for some reason several people (all of whom should have known better) thought the thick green paste was just a harmless spread and applied it accordingly. It was somewhat amusing. Also, our wasabi pea supply is holding up just fine.

I’m keeping this short so that Jerry Morzinski doesn’t have to read a long post on his birthday. Also, no random graphs.

The word of the day is windy. Tonight was so windy we could barely open. From the night report by TO Mauricio Martinez:
3.- 23:40 UT High winds for MagAO, Closed. /MMa
4.- 01:56 UT Opened. /MMa
5.- 02:18 UT High winds for MagAO, Closed. /MMa
6.- 03:59 UT Opened, SH Conemode enabled, with better sky condition, better EL SH performed better. /MMa
7.- 06:08 UT High winds for MagAO, Closed. /MMa

And what does that look like?

We kept trying to peek through the wind anyway:

Well after all the work last week and this week to travel here, tear Clio apart, put Clio back together again — we finally have some pretty images on Clio. This is the new Brackett Gamma filter:

And some pretty plots of the pumpdown and cooldown last week:

But it takes a lot of work to get Clio that pretty, and it takes its toll:

I’ve been this sleepy too:

Meanwhile, Laird attached more Arizona gear to the Nas before he left today:

Beyonce knows how it is:

As do Chloe and Halle:

Gilles reporting in for the daily MagAO blog. Word of the day is “sleepy”.

After being blasted by winds in the previous nights, this night was surprisingly calm (*COUGH*andcloudy*COUGH*).
This gave the team the opportunity to relax a bit and work on some maintenance and documentation that needed to be done.

Jared, Katie & Laird are slowly recovering from literally working around the clock to get the system on-sky.
To illustrate how the team looked in the last days I managed to snap a picture of the zeroth member of the MagAO team at the cleanroom building.

This is the final night for Leiden so I just want to say that Matt and I feel very priviliged to be part of the team for the last few days. It was a lot of fun working with you and we’ve seen very exciting images taken with the new vAPP coronagraphs!
Hats off to you for your efforts in the previous weeks to pull this off. Hope you get clear skies during the rest of the run ! Also kudos to LCO for such a pleasant stay during my first time in the Southern hemisphere. I’ll be back!

The title of today’s song is of course very dear to our hearts but the lyrics are probably written by somebody as equally sleep-deprived as us.

The original to lull us to sleep:

and a cover to wake us up again:

tap tap tap tap

…hello, hello……is this thing switched on? Great! Here we go…

This is Matt Kenworthy, and I’ve been let loose given the reins of the MagAO blog for the night. The word of the night is “plate”, and apparently I’ve been saying “holy guacamole!” a lot.

My graduate student, Gilles Otten, and I are here for three engineering nights with the MagAO team testing three grating vector APP coronagraphs that we have had manufactured. These APP coronagraphs enhance the sensitivity of direct imaging cameras such as Clio2.

Getting the APPs installed in Clio was an epic task which the MagAO team rose to without a single complaint (that we heard…) and last night we saw the first light through the first APP – and it works!

Tonight, after a fight with high wind, we’ve been doing more engineering tests for the A1 APP and then we tried the 360 degree vAPP – which worked as well. Amazing stuff.

Now we’re taking science data with the vAPP.

Some Deadmaus to get us going:

 

…and a pop interpretation!

On this, my (hopefully, fingers crossed) last full night as TO I have the honor to do the daily log entry. Plenty of rules to adhere to, thought (can I suggest next time we only use live performances, performed on site? We could do a gregorian chant on the domes, that would be pretty cool).

Can’t really tell what happened during the day, although it seems that finally the full AO team is on the unnatural night shift (based on the vibes here at the control room at 4 AM). Good for you guys! Only 4 and some weeks to go!

The night started pretty good, on sky very early on, on our first official science night. Of course, after 2 (3) great Engineering nights Murphy had to apply, and a network failure had us on our heads. And double bad luck: once fixed, wind speed was too high to safely open. Sorry, that’s the one thing I can’t fix. That and the damned plates.

Thank a LOT for the opportunity of watching through the eyepiece. I was flabbergasted, really. See you next week. Oh, and a bit late, but: May the 4th be with you!