Blog

We had an action packed night, with many more targets than we’ve been observing so far on this run. The AO system wasn’t on its best behaviour, but we have learned to recognize most of its bad moods quickly and we can usually slap it back into shape right away.

Kate Follette is here, ready to help take up some of the operations load. Our visiting observers tonight were Hector Canovas and Adam Hardy from Universidad de Valparaiso. Here’s a shot of the bleary eyed “aoistas” this morning right before we quit, minus Katie who’s behind the camera, and minus Kate who went to bed too early to get her picture took.

In Kate’s defense, she made it to the half-way point after 24 hours of travel from Tucson.

Most of the targets we looked at for our new friends Hector and Adam were faint and red. When we set up the system for such targets we need to have a good guess how many photons per second the pyramid wavefront sensor (PyWFS – following the obviously correct conventions of Guyon 2006) will get. This can be tricky because our PyWFS has a very wide and very red pass band, something like R+I. So if you use the R magnitude on an M5 star, you’ll set up to run slower and with fewer modes than you need too. It’s worse if you give us the V magnitude. So tonight I whipped up a set of synthetic color corrections, and compared them to our PyWFS’s own estimates.

UPDATE: A day later, we have investigated why the R band colors were weird in the first version of these plots. We are now using a self-consistent set of VRI magnitudes, from the USNO UCAC4 catalog, transformed from APASS gri (AB). I think we can now declare the MagAO WFS pass band done. I’ve updated the next two plots to the latest, most correct version.

Here’s a fun set of bookends on the night. We took flats at evening and at morning twilight. During this, you can see a really cool pattern on the PyWFS. You can also see the secondary mounting structure lit up by the sun. See the difference?

Here’s a just-after-dawn shot to the west, towards the Pacific Ocean.

Though you might think this was about the ASM supports being too reflective, the song of the day is for Veteran’s Day.

Our T.O. for the last week, Jorge, has dubbed us “the aoista operation”. Tonight was pretty calm – no major technical problems, a few scientific discoveries, and a pretty relaxed night. The clouds rolled in a couple of hours before dawn, so we closed out with some minor engineering tasks.

Tonight was TJ’s last night. So long. Kate is (possibly) arriving today, and tonight is the first night for our Chilean observers. We’ll have some new faces on the blog this week.

This is not the greatest blog post in the world.

Nay. We are but men.

Things went pretty well tonight. Alfio called us to check in and we could proudly show him that his software is keeping MagAO running smoothly:

In fact, we are mostly keeping his chair empty for him:

Except for when things need attention:

Our friends over at Cerro Pachon are observing with GPI on the Gemini South telescope for the Gemini Planet Imager Exoplanet Survey (GPIES):

I was Skype-chatting with them a bit tonight:

We talked about astrometric calibrator fields, such as the Trapezium:

At the end of the night, seeing spiked up to 2” and we couldn’t keep a lock on our faint science target — it was the equivalent of clouds rolling in, we lost so much light.

So we tried an experimental target instead. Here is a quick snapshot of HD 269433 (all we could get before the loop opened again, as the Sun was rising too). It looks like this one, which is in the LMC and our WFS read as R=12.1 mag, will not work as a good astrometric calibrator for GPI.

Jason Wang is blogging about GPI this week and we tried to keep up with him:

Over at GPI, the GPIES team saw a vizcacha tonight by Gemini. I wonder if they stole ours, we have had so few sightings this run! But tonight, Jared did see one or two vizzies by Magellan at sunset:

Also, we also saw a herd of burros on our way up to the top tonight:

And we took a picture for our loved ones back home:

Finally, today is Jared’s mom’s birthday, so here are some pictures of her favorite oldest son for her to enjoy:

And finally, here is a beautiful song from South Africa:

It’s day 13 – we’ve been here almost 2 weeks out of 6 now – so we’re almost a third of the way through. I think of it like running a 5k (3.1 miles) where the first mile is the phase where you try to get out ahead of the pack, and the second mile is where you settle in to your pace. That’s where we are now, we’re settling in. Here’s a little bit about what that looks like.

I’ve been monitoring the temperatures on Clio. Last week we hooked up the new pump, which is stronger than the old pump, and I was worried that the temperature wasn’t settling quickly enough.

But take a closer look at just the detector temperature. I don’t think it’s quite as stable as it could be. I will think about this some more and possibly throttle the pump, crank up the heater, or go back to the old pump.

Finally, some LCO lifestyle pix as we are settling in:

A great song:

Now that we have 3.3V where we’re supposed to have 3.3V, and we’re using good fiber cables, everything is easy. It was also a nice night, with stable (if not always good) seeing. This is much more relaxing than some earlier nights. It also means there isn’t much to write about.

These next two pictures were taken about 10 minutes apart.