Blog

Our first non-Arizona visiting astronomer was taking data with Clio and VisAO tonight. His name is Brett Addison of the University of New South Wales, Sydney.

Also Alycia arrived safely today.

Today the seeing was bad to very bad for almost the whole night.

Alfio made a new mirror diagnostic last year that shows the mirror commands sampled at a very high speed. See the video here: It’s a really cool one!

Then this run he added the plot to the right that shows the maximum mirror command at each time step. I liked this plot so much because it shows you both how stable the loop is as you are adjusting the gains, and also gives a diagnostic for what happened if the loop breaks open. I told Alfio it was my favorite plot, so he made a quick update to the code:

In honor of our knocking out targets numbers 1-10 tonight (although we had to skip target 3 due to seeing and faintness, so it was 9 targets total…) here is Tina Dico singing her song Count to Ten:

We had another somewhat so-so night. Some high winds made it interesting, but there were few to no clouds and seeing was at least mediocre. But right at 4 am, when we switched targets, seeing blew up to more than 1.5 arcseconds. Sorry DZ — we aren’t doing this on purpose.

There have been several calls for the return of the quotes of the day. Here’s a sample from the last few days:

Jordan: “The problem with this AO system is that it stays closed for so long that it’s hard to find a bathroom break.”

Alfio: “I went there once to take their cheese.” (explaining that he has been to the Baade telescope).

Laird: “You fooled me by taking the data incompetently.” (to T. J.)

Finally, my song for the night is absolutely full of astronomical references. Free MagAO sticker to the first person who emails me a list (no googling, on your honor). In any case, you should listen to this with the volume at 11. Trust me, it’s better that way.

Today was our first official science night! The previous nights were engineering, but tonight we had a visiting astronomer here at the telescope, and he was calling the shots for his observations. He took logs while we helped him take data, and the operations went pretty smoothly.

The night started out well, with Alfio successfully managing a difficult aquisition, and with the data coming down the pipeline looking just fine.

However, around midnight the clouds thickened up, and the AO system couldn’t stay locked.

We kept trying brighter and brighter stars, eventually trying a 0-th magnitude star — the wavefront sensor would alternate between saturating counts on this bright star to not even seeing any photons from it at all — 12 mags of extinction! Sigh. So it was a disappointing night. At least we were able to get some testing of various modes and set-ups done, so that’s good. But we are really hoping for a better night tomorrow!

Time for the pretty pictures:

This is the song in my head when we are watching the photons on the wavefront sensor slowly diminish:

Hello everybody, I’ve been enlisted to write the blog post tonight. I take it that I’m supposed to post a picture of a horse:

To get started, here’s a few images from last night’s engineering. The first is a VisAO image of Baade’s window. Check out all of those stars!

Next, here’s  a picture of an asteroid and its little satellite.

We also did a bit of engineering on Clio’s spectroscopic mode. Here’s the dispersed L-band image of an A-star. The prism provides R~200.

Lot’s of thin cirrus clouds in the sky, but the AO loop remained closed for most of the night. We did lose some time when the power went down briefly in the dome. Everything restarted smoothly and not too much time was lost.

I hope these clouds leave, science time starts tomorrow!

Tonight’s song is, according to Jared, the official VisAO theme song. I present it here in honor of the beautiful blue images produced by VisAO:

We spent almost the whole night with the loop closed, with a few exceptions. For instance, we had to open the loop during an earthquake! Not a big one, but the floor rumbled and the loop went a little crazy because of the vibrations.

One of the fun things about observing with AO is that we frequently discover that stars listed as singles are doubles, triples, or even quadruples. This happens when we pick a star just to do engineering tests, and we find more stars than we expected. Here’s an example from tonight.

The same horse is still hanging around. He still won’t let me pet him.

We couldn’t do much in the way of photometric standards, but the sky was pretty.

In addition to the quad, we imaged a couple of star fields and clusters. We counted lots of stars on both of our cameras.