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).
On our last night (last night) we had a spike of seeing up to 2” that gave our AO system a run for our money:
These spikes of seeing made us have to keep re-optimizing our AO parametersYuri Beletsky, Magellan Instrument Support Scientist, sent us this photo with the following note: “Tonight, while you were closing AO loops, I went outside and managed to capture some interesting view – while the night has been definitely not photometric, there is also quite strong airglow! You can easily see it as the green emission (due to atomic oxygen) on the image. On the center-right you can also see the bluish fuzzy ball of the Gegenschein.”Stitching together a picture of the mountain and valley
Well, today we are taking everything off the telescope, it’s been a good run!
Quotes:
“But anyone could go in there and delete it!” – Laird, about doing the AO user’s manual on google docs
“Well, OK, but I could throw your computer off the catwalk.” – Jared
“We should do the manual in IRAF” – Laird
“Ah but then it would be a seeing-limited manual” – Alfio
