Blog

Today Laird got up at 8am while Jared and I went to bed after our Last Star last night. Laird and the crew took down the ASM, then Laird and Jared de-cabled the NAS and I de-cabled Clio with their help. Here are some pictures:

The song of the day is inspired by the film 28 Days Later. We hope when we get back to Tucson, it isn’t a post-apocalyptic wasteland with everyone crazy party-rocking and/or our loved ones turned into zombies. Still, should the need arise, we are ready to party rock.

We have observed our last target star of the 2014A run. It was another great night, with half arcsecond seeing almost the whole way.

We now have 2 days of packing and storing and inventory to do, and then we start the long journey home. Laird and Katie got started as soon as the dome closed.

We have to spend some time saying goodbye to all of our friends. We won’t see them for 6 months!

And we need to spend some time actually looking at the night sky, it’s so beautiful here.

We spent a lot of time on this run trying to mitigate the effects of diffraction. So check out the wave nature of these guitar strings:

Only one more night to go — I think we’re going to make it! Tonight was fun in a crazy busy kind of way. We did about 20 targets total, most of them were faint Clio targets. Vanessa had left at the end of the previous night, so this kind of a night kept me really busy and missing her. Here is a picture of Jared and Vanessa and me at the end of last night right before Vanessa left to go back to Tucson:

Tonight we bagged about 20 targets and spanned a factor of a million in guide star brightness. And that’s without any optics changes — we just bin the pixels on the CCD and adjust the gain, and we can lock on zero-th to 16th magnitude guide stars!!

Here we are locked on one of the brightest stars we can do:

And on one of the faintest stars we can do:

We also got some amazing images with VisAO:

And finally, we imaged yet another faint substellar companion — Pluto!

Quote exchange of the day:
“Ok, open the AO thing.” – Jen.
“Ok, the AO thing is open.” – Laird.

Video of the day: Amanda Bosh’s video of the Baade (left) and Clay (right) telescopes going on-sky for the night. Really cool! Thanks, Amanda!

Song of the day:

After another busy night, I didn’t put together a substantive post. Thankfully, today was a beautiful day, with plenty of both literal and eye candy for the blog.

Francois played Easter bunny and hid chocolate eggs around the control room for all to enjoy.

 

Jared spotted our friendly local Easter “bunny”

 

And Jen had a new roommate when she woke up this morning

 

I took a few last photos of the local flora at sunset

 

Here are a couple more  stunning photos Jan Skowran and Yuri Beletsky took over the last few nights:

I feel like I’ve just arrived, and it’s already time to head home. It’s been a blast working with a great group of team members, telescope crew, and observers.

Until next time, MagAO!

Though it’s about 24hr door to door, I remind myself that it’s not so far in the grand scheme of things:

I’m guest blogging for MagAO tonight.

I came out on Thursday for Subo Dong’s run, and then I’ll be observing again on Monday. In the meantime, I’ve got some down time for a few days. Mostly I’ve been planning like crazy for Monday’s observations. A big thanks to the MagAO team for all of their help answering questions.

The free-time also means I can take leisurely walks up to the telescope and watch the sunset.

I’ve been hanging out in the control room, watching the operation of the telescope and the instrument, and generally trying to absorb as much information about the system as possible.

Practical tidbit: I’ve been working on a way to implement a 9-pt dither pattern on Clio.
This turns out to be non-trivial since the available ways to move are either to do an AB nod (which only gets you 2 points) or to move in X or Y (moving in both is a two-step process). Katie came up with a clever way to combine different AB nods so you can move efficiently, which saves time overall if the integrations are long. The trick is to split the exposure at each nod position into two, so you can repeat the last ‘B’ position as the next ‘A’ position. So the sequence is nod AB, nod BC, nod CD etc.

(I’ve also been spending a lot of time sampling the contents of the cookie cabinet).

Because I’m feeling silly and haven’t really been doing too much over the past few days: