Blog

MAPS May 2024A Day 1-Night 1: Installation and Alignment

The first two nights of this run are for MIRAC (PI: Leisenring), while the last 4 are for AO (PI: Morzinski). Therefore I decided this was my chance to come up in the morning to see the installation of MAPS. See, usually I try and sleep in on the morning before a MAPS run, to help me switch to a night schedule. But instead today I got up in the morning as usual, headed up to MMT, and was able to observe the installation of the Top Box and ASM with a full MMTO crew as well as Dan and Ruby from MAPS. This is important to me because we’ve talked a lot about the installation procedure and whether it can be made more repeatable, but I hadn’t actually seen the full procedure yet. Now I have a much better picture of the process and thoughts about repeatability.

Installing the Top Box to the Cass port of the MMT.

So here’s what I saw. When the Top Box is installed there are 4 feet on the lift that can be independently adjusted. However, the actual measurement of how parallel the Top Box plate is to the Cass plate is through hand-held measuring tapes. There are 2 pins that help guide the Top Box up. And in the end the plates were flush. But I was wondering whether there could be any skew on one side or another.

Installing the Top Box: Measuring the gap on all sides to make sure it’s going on straight.

The ASM installation is complex. The ASM is mounted to the hexapod. This is done while the former is hanging from the crane and the latter is supported on a bouncy stand — so could these be misaligned? But then the screws are gronked on until the plates are flush, except for a gap covering about 20deg on one side where the ASM plate is warped, of about 4 thou. Then the hexapod is mounted to the hub. It’s behind a flange, but the 2 pins keep it aligned, one of them is diamond shaped to control angle, and then the screws are gronked on until tight so we assume it is flush too.

Mounting ASM to Hexapod.
Measuring the gap over about a 20-degree wedge due to a slightly twisted ASM mounting plate. It appears to be repeatable, plus all the bolts are flush and the rest of the mounting plates are flush with no gap all the way around.
Craning the ASM+Hexapod structure up to mount it to the Hub.
Inserting the ASM+Hexapod into the Hub.

Also Dan and Ruby connected the rack and all our other cables:

Connecting the cables in the elecronics rack on the third floor.

Then tonight was supposed to be a MIRAC night but they had a chiller problem and weren’t cold enough, so instead we decided to try AO.

Except instead it still took over half the night to complete set-up and alignment. So we continue to explore how to improve these procedures.

Even though this is the MAPS run not the MagAO-X run, I’ll stick with the MagAO-X blog rules for this run. Therefore, the best 15 minutes of the day were seeing the ASM mount to the Hexapod and then the whole assembly mount to the Hub. I have to admit I’ve never quite pictured it correctly when we talk about in our off-mountain meetings, so this helped me visualize what’s happening very well!

Song of the Day/Night: “…Baby One More Time” by Britney Spears (1998)

MagAO-X 2024Ab Day 7: Chilly in Chile

Greetings from the downstairs lounge, where you can see exactly as many stars as upstairs. That’s right: it’s another cloudy evening here at Las Campanas Observatory, but one ray of bright starshine has broken through: Dr. Alycia Weinberger! She had to spend a night in Miami, and another night in Santiago, but she has finally arrived!

We all forgot to document her arrival for the blog, so have a condor instead.

(Photos: Maggie Kautz)

Since the clouds stubbornly remained at sunset, we went on an expedition beneath the Magellans.

Okay, that’s enough natural beauty. (Photo: Alycia Weinberger)

There was a fad in the 90s for two-for-one telescope deals, along with vague plans for interferometers (some realized). True to form, the two Magellans are connected by a tunnel.

This is where I’d put my interferometer… if I had one.

We also explored the maze of twisty passages.

Reminiscent of her majesty’s navy?

We descended into the oubliette.

If someone messes up the instrument alignment, they will be confined below.

There are removable floor grates to confound your enemies.

Legend has it that a secret sub-sub-basement exists, hiding untold riches.

Here’s a view upwards through the central core where all the wires and hoses snake up to the telescope platform, eventually entering a cable wrap.

Don’t look up.

There is a two meter thermal exhaust port:

Ask not about the biblical mouse plague.

Evidence of researcher enthusiasm underneath 100 tons of telescope.

Evidence of Dr. Weinberger’s arrival, upper left in gray.

Maggie Kautz bid a fond farewell to MagAO-X, as she will be leaving in the morning. Maggie has graduated, which means she probably needs to defend her dissertation soon.

anTop? What’s an anTop?

Then she came back and replaced a picomotor that had gone on strike due to the cold conditions.

It could be Professor Laird Close under that getup, for all we know. (Photo: Jared Males)

Once she finishes up her doctorate, she will be starting a new job… as a staff engineer at Steward Observatory, home of MagAO-X! (And some other stuff I guess.)

After we bid our actual farewell to Maggie-O-X, it was time for Josh to drive. We found that all of Sebastiaan’s notebooks were still on the old ICC data drives, so some surgery was required to get them back into place on the new and improved SSD array.

Okay, keep an eye out: we’re looking for a 500GB folder called “SYH_notebooks”

As I write, there’s some serious disk pic analysis happening in the lounge, so maybe this night won’t be a complete bust…

Highlight of the Day

Per 2024Ab rules, the best part of the day… might be the underground Magellan tour, actually! So, you already read all about it.

Song of the Day

“Black Moon” by Screaming Females

(Technically a waxing gibbous, but I can’t see shit.)

Our semi-occasional recurring feature: “Overheard at LCO”

“We’re just roadies for a metal band called MagAO-X.”

“At least on the internal source I can’t break anything.”
“Why would you say that?!“

“It’s a dissertation. It doesn’t have to be perfect.”

MagAO-X 2024Ab Day 6: LCO above a sea of fog

Like that classic painting, LCO took on some majesty and wonder today as the valley filled with clouds to compliment the cloud-covered skies.

Ominous
It creeps up the mountain

Which gave way to another great sunset

Which gave way to another set of sad astronomers. Jay was eager to hit his disk target right away, but clouds are opaque to dreams and starlight alike.

This run, since the nights are so long, we’ve broken them into shifts with shift turnover around 1am ish. It’s 1 am now and the first shift is done for the night, I’m going to bed. There are faint whispers of hope in the cloud trend, but I suspect it is futile. Trust not to hope, it has abandoned these lands.

The best 15 mins of my day I guess was sending the first draft of my dissertation (minus a chapter) to Jared. Oh and then I played Untitled Goose Game with Joseph for an hour.

The song of the day is Sad Songs by Elton John.

MagAO-X 2024Ab Day 5: There’s a first for everything

For the first time ever, an adaptive optics system at Las Campanas Observatory was installed without the guidance of Professor Laird Close! Laird is back in Tucson supporting his daughter at her high school graduation (congrats Annabel!) This means I got to fill in for my advisor as optomechanical lead on MagAO-X, and align the instrument to the telescope. It’s not as easy as it sounds!

To be honest, our smaller group of grad students really stepped up to the plate today to get this install done quickly, efficiently, and correctly. I guess we have good teachers or something….

Action shots of bringing the legs out of the aux building

An anxiously awaiting PI
The elevator is so fun

One of the most important items I was tasked with today was not forgetting to remove the window covering on the back of the instrument (you know, so the starlight can actually get inside MagAO-X).

Proof.

One of the more challenging sections of the alignment process is leveling the legs. Each of the four legs has four jack screws that are driven into corresponding metal casters placed on the floor. This raises the instrument to a particular height and does a preliminary leveling of the table before we turn on air flow to float the table. For some reason Josh got the pesky leg and we had to adjust it several times to get that lovely “0.0 degrees” on our digital level.

Pictured: Josh defending his leg. Not pictured: Me frantically running around with a caliper measuring each leg’s height off the floor.

Other antics today: Our beloved postdoc, Dr. Sebastiaan Haffert, left the US today to return to his home country to become a professor at Leiden University in the Netherlands. We know he is going to accomplish amazing things! Too bad he’s leaving behind this group of jokesters (see our clown car).

Good luck Sebastiaan!
It’s too cold to walk to lunch

Once we got the table leveled, and confirmed the ability to float and stay level, it was time to cable the instrument to the electronics rack.

Eden guides the way!

Cabling went smoothly and all the DM actuators were live on the first try! Woot! After that, most of the team went to the early dinner while Kian and I stayed back and installed the worst part of our instrument: the bumpers. Below are some photos. Each leg of the instrument gets a bumper. Notice in the picture the rubber is not quite touching the instrument. That is intentional. When the telescope slews (rotates) our instrument mounted on the nasmyth platform rotates right along with it. If there was an emergency stop, and the telescope abruptly stopped moving, our floating table’s momentum would cause it to continue to move right off of its legs and go flying like a frisbee. Thus we have four bumpers attached to the legs to bump the instrument back onto the legs in case of such an event. While these are a necessary safety precaution, they are no walk in the park. They’re heavy and unwieldy, and if you recognize that clam looking piece of metal, that is because it has to be uninstalled from the cart we use to wheel MagAO-X around, then reinstalled onto the legs with the bumper hardware.

The A and B side is more challenging since the instrument is cabled on that side. Cabling team gets priority so the bumpers don’t mess with any DM cabling.

We typically install the C and D bumpers on the outside of the clam pieces and the A and B bumpers on the inside of the clam pieces.

Nonetheless, Kian and I persevered. We installed all four bumpers plus some earthquake bars and we were ready to observe! But not before some sunset shots!

Red at night, sailor’s delight?

Now I am sitting in the control room, writing this blog, as Jared works on calibrating, Eden is taking logs, Logan works on her dissertation, Kian is modeling some coronagraph, and Joseph tries to fix our never-ending computer problems. Josh and Jay are hopefully peacefully asleep, as they are taking over the second half of this 14 hour observing night. The dome is currently closed due to clouds. Before we closed though, Jared managed to close the loop at 3000 Hz for the first time on-sky!

Happy control room

The best fifteen minutes of my day was really just a few seconds. As soon as Jared confirmed that the system was aligned and a star was incident on our cameras, just as well as the March run, I felt a huge weight leave my shoulders. I have done well by my advisor and I can rest easy knowing I handed off MagAO-X in a usable state.

Song of the Day:

Your song of the day is paying homage to the worst 15 minutes of my day.

We interrupt your regularly scheduled blog post…

Hey MagAO-X’ers we heard you all were at an observing run, and by coincidence the Space Forcers are too! We are at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory on La Palma, Canary Islands for sodium laser beacon testing. (Initial results shown at the end if you want to skip to the good part!)

This observing run actually started at Teide observatory on Tenerife. Myself and a fellow Space Forcer Robert Johnson were doing some mission reconnaissance to check out an empty dome as a potential location for some future laser beacon experiments.

For more information on future Space Force Space Lasers see our SPIE talks 😉

Next we headed to La Palma and headed up to the observatory. The road is really curvy. Luckily the wildflowers are in bloom here so we stopped a lot to take breaks and take in the views.

Lots of flowers and lots of cool birds. Excellent time for an observing run.

And finally, after over a day straight of traveling, the Starfire team arrived at the observatory!

Starfire Optical Range Team! From left to right: Robert Johnson, Ian Kingsolver, Lauren Schatz, and Lee Kann.

The observatory itself is very dramatic. The telescopes are on one side of the mountain and right across the peak is a huge cliff into the very deep and eroded caldera.

Now onto the telescopes…. The Starfire team is working with a group of Italian and German researchers to test the new sodium laser. We are working in one of the open control rooms in the William Hershel Telescope pictured below. Our job is to perform analysis on the beacon to determine the magnitude brightness and the extent in arcseconds without turbulence. I was told last minute I had to learn astronomy and write a data reduction pipeline so thank you to Joseph and Logan for answering all my frantic questions!

We aren’t observing with the WHT. But they have a really cool new multi-object spectrograph instrument they are comissioning!
Obligatory sunset photo. Grand Canarias Telescope on the right (bigger than Keck if you really want to compare…)

Now onto the best part! The laser beacon! Tonight we are propagating at 45 Watts and hope to ramp up to 75 Watts. This is the brightest sodium laser in the world! It is really amazing to see with the naked eye.

It’s so beautiful :*)

Hope your observing run is going as well as ours!

Song of the Day:

In honor of Brian May who did his PhD observing at the Willian Hershel Telescope.

As seen in the control room kitchenette.