The MagAO project once lived in Florence, Italy, for almost a year. It’s where we first got it all working and got to know our Italian teammates. We’re back, this time for the AO4ELT3 (Adaptive Optics for Extremely Large Telescopes 3) conference.
The 3rd AO4ELT conference.
We includes Laird, Phil, Katie, and Jared from Arizona, Derek from Heidelberg, Simone, Armando, Alfio, Enrico, Runa, Marco, Lorenzo, Fernando, Luca, and Paolo from Arcetri. You can also find MagAO friends such as Roberto Biasi from Microgate and Doug Miller and Olivier Guyon from Arizona.
If you are in Florence with us, come see our poster and get your MagAO sticker. We’re only giving them out to readers of the blog! The password is “Vizzy.”
Our poster. Laird and Katie are both giving MagAO talks later this week.
Here are a few views from around Firenze:
The Duomo from the rose garden, just below Piazzale Michelangelo.A replica of David at Piazzale Michelangelo, which has, overwhelmingly, the best view of Florence.Alfio took us to a restaraunt at Piazza Santo Spirito, and we went for full-moon walk along the Arno. This is the Ponte Vecchio, a famous bridge in Florence.
MagAO teammates and friends Jared Males, Andy Skemer, and Laird Close recently published a paper: Direct Imaging in the Habitable Zone and the Problem of Orbital Motion. This work describes the problem of how planets won’t hold still, but instead keep orbiting their stars while you’re trying to observe them. The paper is in proof with the Astrophysical Journal Supplements.
And if you’re going to be in Florence for the AO4ELT conference, or in Victoria for the IAU 299 conference, we look forward to seeing you there and presenting our first-light results!
MagAO won’t be back on the telescope for a year. That’s a long time. In the mean time, we have some amazing data to analyze, and we have some upgrades planned (which is why there’s such a long break). We’ll keep you posted as new results come out and our schedule progresses. The adventure isn’t over yet!
Laird, Katie, TJ, and I left LCO today. This was our last view of the telescopes.
Thanks to everyone at LCO for helping us get where we are. The future of MagAO is bright, and we are going to do a lot of fantastic science here.
The western valley below LCO. You can see the sunrise shadow of Magellan.We made a pit stop at the offical MagAO watering hole, the Casino Enjoy in La Serena.A cruise ship gets underway from La Serena. We’ll be back.
Some quotes:
“no, no, no.” — our waitress, wagging her finger at Laird. Apparently you can’t order beer before noon on Sunday in La Serena.
“No! The blog is over. I should be able to say whatever I want.” — Laird
Today Laird, Jared, and I packed everything up in preparation for departing… and possibly not coming back for almost a year.
Jared was in charge of backing up all of our computers and archiving the VisAO data. We have 5 computers on the mountain: The WFS supervisor, the ASM supervisor, the VisAO supervisor, the VisAO camera computer, and the Clio camera computer. It’s a good thing he knows what he’s doing. Jared starts up a bunch of jobs to back-up the computers and archive the data. Nice hard hat.
Laird and I supervised the ASM’s journey from the top of the mountain to the clean room in the ASB. This always makes me a little nervous. We had to wait until the afternoon to do it, because in the morning there were winds up to 33 mph, a bit too windy for shipping around such delicate equipment. But it went very well and the ASM is now safely in the clean room.
We bring the ASM down from the telescopes to the Astronomer Support Building where the clean room is.The ASM backing up to the ASB.The P.I. supervises closely.
Laird and Dave attached the new dust covers to the NAS.
Jared and I did an inventory of our supplies so that we can remember what we need to re-stock next time.
I said goodbye to Vizzy.
When I was walking down from the mountain tonight after doing a last sweep, I walked in the dark, and my eyes got adapted so that I could see my shadow by the crescent moon, and more and more stars appeared. The Magellanic Clouds really pop down here too. OK, this picture of Enrico and Alfio under the stars is by Enrico from Nov. 25th Comm1, but I also didn’t have any good night-time pictures (with my cell phone).
