Blog

Tonight we saw some cute pictures of the various children in our lives dressed up for Halloween. Well don’t worry, but we had the holiday covered here as well. Here is a monster of an old man who showed up just before sunset:

He looks scary but we let him run our instrument. And he did a great job of frightening the PI.

I did a bit of searching to try and figure out what that gorgeous display of clouds was. I’m going to go with Altocumulus Mackerel. Look it up. But I can’t tell if it’s going to be, “Mackerel in the sky, three days dry,” or “Mackerel sky, mackerel sky. Never long wet and never long dry.”

Tonight, though, the clouds remained thick and patchy until the dawn. We were still able to work through the clouds, locking on an 0.5-mag star (Achernar) and later, a -1st mag star (Canopus). The AO system reports the magnitude back to us and we had up to 9 mags of extinction! But this was sufficient to do our tests of things like software, communications, and scripting. I also tested Clio’s wide camera.

Yesterday I was able to focus Clio and verify that our focus positions haven’t changed since the last run.

Our Chilean students (Javier Garcés, Sebastián Zúñiga, and Mario Castro, from the Universidad Tecnica Federico Santa María) left yesterday. We will see them in Tucson in January and look forward to seeing how their vibration data are, which they took last night by attaching their in-house custom accelerometers to the telescope and instrument.

Anyway, it was a good night even for the clouds, because we were able to do so much testing. I’ll leave you with a couple more pictures and the song of the day.

The big story over the last 30 hours has been our atmospheric dispersion corrector, or ADC. When you look at a star through the atmosphere, it will be “dispersed” into a rainbow, meaning that the different wavelengths of light (colors) will land at different spots on the camera. But if you have an ADC, it takes out this dispersion. The ADC is two prisms which have to be rotated in opposite directions in a fairly precise way. Well, ours stopped being precise, or maybe it was just random. Opinions vary. We spent the last half of last night taking pieces of it apart and testing various theories. We didn’t get anywhere, but after a long-day’s sleep, Laird had a plan. To keep a long story from getting longer, one of the two rotating prisms tends to get jammed up in one part of its range of motion. We now have a workaround in place for this, with a bunch of software hacks to enforce some new rules. So, problem solved! Just like that.

To put that in perspective, when I went to bed yesterday morning I was pretty sure we had to pull MagAO off the telescope and tear apart the ADC. It’s good to be wrong about some things.

Losing some time to the ADC troubleshooting hasn’t been too hard to take, because we’ve had some cloudy nights.

Here are some more pictures of the mounting and cabling from yesterday.

MagAO’s favorite Chef is on this week. Here’s an example of why we love Hector so much.

I found some more flowers today.

Clouds suck. They should never come near any observatory where I have time. But, they make for nice pictures.

There’s a lot of pressure for us instrumenteers in the days before a run, especially such a long one. We have many people coming to visit us and use MagAO, and we need to have the system in top form when they get here. I think we did it — MagAO is ready to go. But, needless to say, we worked pretty damn hard the last couple of days.

Today was a long night. Too long to report all the events. But, we installed the NAS and Clio, took off the ASM cover and put on the wind monitor, and closed the loop!

Three students from the Universidad Tecnica Federico Santa María, Javier Garcés,
Sebastián Zúñiga, and Mario Castro, arrived today. They will be working with us on vibration testing, and will spend some time in Tucson in early 2015. They also helped me cable and move Clio today:

Sadly we haven’t seen our mascot, Vizzy, at the clean room yet. Did he move out? …

The big news for today is that Laird and Katie cabled, plumbed, and powered-up the ASM. We’ve never done that before without at least one Arcetrian in the room. It all went very smoothly, and the ASM is ready to go on sky!

Our day started with Oscar introducing us to the Cherimoya. It’s a really flavorable sweet fruit. We also had fresh squeezed Cherimoya juice for breakfast.

We started switching over to a night schedule. That means we got up for breakfast at 7:30 and worked until 2 am. We finished out the night testing some new plumbing fixtures for the NAS. At least we’ll sleep in a little this morning.

We should be on-sky tonight. Baby get ready.

There was a cold wind blowing today but in the hottest/sunniest parts of the day it calmed down. During this time we moved the ASM from the clean room up to the Clay dome:

It’s beautiful up here. Breakfast was amazing: fresh-squeezed orange juice, oatmeal with warm milk, dos huevos fritos por favor, and unsweetened whole-milk yogurt — yum! I hiked up and down the mountain 5 or 6 times and it’s really helping with my jet lag to be out and about in the sunshine.

I connected Clio and got it up and running. Victor helped me cool it down as we were doing this. First Laird and I put the new washers Manny made in to help support the gold electronics box as the Delrin was starting to crack/warp.

Meanwhile, Jared did the same thing with VisAO — plugged everything in, moved the motors, took test images. Later Laird cleaned the optics and Jared tested characterized the images:

And we saw all sorts of wildlife today! Donkeys, a guanaco, a snake (little garter snake), and a vizcacha bounding up the stairs! Here are the ones we were able to get pictures of:

So those were the fauna, now for the flora. It’s spring here and the desert flowers are coming up – beautiful!

This song makes me think of home, more MN/WI than NM b/c of the farm refs. For the Moms, the Dads, the Grandmothers, and the Grandfathers, we miss you. <3 Agnes