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Infrared cameras are tricky beasts, forced by us ground-based astronomers to
work while bathed in background photons impinging from every direction. Clio
is also a bit on the complicated side, working as it does all the way out to 5
microns, with two camera scales (hence a movable camera lens), two filter
wheels, and various other moving parts.

During some tests of ghosts and pupil reflections that I did with Katie
yesterday, we noticed some interesting abstract shapes. Of course, the human
brain is always keen to find patterns, so I liked this image where Clio smiled
at me with a twinkle in its eye:

As a result of Clio’s smiles, we go for the Cheshire Cat smile and tend to keep our primary target to the upper left of the detector, which places the ghosts and reflections as far away as possible.

These images were taken of one of my favorite stars in the L’ filter and the wide camera, but we see the same basic patterns on stars I don’t like as much, in other filters, and in the narrow camera.

Since we’re mainly interested in science (planets, disks, etc) close to the primary star in the field, this constraint doesn’t cramp our style too much.

People always ask me why astronomers bother going to the telescope any more. Obviously, we don’t have to go to the Hubble Space Telescope (though it’d be fun). It is possible to make a telescope operate remotely. It takes a lot of money, but yes, it can be done. Ground-based telescopes face more changeable conditions (see bath of infrared photons, above) including the atmosphere (enter MagAO), and thus are even harder to automate. But to be honest, part of the joy of being an astronomer for me is collecting my own awesome data. I like the anticipation of sunset on a clear sky and the tired feeling of satisfaction at dawn. OK, I also like the sense of control.

One angst-inducing feature of taking one’s own data is having to know when to stop. We come to the telescope with lists of objects to do, usually lists that will take far longer to finish than the available time. We do on-the-fly data reduction to see how we’re doing. This leads to my, sadly proved by experience, rule, which I will here set out as Weinberger’s Law: While at the telescope, the signal-to-noise of your data will appear higher than it does when you get home.

Jared claims this isn’t true for principal component analysis reductions where
quick look reductions at the telescope have insufficient computing power. I
maintain however, that Weinberger’s Law has more to do with optimism and
impatience (get to the next target while the conditions are great!) than CPU
cycles.

We have just discovered that this is the highest MagAO run blog post EVER (for a day). It’s a good thing Clio is smiling on day 31, because there are still 8 more days of observing.

Tonight’s song was easy to choose, as it had to come from “Ghost in the Machine” by
the Police. In my opinion, Clio is female like all capable machines (see, for example, the
oevre of children’s stories by Virginia Lee Burton
Mary Ann helps Mike Mulligan, Katy rescues the town, etc.). Plus, “Cleo” is more likely to be a female name, at least in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (apparently there are no young Cleos and no baby Clios at all).

So, since Clio is a “she”, the song is “Every Little Thing She does is magic.”

Ending last night, I left the telescope thinking of what to share on this blog, driving “home” (Nagoya Palace). A cute shot shaped the place where we stay half of our life.

“Nagoya Palace” from the road.

 

Day 30 is not from a regular night shift, longer than my 12 days a long time ago. Even though, this week has been a quite shift. Thinking of Christmas next month. You have 12 more nights to be here, working with  this amazing MagAO instrument and Clay Telescope.

Clouds make every sunset different from any other. Shapes, colours, angles. Even more when Moon is slightly with us. Well, unfortunately the thick clouds came soon tonight,  stopping observations for a while.

Jared noted yesterday the Vizzy appearing. It is common to see vizcachas around Magellan Telescopes, but not often they show us for long time to take pictures. In this ctime, the vizcacha was seating waiting for the sunset. They like to do that, sometimes alone others you can see 2 or three of them.

So, starting to relax after all, I have a gift for you: Night Shift – Bob Marley

We had another good night. Some thin/patchy/high clouds blew in after about 2 am, but we were on a bright star and really didn’t notice. It was “Empanada Sunday”, and we all had empanadas for our night lunches. The most exciting part of my day was getting to see Vizzy at the clean room on my walk up to the telescope. I skipped dinner (too soon after waking up for that much food) so I went up earlier than usual. And one of our friends was hanging out. It’s been really skittish the two times I’ve seen it, but I moved slowly enough to get some good pictures.

There are really many fewer Viscachas around compared to our previous visits. This wikipedia article says they do not hibernate, but they are “prone to wide swings in population due to adverse weather conditions.” It is spring down here, so maybe the winter was hard.

There may not be a spider shortage here though. I think we can apply a thumbrule that says the number of live giant terrifying spiders in your immediate vicinity that you can’t see is 10^2 to 10^3 times the number of dead giant terrifying spiders you can see.

Luckily I think they’re too big to get under our doors. There are some gaps in the wall behind our gas heaters though, and I don’t know about the vents over our beds. Sleep tight everybody, and remember “Gilthoniel A Elbereth!” might help (but I think you have to pronounce it right).

We’ve been having some fantastic sunsets. Sunset is a bit of an event – the observers at both Clay and Baade gather on their respective ends of the catwalk along with our telescope operators to watch the proceedings. The first of many cups of coffee is sipped, yarns are spun about glorious green-flashes of yesterday, and much hypothesizing occurs about the optimum conditions for the elusive flash.

Did you know AC/DC has a new album coming out in 4 days? This should get you ready for it.

My blog post for tonight was inspired by the coincidence of Katie searching the online astronomical database SIMBAD for a bright star near where I wanted to point on the sky and finding “AO Men.” No, Laird and Jared haven’t been honored with entries in SIMBAD. As I said, it was coincidence.   Variable stars, as they are discovered, are designated by capital letters starting with R, followed by the constellation name (or abbreviation). But there are lots of variable stars (in fact, when you get into the details with Kepler, there are hardly any stable stars, but let’s not go there right now), so after R-Z, then variable stars are called with double letters RR-ZZ and then AA-RR. So, AO Men is the 69th (or something like that; there are a lot of arcane rules of the naming, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable_star_designation) variable star discovered in the constellation Mensa. As I said, there are a lot of variable stars, so all the constellations I had the energy to check had an AO.

This led me to consider these stars as friends of AO:

AO Men – Unfortunately, there’s no constellation Womensa, but if we consider “men” in the sense of “humans”, Katie and Jared certainly qualify as AO Men (get it — yeomen), as they do an incredible amount of work up here to make this run a success.

Quote of the night: Jared, bragging about his hand strength — “That’s AO Men right there.”

AO Car – the little manual transmission Toyota that I drive up to the dome in when I’m too tired to hike it.

(Note: the coordinates are not exact for the named stars in the little Aladin-Lite images because of how I did the screen shots. If you want to observe these AO stars, look up your own coordinates first!)

AO Cap – the hard hats the team has to wear when working in the dome (modeled here by me in a selfie)

AO Pup – The vizcacha, of course. Sadly, I haven’t seen her on this run yet.

 

AO Cam – The wavefront sensor detector. The system has been running so smoothly that it’s been largely ignored. See — no one is in front of the AO Cam in this picture from tonight. In fact, as I was writing this, the screen saver on the computer went on.

And finally, the star as my favorite question, “What is ‘AO For‘?” Tonight, the answer is that it’s for producing awesome images of young stars so I can image their disks and planets (if they have any). Of course, the night wouldn’t be complete without a binary star (it’s not AO For, but it’s what AO is for):

Here’s one thing that doesn’t vary: MagAO is awesome.

Katie is insisting there be a song. I chose this for the lyric, “After changes upon changes
We are more or less the same.” And because I just really like Paul Simon.

Tonight was great. Good AO loop, good weather, good science. Last night, though, the internet was down for a few hours in the middle of the night, so we weren’t able to investigate the airglow until tonight, which we saw last night as fringing on the all-sky cam. Yuri Beletsky, Magellan Instrument Support Scientist and Astrophotographer, shared with us the following images he took of the airglow at LCO:

https://500px.com/photo/27927395/amazing-airglow-by-yuri-beletsky

https://500px.com/photo/81325491/airglow-and-the-milky-way-by-yuri-beletsky

Check them out, they’re gorgeous pix!

Yuri also shared with us this link describing the phenomenon of airglow.

In our cell-phone-camera pictures, you can see some fog from a couple days ago (the terrible horrible no good very cloudy night) at dawn, reminiscent of some of the fog Yuri saw in his Amazing Airglow pic:

And some more goings-on:

Typical breakfasts 1 and 2 — like hobbits!