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.
We saw vizzy drinking out of a sprinkler hose, and then she hopped up the hill to watch us go by.Tonights sunset was leaning towards green until the last minute.
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“There’s nothing left to dump out of Clio now. I’m coming back in.” — Laird
We started off the night trying to track down the mysterious source of a perfectly symmetrical spider (literally a spider!) that kept popping up in the Clio viewer (see Jared’s post from earlier today for more details). Luckily, Povilas was working on the pointing model at the time, so we were able to indulge in tracking down the source of the April Fool’s joke. It turned out to be none other than Clio PI and advisor for half of the observing team, Phil Hinz. Nice one, Phil!
The new Clio “spider”
Shortly thereafter, I spotted this guy in the bathroom downstairs. Some squabbling ensued about what to do with him. He was eventually removed from the bathroom, and was not harmed in the process.
Tarantula-esque spider that at first was thought to be part of the April fool’s joke. Turned out it was real.
It took the first half of the night to finish the pointing model tests, and then we spent some time doing engineering calibrations. Clio did more focusing and tested the prism, nodding and image quality. By the way, Clio has real “spiders” all the time, not just on April Fool’s. See image below.
The four telescope spiders and two cold stop spiders make some gorgeous diffraction spikes (the long lines extending out from the stars) on Clio. (The bright star is saturated pretty far out, but you can see some beautiful Airy rings on the faint 4” companion.)
Meanwhile, VisAO did some spectrophotometric standards and tested the symmetry of the coronagraph.
Towards the end of the night, we were also able to do a little bit of engineering/science by looking at a nice bright disk with both cameras. We’re particularly eager to characterize how well we can image extended objects with VisAO, so we’ll report back on this.
We said goodbye to Marco and Povilas tonight. Thank you both for all of your hard work! Before Marco left, we managed to take one picture of the full commissioning team.
From left: Marco, Alfio, TJ, Laird, Jared, Katie, Vanessa and Kate
“Believe me, we aren’t hiring friendly people.” — Laird
“Guys, I have bad news. We are out of cheese.” — Marco
“I do not like spiders. I don’t like them.” — Vanessa
“It’s so rare that I can teach a student something that has to do with computers.”– Laird
On November 26th, 2012, we closed the loop for the first time on-sky here at Magellan. A multitude of cameras and video recorders were there to document the moment. Here we present a three-dimensional tomographic reconstruction of the first-light Magellan adaptive optics controllers.
Fig. 1 is taken from the North side of the control room with a SLR camera.Fig. 2 is taken from the South side of the control room with a LG android phone.Fig. 3 is a frame grab from a video camera on a South-Southwest bearing.
We input these images into our FPGA reconstructor, to obtain the following 3-d tomographic reconstruction of the MagAO controllers: Reconstruction of MagAO Controllers (looking away from the Celestial Sphere).
The control room appears to be less crowded on our current commissioning run, but a full 3-d tomographic observation is needed to be sure.
Tonight was our second night on-sky this run, and we have been accomplishing many engineering tasks. With the AO system, we have been testing and optimizing our AO parameters. Here is a PSF from yesterday, with only ~100 nm phase rms WFE: 61% Strehl at z’, closed loop with 378 modes.
With VisAO, we are calibrating our photometric system. With Clio, we are focusing and testing the pupil masks. And Vanessa has finished adding the AO and TCS keywords to the FITS headers, and it turned out to be very useful! Thanks, Vanessa!
Here are some images in M’ from Clio with the apodized-phase plate (APP) coronagraph:
A bright star imaged through the M’ APP coronagraph.A binary star imaged through the APP coronagraph. (Ignore the ghost)
Look at all those beautiful Airy rings! It’s a pretty great way to do coronagraphy on a binary star, because the APP is a phase mask placed in the pupil plane, so it attenuates the PSF of both stars.
Well, these nights are long since it’s getting to be winter, and so I’m really tired… let’s finish with some more pretty pictures: A guanaco gazes at the 100”.
This sunset picture shows a diffraction spike and ghosts and flares, just like the Clio image.Sunset at the Clay was exciting tonight — a few of us believe we saw the green flash for the first time!Looking to the east after sunset, the sky was just gorgeous.
Some quotes from today:
“You’re not doing astronomy if you don’t have to do everything twice” — Dave Osip
“I’m not going to give you any more quotes for the blog” — Povilas
“Do you know the ratio of the ghost?” — Laird
“Which one?” — Clio team, in unison
“I know my Astronomy!” — Vanessa
“Hold on. Let’s talk about what’s really important. Did everyone get
empanadas for their night lunch?” — TJ, interrupting discussions of
observing logs.
