Blog

We opened our blackout curtains to a cloud-free sky yesterday evening. And then we had a long relaxing night in 0.5″ +/- 0.1″ seeing. We feel much better about life this morning.

After 26 days of continuous MagAO, we have a few corrections and clarifications to make:

First of all, I did not change my code. We are FTEs of action, lies do not become us.

Second, Francois Menard insists that he was misquoted. I agree that he only took the telescope to 30.6 degrees elevation, not thirty point zero zero zero zero zero zero one. He also writes “You guys are the best. (you can quote me on this too!)”

A third area where the record is a bit spotty is the infamous graph of familial love by Kate. Several relevant correspondants have chimed in:

– Both Anna Morzinski (Katie’s Sister) and Josh Males (Jared’s Brother) report that they consume their MagAO news mainly via Feedly, which likely doesn’t show up on our site hits. That explains the low number of hits (5) from Nebraska, perhaps, and argues that the Morzinskis deserve a bit more credit. It does lead to the question of who else in Seattle is reading.

– On the other hand, it is not clear that Jerry Morzinski (Katie’s dad) has read to the end of a single post to date.

– Futher on the subject of the Morzinski family dedication to MagAO, we received (indirectly) an apparently very passionate objection to the entire Arizona count being credited to Laird. Katie’s brother Mike Morzinski and family (who live in Tucson) should also have been credited with a significant fraction of those hits. I also suspect that Buell Jannuzi can’t go more than a day without checking on us. In fact, it is no longer clear that Laird even remembers us, let alone looks at this blog.

– [redacted] also expressed some concern about [redacted] privacy being violated. I assure you that no personally identifiable information is reported to us, only the number of hits. It’s too bad, selling that stuff might be a good way to fund MagAO.

– It appears that the Brutlags have no excuses. They just don’t care.

Alycia arrived today, and is ready to push MagAO around for the next several nights. Other than misquotes and inter-family squabbling, the only real problem we had tonight was complete loss of internet for several hours. It’s amazing how many little things that affects. Computers started running out of memory (I thought Macs just worked?), we couldn’t check star catalogs, etc. A fun game to play is how do you use VoIP phones to report that your internet doesn’t work?

Finally, you should know that there aren’t really any limits on MagAO’s availability. Here we show the loop closed (300 modes, 1 kHz, full gains) with the Sun up. Maybe we haven’t even stopped yet . . .

Long boring night tonight, sitting around waiting for clouds to clear. We started out ok, but after about 2 hours the clouds rolled in. We closed for several hours, and then opened but couldn’t get anything done with extinction jumping between 0 and more than 5 mags.

The only other noteworthy event was that we changed the batteries in the wind monitor, which means another week has gone by. The wind monitor continues to report 0 m/s, correctly.

We had high hopes for tonight after seeing 0.34″ seeing last night. You should know that’s an upper limit – it was from one of the guiders, which can’t make images much smaller than that. So here’s a great song, which fits the disappointed clouded out mood. “This world is only gonna break your heart.”

And here’s an awesome cover of Wicked Game by Daughtry.

The past few weeks have been full of exciting firsts* for me: first trip to South America, first real Spanish conversations, first taste of mote con huesillos, and especially exciting — first time observing at Magellan, and first time using MagAO!

*Unfortunately, there’s not been a first sighting of the famed viscachas — or any other high desert mammals, apart from astronomers and observatory staff! — but I don’t leave Las Campanas until this afternoon, so perhaps there is more time…

 

I’m a graduate student at Arizona State, but am on a fellowship in Santiago until the end of January, so I was fortunate to arrive a couple days in advance of my run to learn the ropes and help Katie and Jared on their marathon MagAO run (so I had the lovely opportunity to overlap with Kate and Jordan too!) It was great fun training to operate Clio and learning about the AO system and VisAO.

In terms of last night and tonight, everything went incredibly well — better than I could have expected! We had literally the best seeing I’ve ever encountered, anywhere. That number in the left upper corner is, indeed, 0.34 arcseconds:

These fantastic conditions, coupled with a well-behaving AO system, meant that we powered through all my science targets for a whopping 38 targets — 22 of which were observed tonight! It seems this may be a record of some sort.

Slewing to lots of targets provided many opportunities to refine the sweet-spot landing between acquiring a star from the telescope with MagAO and placing it on Clio, and Jared and Katie worked on that in addition to running AO and VisAO while I was at the helm for Clio. Our quick observing cadence also meant little time for breaks during integrations, but I snuck outside to try some nighttime photos (difficult without a tripod!):

Even at the end of a busy night, some late RA targets also meant observing well into (nearly beyond?) the morning twilight. Let no photon go unmeasured! Here is what it looked like immediately after I was finished observing this morning:

I can’t believe how quickly these past few nights went by! I am sad to depart the excellent company of Katie and Jared, who are the most stalwart endurance observers I’ve ever met. They do an incredible job of keeping MagAO a well-oiled machine! I am so looking forward to coming back and observing, and helping out with future runs.

Finally, given the fact we finished at 6:17 am, I can think of no more appropriate song than this:

Until next time!

– Kim

Well Kate, we don’t have a clever fix for you yet. But why be clever when hacking will do? The technical difficulties last night were from timeouts in the TCS communication (which mysteriously had never timed out until we tried taking data for Vanessa……). Jared implemented a workaround in which we timed various nod sizes at the beginning of the night on a test star, and used those delay times as the wait statements for the AO. It worked so great that we were able to look at 16 targets for ASU grad student Kim Ward-Duong tonight, which is a lot! We only had 1 unexplained RIP all night and recovered from that just fine. Kim is a very experienced AO observer with adaptive secondaries (MMT, LBT, and now Magellan), and has become an expert on Clio in just 3 days, so we were very efficient. It was a much better night! Here we are all looking happy to be observing with MagAO:

Povilas: Well, what did you change?
Jared: I haven’t changed my code.
Povilas: It worked fine yesterday. You must have changed your code.
Jared: I haven’t changed my code.
Povilas: That’s what everyone says. “I haven’t changed my code.” “Fezzik, tear his arms off.” “Oh, you mean *this* mount-wait statement.”

Jared: Well, at least there’s some good news… I still have an empanada left!
Alberto: Oh, you mean *this* empanada? …It was delicious!
(Haha just kidding!)
Anybody want a peanut?

Metaphorical rain in this case, not actual rain – don’t panic!

I’m told there’s a blog post like this one on every run, though I’ve been lucky enough to avoid being here for them so far. Tonight, we had a few technical difficulties. For those of you in the know, this picture speaks volumes.

In good news, today was empanada Sunday. I didn’t take a picture of mine as I was scarfing them down, but I did take a picture of my delightful dinner. Those things that look like pears are actually cheesy potatoes in the shape of pears. So creative!

I’m headed down the mountain tomorrow, and want to give one last shout-out to Jared and Katie, the heart and soul of MagAO. [Don’t worry Laird, you can be the brain.] They’re down here away from home for a whole 6 weeks, cheerfully and tirelessly supporting observers on good nights (most) and bad (very few) AND blogging about it so that us slackers who get to go home can stay informed. You guys are the best!

Here’s a picture that Jared took of the “Three Ks” tonight. Good luck guys! Can’t wait to hear about your clever fix tomorrow.

I think tonight calls for a motivational song.

Update By Jared (after the Sun came up): Well that was horrific. I won’t try to explain all the things, but we managed to get MagAO back up off the mat and get some work done. During a final round of troubleshooting as the Sun was rising, we took these images:

If you’ve been following MagAO, you’ve seen our previous images of these two stars. It looks like they’re about 4 mas closer now (caution: that’s control room astrophysics, which means it’s wrong in at least one way!).

Time for bed. Thanks for your help the last week Kate. See you back in Tucson.

Here’s another song with relevant lyrics.

Quotes:
Vanessa: “Well, if it’s a software bug, you know I’ll uncover it!”