Blog

The other day we said we were back to normal… the clouds had gone away and we had a great night on-sky with a good AO correction, doing fun science. However, some not-so-normal problems cropped up again, and we just got through a bit of a stressful time. We were losing communication with our slope computer, and having other strange symptoms. In the end, we managed to get ahold of our Italian friends, who helped us trouble-shoot.

The project spent a lot of time in Florence and some in Bolzano, and we are so grateful for our friends and colleagues who show such great interest in our project and in helping to keep it running! Here is Arcetri where Laird and Jared built the system with Alfio, Simone, Armando, Runa, Marco, Enrico, Luca, and more:

Alfio has been following our progress this run, our first run without him. Here’s Alfio with Jared last summer:

And here is Laird, Jared, and me with Galileo in Florence:

So after Laird went home, we talked to Alfio, Roberto, and Mario, and got some ideas on what to check. So Jared, Pato, and I adjusted the voltage in the BCU and also switched to the spare fibers.

And…success! Slopes were being sent, slopes were being received, and nary a divide-by-zero error to be seen!

We celebrated by replacing the batteries in the wind monitor, getting on sky, and closing the loop!

At the end of a night of good hard work, we were rewarded with the sunrise, a vizcacha, and a herd of burros:

Shake it off!

Tonight was Laird’s last night for the first part of this run — he goes down later today to return home for a couple weeks, then he’ll be back again for the last couple weeks of the run. Jared and I will be taking care of everything while he’s gone. We were also talking to our friends at Mt. Graham, Arizona and Subaru Telescope, Mauna Kea about their respective pyramid WFS observing runs.

Before tonight, I was busy with Clio engineering and science, so I didn’t have a chance to run the AO system much last week. But tonight was TJ & Alycia’s first night and since TJ can run Clio just fine, I was running AO with bits of advice from Laird on what he’s learned operating the system this week. So there was a lot going on, and we didn’t have the best seeing, so I didn’t get much in the way of pictures. However, I have a couple pictures from the previous night, which was my science night looking at brown dwarf and planetary-mass companions to stars. Here are a few pretty pix from Clio:

Speaking of brown dwarfs and planetary-mass companions…
I went to a meeting last summer called Exoplanets and Brown Dwarfs: Mind the Gap, focusing on the overlap between the fields and how studying one kind of substellar object enriches the study of the other. It was a great conference and Startorialist Emily Rice led us in making a fun video about brown dwarfs, which I hope you enjoy watching as much as we enjoyed filming:

Well things finally got back to normal tonight at LCO. Not a cloud in the sky, seeing was 0.5 arcseconds most of the night, T.J. fell asleep in the control room, and most importantly – our good friend Miss Viz was hanging out at the clean room today! We haven’t seen any Viscachas on their usual roosts, but one was there today.

As I said, tonight we got the absolutely perfect observing conditions we’ve come to expect from LCO.

The great conditions have led to some really nice results. Here’s a 47% Strehl ratio image at z’ (that means it’s really good).

We also did some work at H-alpha. Here’s a nice H-alpha jet coming from a young binary star system. FWHM in this image is 30 milli-arcseconds. That’s from stacking 15 second exposures.

At the end of a great night, we saw a gorgeous sunrise over the Andes. Here’s a shot of the MagAO ASM, Clay, and Baade right before we closed up.

I don’t think these have been on the blog yet this run.

So, the last week has been pretty rough from an observing perspective. The clouds and bad seeing means a lot of stress and frustration. I think this video captures what it’s like sometimes in the control room during nights like we’ve had up until now.

Here’s the song of the day. I’m guessing this is going to be a staple at McKale center this year.

We were clouded out for the first half of the night. Once we got open, we started out observing “Runa’s Star”. Runa picked his star as a set up target during our commissioning run 2 years ago. He also deserves credit for designing one side of our MagAO coffee mugs.

Once the clouds cleared we got to work.

On a submarine they say you don’t really start learning how the reactor plant works until you stand your first watch by yourself. It’s kind of the same thing for us, this is our first run without Alfio here to clean up our messes. Tonight was fun. We pushed MagAO into some new territory, at least for the three of us. Before and after, and once the dust settled, we did some really cool things.

The night started by replacing the Clio vacuum pump down in the bowels of the telescope.

We did some astrometric calibrations.

This is the image that almost broke MagAO

Still a bit cloudy, which continues to make for gorgeous skies at sunset

And finally a Viscacha pic. Can you believe this is the first one?

Since this is day 7, I present, out of many well qualified candidates, the following as the quote of our first week. It’s Laird describing how he operates the AO system: “part of the problem is I can’t actually read any of these numbers. I just click on shapes.”

It’s true. I’m pretty sure that if I made a warning pop up that said “You are about to destroy MagAO — Ok — Cancel” he would click Ok as long as it was in the right place.

Here’s your song of the day. Enjoy.