Blog

I get to give an outsider’s perspective on the AO system as a guest blogger
tonight. It’s incredibly exciting to be here and see the AO working.

As best I can tell, the team was not intentionally showing off when just after
sunset, Alfio flattened the secondary, Gabriel our TO brought up the primary
mirror, TJ aligned CLIO’s masks and Katie was off and running for some CLIO
phase plate orientation tests on the Trapezium.

I spent the first part of the night trying to absorb how the three components
(secondary, visAO and Clio) all play nicely together. That’s 8 monitors of
information going at once. It’s mesmorizing to watch the pyramid wavefront
sensor, even if it’s just a slowed-down version of the real-time loop.

I have to admit to some dismay when I saw the bad cosmetics of the Clio
detector. Really, we’re working with that? I preserve it here so we can
reminisce about how ugly it was after it’s replaced next fall.

 

Katie and TJ quickly showed me that most of the centrally located blemishes
subtracted out well. And really, once I saw that lovely diffraction limited
image on it, I (mainly) forgave it its cracks, holes and delamination.

 

I’m enjoying watching TJ’s scripting efforts and his insouscience in the face
of guff from the VisAO/secondary crowd. Readout and usage of the detector is
pretty efficient, and getting better with every script that TJ writes. Maybe
if I can get up to speed on running Clio, I can provide a bit of a break to
the overworked commissioning team here who have been concentrating without a
break for over a week.

The optimism in the room is delightful. The weather helps; apparently the
commissioning team believes that Las Campanas is the Lake Wobegon of observing
sites. The telescope is strong, the skies are good looking, and all the seeing
is below average.

Oh, and I would be remiss if I didn’t note that we made awesome images of one of my favorite disks at not one, not two, but three wavelengths while running VisAO and Clio simultaneously. That jazzed me awake for several hours, but I have to admit that the travel fatigue finally caught up with me, and I had to head back for some sleep at about 3:15 AM. I walked down to the Lodge under a moonless clear sky, with the Milky way from horizon to horizon. The Galactic Center was rising. I actually had to look hard for Scorpius because there were so many stars that even Antares didn’t pop right out. Truly, the skies over Las Campanas are breathtakingly beautiful, so much so I almost woke up again. Almost.

Quotes from the night:

“You’re greedy, aren’t you?  No, I see, you’re not greedy, you’re just spoiled” –Alycia to Jared who wanted to wait for the seeing to drop from 0.6 to 0.3″ before he did his favorite target.

“VisAO is going to melt” — Laird (you may have heard about its hot filter)

Tonight both Clay and Baade belonged to astronomers from Steward Observatory. Bear down.

Over on the diffraction limited side, we had a great night. We observed some young low-mass companions to stars (later we can argue about labels like “brown dwarf” and “planet” – all I know for sure is that they were all bigger than Pluto). We can do this across a wide wavelength range, using Clio and VisAO simultaneously, letting us probe the atmospheres of these objects in a unique way. We’re all really excited about our results! Stay tuned.

Tonight was Vanessa’s last night. Safe travels, and go Bobcats.

Some quotes from tonight:

“You know why we did it in z prime? Because we’re HOT in z prime.” — Laird (we’re learning to talk like optical astronomers)

“I THINK we are in closed loop” — Alfio (trust me, if he says that, we are)

“That was very heroic.” — Katie (after Alfio closed the loop with approximately 0 photons)

“Apart from the hardware bugs, it was only 3 buttons!” — Alfio

“You could make it say ‘T.J. is amazing’ and it would be the same thing” — T.J.

“If we hated you we wouldn’t make fun of you.” — Kate
“That’s what I keep telling myself.” — Laird

“They can’t handle the truth” –Alfio

Today we saw snowflakes here at Magellan! Thankfully, the weather was beautiful without a cloud in the sky; the snowflakes were on Clio.

This is an image of a star. Although it looks distorted, this image is actually great. If our AO system is performing well, the image shape (the technical term is “point spread function”) will be very stable. Who says no two snowflakes are alike?

This image is using a technique called “non-redundant masking,” or NRM, to further improve the resolution of our telescope. With NRM, it’s possible to increase our already AO-enhanced resolution by another factor of ~2. This lets us see companion objects extremely close to their host stars, for example. However, nothing good comes for free; in order to achieve super-resolution, we have to throw away most of the light reaching our telescope (see image below). So this technique is only useful for very bright targets.

For a detailed explanation of the images below are showing, and of how to go from telescope pupils to images, see Katie’s previous post.

The beauty of the MagAO system is its simultaneous visible/infrared imaging. So while we were imaging with Clio, Kate was taking visible-light data of the same objects to study the properties of their circumstellar disks.

In other news, Laird, Jared, Kate, TJ, and I gave a Magellan virtual tour to a group of prospective U of A grad students over Skype. The intertubes were a bit clogged, so I’m not sure how well they could see us, but hopefully our enthusiasm for the project came through anyway!

Runa also gave a virtual tour, though perhaps a lower-stakes one…

Former Steward grad Derek Kopon sent us this neat pic today from Amsterdam:

And of course, I can’t forget Miss Viz…

And finally, I gave a shout out…

“I don’t ever remember focusing at MMT. Not even once.” –TJ,   “I’ve never had a grad student who said that.” –Laird

“Geeze, when are you going to stop nodding??” –Kate

“I’m behind TCL, but Alfio’s behind me.” –TJ

“Don’t worry. Just a Laird check.” –Jared

This is my second post ever. I guess that makes me no longer a rookie…

Tonight went pretty smoothly. Most of the night was spent doing science observations of faint companions. Because we have two science cameras, we were able to obtain some pretty cool images on both cameras–simultaneously!

The AO continued to perform very well, aside from a few hiccups, some of which may be Clio’s fault. (But since Laird/VisAO are always blaming Clio, I’m gonna blame VisAO this time.)

Speaking of Clio, Vanessa and I have continued to make progress in automating the control software so that *YOU* can one day operate Clio by yourself. This is a long and slow process, but things are improving.

Here are some action shots from the night:

I spent most of the night here:

What was I doing? Reading about TCL (pronounced “tickle”). This is because Clio’s software is written in this bizarre-but-very-popular-in-the-90s language. This is not fun reading, although Alfio, curious mad scientist that he is, has already started to read the textbook *for fun*.

A few quotes from the night:

“Why is there no light?? Ah! Because we are in the dark!” – Alfio

“Stop playing” – Alfio (sinisterly)

“My God, it’s full of stars!” – Me (mandatory sci-fi reference when doing Astronomy)

Laird: “Hey Clio”….Vanessa: “Yes?” (first time PI has addressed another human being by the name of instrument they work on…and the person has responded)

Goodnight/morning everyone.

 

 

Tonight I saved over 73000 images on one target. That wore me out.

We had a good night – seeing was fairly good all night and we did some good engineering work in the first half. Clio’s prism spectrograph was aligned and focused, and we did some more photometric standard measurements with VisAO. Later we tried out some disk imaging with our wollaston and SDI filters. This required moving the rotator to various angles, which caused all kinds of excitement, including dumping the liquid nitrogen out of Clio’s dewar. That’s ok – the inner dewar stays solid and can last all night – but you have to be careful on the platform when it happens.

Later we did a long observations on a bright star, simultaneously at i’ (0.77 microns) and M’ (4.7 microns). Kind of cool to be doing science at such different wavelengths at the same time.

On the way down we had a close encounter with Vizzy.

.
“There’s nothing left to dump out of Clio now. I’m coming back in.” — Laird