Today was a busy day, and we began splitting MagAO’ers into day and night crew. See Derek’s awesome post for the bulk of the day’s tasks: aligning the CRO and ASM.
The next major happening was mounting Clio to the NAS. Even though we didn’t play the theme from Top Gunas we did it (sorry Phil!), it was an exciting moment. This is the first time our infrared camera officially met our optical camera and our AO system! They are together at the telescope at last!
Clio, VisAO, W-unit, Nas, ASM, Clay: So happy together!
Here’s how it happened:
Removing Clio from the support cart with the crane — under PI Phil's watchful careAttaching Clio to the NAS ring — under Phil's watchful careClio at the Nas, flanked by Phil and KatieLeft: Phil and Clio instrument. Right: Clio electronics rack and Phil.
Heave-ho: Shimming Clio to align the cold stopsHow's it look, Phil?
LCO crew were busy as always, making everything work smoothly for the run. Here, Mauricio brings up LN2 to fill Clio’s dewar, and Pato optimizes the PID loop that rotates the Nas while the telescope tracks and slews:
Mauricio brings up LN2 to the Nas platform to fill the Clio dewarPato feels for vibrations as he optimizes the PID loop tracking and slewing the Nas rotater
Quotes:
Alfio: “What is this mirror cover?”
Laird: “Oh you’re so cute Alfio.”
Phil: “I don’t lean on Clio.”
Phil: “Used to be, we only had 1 actuator.”
Povilas: “Can 14 mm be considered a shim? That’s more like a structural member.”
Simone has a key to Galileo's house.
Katie: “Hey Jared, how’s it going with the CRO?”
Jared: “I dunno. It’s all in Italian.”
Jared: “The number of Illuminati asking me questions is daunting.” (That would be Simone Esposito himself, as well as suspected members Laird, Phil, and Armando — see our paper for more info.)
Armandino
Jared: “I’m pretty sure I would throw myself off the catwalk if Armando thought it would help.“
Okaayyy!!! Allora. The day began with some avocado slices, dos scrambled huevos, a bowl of oatmeal, two slices of cheese, two slices of breakfast cake, two glasses of fresh squeezed orange juice (delicious!), and a cafe con leche. The food at LCO is very good and below are more pictures, for our respective mothers:
Some sort of meat and potato thing, asparagus, artichoke hearts, tomatoes, beets, and a glass of peach juiceChicken with yellow rice, salad with beets, bowl of fresh fruit with strawberry ice cream, and a glass of peach juice. Eat your heart out LBT!Meat empanada, marisco soup, bowl of fruit, and a glass of juice. Mmmm....
After breakfast, a view of the marine layer in the valley to the north awaited us at the telescope:
We arrived to an email from the crew from the previous night led by Laird and Povilas that told us they had managed to collimate the telescope to the seeing limit using the Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor: a 0.55-0.6″ image on a >0.5″ night. They then created a lookup/flexure table.
A 0.6 arcsec image taken with our wide-field guider probe after collimating the telescopeA guanaco by the side of the road
With that good news, the morning crew proceeded to the next step of mounting the Calibration Return Optic (CRO, now pronounced “crow”). The CRO is a retroreflecting parabola/return flat optic that is aligned to the near ellipsoidal conjugate of the adaptive secondary. Because Magellan’s Gregorian design uses a concave secondary, we can use the CRO to test the secondary off sky with a point source located at the Nasmyth focal plane. We can also use the CRO to run the entire AO system closed loop with an artificial source during the day. The CRO is in a small cup that mounts to a 5 axis remotely actuated piezo stage, which in turn mounts to its own truss structure. This truss structure was assembled and aligned during the tower tests in Italy in order to locate the CRO at the ASM conjugate to a mm or so (hopefully better). The truss is carefully passed through the secondary cage and bolted directly in front of the ASM.
Attempting to write warning labels in SpanishCarefully installing the CRO to the magnetic kinematic interface on the trussChecking the CRO alignment with the boresight gun laser. It's good!A magnified image of the CRO looking through the cage at the secondaryPato running some CRO cables along the structureJared and Pato high up in the scissor lift to run the CRO cables along the spider vanes.Armando putting a fiducial on the primary-facing side of the CRO truss, along the optical axisArmando setting up the crosshair fiducial at the Nasmyth focal plane. This fiducial allows us to align the optical axis of the secondary to the rotational axis of the Nasmyth rotator.Armando, Marco, and Jared going through the alignment procedureLooks pretty aligned to me!
Overhead at LCO today:
“Seven.” -Derek to Marco after counting the number of spoonfuls of sugar the PI added to his tea.
“I always lose count because he’s talking while he’s doing it.” -Armando, regarding the PI adding sugar to his tea.
“Derek, you seem a bit tired, perhaps you need some more sugar in your tea.” -Marco
“I would like a siesta, a wonderful Spanish invention.” -Alfio
“It’s temporary, but it may become permanent.” -Pato Jones. Was he talking about something in particular or MagAO in general?
Some lovely pictures of the telescopes opening last night at dusk:
Our crew is getting kind of big. Todays new arrivals were: Phil Hinz, Simone Esposito, and Enrico Pinna.
Now it's a party. Enrico, Simone, and Phil arrived just in time for lunch.
This morning we finished balancing the telescope, and collimated it. We also installed our new wind meter directly under the ASM.
Laird and Juan attaching the wind probe.
To prepare for moving the NAS, we officially took over the Clay control room.
Armando, Povilas, Vizzy, Alfio, and Marco hard at work in the control room.
The big task after lunch was to install the NAS. We reviewed the procedure with the whole crew.
Laird conducts the procedure review prior to mounting the NAS.
We first had to wait for the Mike guider to finish coming off the telescope.
Emilio, Nelson, Juan, and Miguel removing a piece of Mike.Awaiting our turn.
Installing the NAS went smoothly. We’ve done this once before, so it was a good chance to test the procedure we developed last time. In this video we are raising the NAS from the dome floor up to the Nasmyth platform.
Once we had the NAS installed, we attached the new and improved Anaconda for the first time.
Tyson and Povilas attaching the Anaconda to the NAS.Here we're checking to make sure that our electronics boxes, especially the all important VisAO, clear the Igus thingy.
We also did a live test of the “Snake Pit”, the box that holds the loop of the Anaconda as it coils under the NAS platform. Our current solution is really more of a sketch.
You get the idea. The final solution will be made out of metal.The Anaconda in its pit.
After getting the NAS mounted, we turned it over to Povilas to start testing the guider.
Povilas and Emilio checking out the guider.Shack-Hartmann spots on our guider CCD.
Finally, we opened the dome and pointed at some stars. This was the first time that real starlight bounced off our adaptive secondary mirror – First Light on the ASM! The fantastic result of the tests we did are that we can focus the ASM with the normal travel range of the vane ends (the structure that holds our ASM above the primary).
Here’s the scene in the Clay control room during our first nighttime operations:
The Clay control room on MagAO's first night.
Povilas was able to collimate the telescope, and obtain ~0.65 arcsec images on the guider. A big night!
A 0.65" seeing limited image on the MagAO guider CCD.SH spots on the MagAO guider.
Some random snippets of today’s conversations:
Povilas: “It worked. It doesn’t matter whether I approve.” (note: this has been added to the MagAO support agreement as rule #1).
Tyson: “You’re makin’ me nervous.”
Laird: “Well, you’re making me nervous.”
Laird: “Just as long as everybody remembers not to stick their whatevers in there.”
Alan: “If it clears, it clears.”
Derek: “My wide field lens is performing 2% better than the theoretical limit.”
Jared: “You’re wrong.”
Derek took a walk around Clay today:
While mounting the wind monitor, the primary mirror covers were open with the telescope at horizon. This was an opportunity to pose for souvenir photos in front of a 6.5 meter mirror.
Alan presents the Magellan Clay Telescope.Laird and Simone pose for a shot by Enrico.Laird and Jared contemplate the primary.Laird and Derek, with Juan looking on.
Finally, we note that this is the 100th post to our blog. Thanks for reading!
Today was almost a terrifying, cutting-into-the-ASM kind of day… but a bit of organizing and sparing saved the day! See Marco’s lively post for the gory details — but we can now talk to the ASM from the control computer!!! 🙂
Happy DM fans!Povilas, Dave, Marco, and Emilio working on putting an SC connector where the damaged LC connector was, so that we can connect to an SC-LC patch cable. Got it?
What happened was we thought we didn’t have the right connector to repair the damaged fiber (from yesterday), but Jared was organizing some tools for mounting the NAS tomorrow and came across the necessary replacement part! Phew, what a relief! So now we can talk to the ASM, again just read all about it here courtesy Marco.
What else happened today?
Well, we always start with an 8:30am meeting in the library — every day, even Saturday and Sunday — to make sure everyone is on board for the day’s events.
8:30am meeting --- every day. Clockwise from lower left: Laird, Frank, Emilio, Jared, Gaston, Armando, Juan, Jorge (sitting at table), Miguel, Nelson, Gabriel, Povilas (sitting on shelf), Marco (you can just see his back), Derek, Alfio, Katie, Dave, Tyson.
The days events were: Gabriel lead the charge to collimate the telescope, Derek and Laird aligned the laser, the crew worked on balancing the telescope, and we took over the Clay control room. Also, we played some frisbee, this may be a regular Sunday MagAO team bonding exercise.
The PI on his way to Clay after our morning meeting. If you aren't a little stressed out, you aren't paying enough attention.
After figuring out that we didn’t have to tear into the back cover of the ASM, the big happening was opening the primary mirror covers. We first turned on our alignment laser, which tells us whether the ASM has any tilt to it as mounted. Incredibly, the alignment laser landed in the collimating eyepiece on the first try. It was a little off center, but so close that we can’t be sure that the laser itself isn’t the problem. We have some more testing to do tomorrow, so we may still have to shim a little bit. That means we’d loosen some bolts on the ASM mounting structure and insert some metal to change the angle of the ASM. But we might not have to – it looks like we’re good. Keep your fingers crossed.
Juan and Derek on the scissor lift --- and the ASM and the control GUI
Tyson completed the finishing touches of his cable wrap:
Tyson and the cable wrap
Alfio and Jared knocked out a bunch of tweaks to the control software today, including fully integrating some custom wavefront sensor camera controls that will make it easier to work on bright stars.
Alfio at work on our AO control software. They're making a few adjustments, but the nerds appear to have everything under control in software land.
After we convinced ourselves that the tilt of the ASM was as good as we could measure, Laird and Jared measured the distance to the thin shell vertex from MagAO’s nominal focal plane (with some offsets for how we took the measurement). It isn’t exactly right, but (as with the tilt laser) it’s likely that we aren’t actually measuring the thing we want to measure. We’ll have to look at a star to really understand it. This could also lead to some shimming, but we’re confident that we got it right.
Laird contemplates the Mike Nasmyth port.The laser tape says were a little off, but it's probably because we aren't exactly measuring the vertex of the secondary mirror. We won't know for sure until we point at a star.
Overheard at LCO today:
Laird: “Why don’t you guys go play in the intersection!” (Frisbee time)
Laird: “I have a Telecon with my daughters.”
Marco: “Hey Alfio, I found a bug today.”
Alfio: “A Bug!” (Seriously alarmed—What in the world could it be???)
Marco: “Yes, in my code.”
Alfio: “Ahhh, in yourrr code.” (Sigh of relief—the Universe makes sense again)
Jared: “I’m so happy Alfio is here! We’re getting stuff done.”
Our nightly LCO sunset courtesy of the MagAO Ultimate Frisbee squad (in the intersection).
