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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.

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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!

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.

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.

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.

“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

“You can’t say that Clio is boring.” — Alfio

 

Just before starting our science observations tonight, we discovered a major bug in the Clio software.

Well played, Professor Hinz. Well played.

“That looks like a spider.” — TJ

“You can see the bad pixels through the spider.” — Laird

“This is the most in-focus image I’ve seen on Clio.” — Alfio

Postedit:
The fun continued… the culprits are our LBTI friends!

Oh, and speaking of our LBTI friends, check out the LBTI Exozodi-Exoplanet Common Hunt’s new website.

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.

We input these images into our FPGA reconstructor, to obtain the following 3-d tomographic reconstruction of the MagAO controllers:

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.