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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.

Today was T.J.’s first night, which means the start of good solid breaks for Jared and me. It was pretty cloudy which made for a quiet night with no disturbances:

Since it was my first break in a long time, my brain was mainly up for a lot of youtubing of Namibian folk songs. If you are also spending your weekend waiting for the clouds to clear, enjoy this long playlist of beautiful music from Namibia:

First song of the day:
!Nosa !Oes Ge Nesa /translated “It’s a quiet night there are no disturbances”

Cover:

(Also stick around for the fun song “Sponono” at the end, I love that one!)

The person who posted this to Youtube claims it is also called Sponono, but it’s not the one (above) that I know as Sponono. It’s still a nice one. Perhaps our Nama-speaking readers can help us with the title of this one:

Third song of the day:
Tuaza Kokure

No covers to be found, and I listed long and hard — I love this one. The second song in the Tuaza Kokure video is a cover for the…

…Fourth song of the day:
Dumelang ma Africa

Fifth song of the day:
Tate Wetu

Update: Covers are required if they can be found:

Sixth song of the day:

I don’t remember how to spell the title so I couldn’t find a cover — but I love this one.

Seventh song of the day:
Sipiri

Cover according to the 2015A Blog Rules:

Final song of the day — also no covers:
#Nabara #Na

A beautiful peaceful one to end on. Love the language and the singing. Good night!

Tonight went smoothly… for 2015A. We were doing some of the MagAO Key Project which are the types of observations the system is optimized for, including pointing mostly South out of the wind, and taking deep high-contrast imaging data. Still a bit of weather… but overall quite a calm smooth night in the control room. Mauricio made sure we had chocolate cake with our plates of dinner for our midnight lunch and the telescope stayed pointing, Jared made sure the loop kept closed and VisAO kept running, and I made sure Clio saved all the right photons in all the right places.

The song of the day:

The cover of the day:

The wind was blowing and the stars were twinkling hard tonight. We still got some science done, but it was less fun than we’re used to. Also, we only planned some troubleshooting — we didn’t actually do any tonight.

Here’s an action shot of the instrument scientist aligning Clio at sunset. This is temporarily a very manual process due to our dead motor controller. We’re happy to say that the replacement is on its way, so Katie only has to do this a few more times.

Since Vizzy and Alberto posted some Mariah the other day, here’s my response. Maria is making sure we remember her name on this run — take it from us, she really does blow the stars around.

Just in case you aren’t in the know, Mariah Carey was named after this song.

Tonight was a good night: so good that we got to the screensaver on the AO control workstation. That means we went long periods of time without having to adjust anything.

Speaking of screensavers, what is going on here?

Passed the Burros on my way up tonight.

We’re starting to obsess over sleep.