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I’m on Mauna Kea visiting Olivier Guyon and the Subaru Coronagraphic Extreme AO (SCExAO) system. At 13,800 feet I’m pretty sure this is the highest altitude pyramid AO system in the world. Despite having a pyramid wavefront sensor, SCExAO is a pretty different AO system from MagAO. For one thing, there isn’t an adaptive secondary. Instead, the deformable mirror is on an optical bench off to the side. SCExAO is also not the only AO system – before light gets to SCExAO it has been corrected by the AO188 system, which is the AO workhorse of the Subaru telescope.

SCExAO hosts several science cameras, including VAMPIRES and FIRST which are being engineered on this run. I’ve also seen some impressive demonstrations of low-order wavefront sensing, focal plane wavefront sensing, and speckle nulling. SCExAO has some really exciting high contrast imaging capabilities.

As you can see, the SCExAO team is very creative with their camera displays. They consider Chuck Norris to be their spiritual leader, though somebody seems to like My Little Ponies.

Mauna Kea is high, and the air is thin up here.

We stay at Hale Pohaku (HP), which is at a more comfortable 9000 feet.

One thing that I learned during this visit is that if Olivier ever asks you to go for a walk, you say NO. What he considers a “walk”, most people would consider “rock climbing in the dark”.

The view is amazing from up here.

Being back in Hawaii reminds me of old times. The song of the day describes one of life’s enduring mysteries, which I still have little insight into.

Hi MagAO fans, you’ll never guess where I am…

We spent almost the entire month of April in Chile for MagAO’s first science run, and we were very happy with how well it went. So what better thing to do than get on a plane back to Chile to work on my other high-contrast AO project? I’ve been at the Gemini South Telescope at Cerro Pachon this week, helping with the 3rd commissioning run for the Gemini Planet Imager (GPI). When I was in grad school, I worked in the lab on the MEMS deformable mirror for the GPI AO system, advised by PI Bruce Macintosh. And now that GPI is on the telescope, I was very happy to get a chance to come and see the instrument on sky!

On this commissioning run, we’ve been running lots of tests, because GPI is a complicated instrument with stringent top-level requirements for its international user base. But today I’ll focus a set of data we took to calibrate the astrometry of GPI.

Astrometric calibration is critical for GPI as well as MagAO: When we see a faint dot near a star, the best way to check whether it is a planet orbiting that star, versus whether it is a background star along the same line-of-sight, is to compare the astrometry at a later date. Astrometry means measuring the stars — measuring the exact position in arcseconds and angle from North. But to figure out the size of our pixels on the sky, and the orientation of our camera and which way is North, we have to observe known groups of stars and measure their separations and angles. Then we compare our measurements to those from other instruments and tie that back to basic calibrations done in the lab with pinhole masks to create a common reference frame. This is how we calibrate astrometry.

But the field of view of GPI is very small, and it is hard to find a group of stars that are very close together, that also have a bright enough guide star for the AO system. Fortunately, MagAO observed an 8th-magnitude star in Baade’s Window at Magellan during our science run in April 2014, and we decided to try it with GPI. (Baade’s window is a clear window through to the galactic plane, so it’s full of stars that are thousands of parsecs away.)

We have to give credit to Laird for finding this field — it wins for the most stars (six!) visible in GPI’s field of view so far! Here is the GPI image compared to the MagAO/Clio image — both in H-band:

We have also sent the field along to our friends at VLT/SPHERE, who are currently on their first-light run, because someday we will all be trying to compare our observations of the same planets, and that will be much easier if we can also compare our astrometric calibrations.

Although GPI’s field of view is small, MagAO/Clio’s is a bit larger and so we can bootstrap our astrometry from some of the stars seen wider out in the field. Here is the zoomed-out Clio H-band image:

Finally, here are the zoomed out images from both VisAO and Clio, where we have plenty of stars for boot-strapping:

This is a great example of what we gain with cooperation and synergy between complementary instruments and our scientific friendships!

This post is cross-posted at the GPI blog. Over here you get a song of the day:

From April 5 to April 21 we were helping other folks use MagAO. It took the work of a large team of excellent folks to make all this happen. In particular, we had the expert help of TJ Rodigas, Katie Morzinski and Vanessa Bailey who all looked after Clio with expert hands. Jared’s VisAO camera was also helped out by Ya-Lin Wu, and Kate Follette. The MagAO software became much more stable after the engineering period at the start — thanks to the hard work of Alfio Puglisi and Jared Males. The AO system was run by Katie and Jared and myself (running the AO system was pretty easy by the end of the run — so easy the PI could do it).

We also benefited from excellent support from the Magellan mountain staff. Juan Gallardo and his team expertly helped install (and uninstall) the adaptive secondary mirror, the NAS, and Clio (while also doing the same for the f/5 and the f/11 secondary!). Povilas Palunas did a great job of getting the f/16 guider running smoothly.

Also I’d like to thank all the excellent observers that submitted proposals to use MagAO and especially those that came down to visit us at Clay. These were our visiting astronomers: Jorden Stone (U. Arizona), Brett Addison (and Graeme Salter remote; UNSW Australia) , Alycia Weinberger, (Carnegie) Timothy Rodigas (Carnegie) Kate Follette (U. Arizona), Jared Males (U. Arizona), Subo Dong (PKU, China), Sebastian Perez (U. Chile), Francois Menard (U. Chile), Amanda Bosh (MIT), Stephen Levine (Lowell), Jennifer Yee (Harvard) and John Monnier (U. Michigan; remote) . Thanks to all for making this such a scientifically productive (and enjoyable) run!

Here is a summary of the run from the results of the Run reports that are filed at the end of each run. Overall I’m really happy with how well MagAO worked (especially after the first week) with very little “down-time”.

The Reviews Are In

Here are the reviews of how users felt the support from the MagAO team was for AO operations (1 is the lowest and 5 is “well above acceptable” and the highest rating possible):

Also here is the rating of how well users felt MagAO/VisAO/Clio performed:

So it looks like MagAO/VisAO/Clio did very well this run. Of course, it was the nightly support from Jared and Katie that helped make all this really happen. So here is a photo of them finally getting off the mountain after a month!