Blog

Comm2 Day -3: moving the primary

The Clay telescope’s 6.5m primary mirror is getting a bath tomorrow. So today it was lowered out of the telescope, and moved into the aux. building. Not something you see everyday.

The 6.5m honeycomb mirror, inside its cell (the white cylinder), after being lowered onto its cart.
The surface of the mirror. This picture is normally almost impossible to take.
Here the mirror is making the journey into the aux.

Alan and Tyson did some guider housekeeping today, covering up some pesky LEDs. I turned the W-Unit on and made sure everything still works. No problems!

Vizzy definitely knows when he/she gets noticed and is having a picture taken.
Waiting for the sunset.
The view off the back of the mountain, right at sunset. It was cloudy all day, but it is clearing up tonight.
Our nightly sunset.

Comm2 Day -4: again back again

The “advance team” arrived at LCO today to begin preparations for MagAO commissioning run #2. Alan, Tyson, and Jared made the long overnight journey from the USA, accompanied by Povilas and Mark Phillips who were returning from the Magellan SAC meeting.

Tyson getting recharged in Santiago.
The first part of the road has been freshly paved. The rest of the way is . . . still bumpy.

After a delicious LCO supper I went up and looked everything over. Here are some of the important things I checked:

Vizzy watched the sunset with me.
Our frisbee was still in its hiding spot. Need a few more players though.
Our various caches of gear are still in place.

And of course, I took a stroll around the mountain to see how things are without us.

Andrew Carnegie, ladies and gentlemen.
Posted without comment.
To decrease plastic water bottle waste, you now get one of these nice Al bottles when you show up, and there are filling stations everywhere.
No MagAO @ LCO post is complete without a sunset from the catwalk.
I don't see the comet.
That's moonlight on Baade. That's Betelgeuse above and left of Clay.

MagAO AAS Poster by Kate Follette

MagAO fans:  Did you miss AAS?  Or did you see our poster at AAS and want to see it again?  Kate had a lot of great conversations at the meeting (ADS link), and she has now posted her AAS 2013 poster as a PDF to our publications archive.  Here it is:

Well, we can’t believe it, but various team members are going to start heading to Chile next week for Comm-2!!  So we hope you enjoy this first taste of our results… and stay tuned for more soon!

Follow the LBTI

Hi MagAO fans, it’s been a while since we’ve updated our blog. After we recovered from our month on the mountain, and got through Christmas, New Years, and the start of the new school year, the team has jumped into processing all the fantastic data we got from MagAO, Clio, and VisAO.

In one month, we’ll be back at LCO doing our thing. It’s a little shorter run this time, but still more than three weeks.

While you wait for us to get back to work, you can get your cutting edge high-res/high-contrast science fix at the LBTI blog. There you can see how MagAO teammates Phil Hinz, Vanessa Bailey and Andy Skemer are doing at Mt. Graham in Arizona.

MagAO Commissioning Day 30: Local minimum

Well, we are almost home… we made it to the Dallas airport. When we left in early November, the election had just concluded and I was still eating Halloween candy. Thanksgiving has come and gone. And now that we are back in the US, we are hit with the usual full-blown American Christmas with music, trees, and poinsettias overstimulating our tired traveling brains. We were trying to find the Admiral’s club in DFW and were talking very nerdily about MCMC algorithms to help us find it, and Laird said “I hope we don’t get trapped in a local minimum!” So here we are in a local minimum, and will be getting back to Tucson in a few hours. So let’s look at some highlights from the run.

The trip started with a solar eclipse on Nov 13th
We played some ultimate frisbee to unwind and for team comraderie.
The control room was packed -- but we never ran out of cookies!
We saw some beautiful sunsets
Saw some great vizzies
And had some touching advisor-student moments
We asked for more cowbell, and Simone wavefront-sensed by eye and figured out that we were phase-wrapping at the pyramid ... and that it could be fixed with a sign change in the interaction matrices
We made some pretty pictures
And made the highest angular resolution image in the universe -- Theta 1 Ori C in the optical. We later beat this by a few mas on the same binary. Better images are on the way.

Last quote of the run:

“Is it finally safe to say things around you two?” – Laird, to Jared and Katie.