Hola, it’s Vizzy! I work hard to keep my fur fuzzed, so I was asked to do a special guest post on LCO style. MagAO has been immersed in the culture of LCO for a month, and they are a stylish bunch indeed. Here we go!
Yours truly, guest blogger
LCO is a pretty stylin’ place.
Caution: Style ahead.
What with the jumpsuits,
Nelson and Miguel watch in style, as the ASM is trucked up
clean room attire,
Marco, Armando, and Katie working the clean room look. Note the fine Italian booties.
ASM-handling accessories,
Laird and Juan accessorize their ASM-handling look with an of-the-moment face mask and purple gloves
hard hats,
Hard hat style -- Jared and Katie. (Note laser for alignment at upper center.)
and steel-toe shoes…
Most colorful steel toes
MagAO worked at LCO in style.
LCO staff always inspire me to keep up my look:
Emilio Cerda, style inspirationMiguel Méndez and Nelson Ibacache style their jumpsuits with colorful harnessesJuan Gallardo works the striped and color-blocked stylePato Jones has great style -- I love the creativity in his scarf! He also donated his clean-room jacket to the cause of sun protection for the ASMPovilas Palunas kicks it in my favorite steel-toe boots
Laird Close, the PI of MagAO, is a style leader as well.
Laird Close keeps it cool
Laird brought with him a plethora of Italians, Arizonans, and Californians to put together MagAO.
Armando Riccardi is the leader of ASM styleSimone Esposito leads Pyramid styleAlfio Puglisi, software styleRuna Briguglio, ASM and tea styleEnrico Pinna, Pyramid styleMarco Xompero, ASM styleAlan Uomoto, tech manager styleTyson Hare, all-round engineering stylePhil Hinz, Clio PI, shows his LBTI prideKatie Morzinski, Sagan Postdoctoral Fellow, styles her steel-toe sneakers with stripey/plaid/color-blocked looks and an HR 8799 T-shirtDerek Kopon, first MagAO PhD, goes for a crisp clean look, while carrying a delicate optic for pizazzJared Males, VisAO Instrument Scientist and MagAO Real-Time and Networking Software Engineer, styles his hat like Robin HoodKate Follette, Astronomer, has a versatile look, from cool to angelic, in her range of headwear and spot-lightingT.J. Rodigas kicks back in his UofA track suit, Rocket Scientist T-shirt, and carries a must-have MacBook ProYa-Lin Wu, MagAO's newest team member, looks slick in modern observing wear
In conclusion, I will miss this stylish team when the last of them depart LCO tomorrow. Thanks for always taking flattering photos of me, guys! And see you in 2013A!
Laird, Alan, Alfio, Simone, Jared, Armando, Mauricio, Phil, and Marco
This is my least favorite part: packing everthing up, getting organized, finding all of our lost allen wrenches, and taking a zip-tie inventory.
The PI stumbles into breakfast after our last night on sky.
The ASM came off the telescope yesterday, and rode down the hill first thing this morning.
The MagAO ASM backs up to the clean room, where it will sit safely waiting for us to return in March, 2013.
The last major operation was to unbolt and crane the NAS off the telescope.
Juan reviews the NAS removal procedure before we start.Laird untangles our NAS lifting harness. Every single member of the project has fought this contraption at least once, and lost . . . miserably.The NAS weighs 1800 lbs (remember? that's why we buy C/75 steel toes) so the crane picks up that much weight before we remove the bolts.
Once the NAS came off, we got a look at the W-Unit for the first time in a few weeks. Here’s our wollaston beamsplitter, which helped deliver some amazing SDI science at visible wavelengths.
The VisAO SDI Wollaston beamsplitter. The elevator is voice activated.
Kate, who is using the VisAO SDI mode to study disks around young stars, had never actually seen the fully assembled instrument before. Here’s a picture of me and Kate after a quick tour of the components she’s been operating the last few nights.
Jared and Kate looking happy with VisAO as they help take it and the rest of the NAS off the Clay telescope.The NAS heading down on the elevator, on its way back to its parking spot in the Aux building. See you in March!
We also cleaned up some of our, shall we say, less rigorous engineering solutions.
Katie with one of her many significant contributions to the project - our power cord protector. Alas, this has been scavenged and returned to service as packing material for Vizzy's monitors.
Laird’s folks happened to wander by today (why are you surprised? it’s not like we’re on a mountain top in a remote area of South America or anything). As is his wont, Laird put them to work settling the ASM into the clean room. I hear they helped flip it back to zenith. Perhaps even more appreciated was a chocalate fix for certain members of the team who didn’t plan very well.
A welcome change from Chilean oreos. Don't get me wrong, the cookies are great. But this is day 27.
Quote of the day:
“We should come up with something that looks less like garbage. I mean, it’s well decorated garbage. But.” – Povilas Polunas.
When you bring an expensive, delicate instrument to an observatory, you want there to be people like Juan Gallardo who put their full attention and serious effort into the procedures and operations for mounting and dismounting your instrument. Yesterday evening, we all met in the library/conference room, and Juan briefed us on the procedure to be taken today and tomorrow in removing Clio, the ASM, and the Nas from the telescope. Juan has been taking pictures and detailing every step, the whole time we’ve been here, and he put together a detailed and thorough document. Today the procedures were followed to safely and successfully remove the ASM and Clio from the telescope; tomorrow we will remove the Nas and store the ASM. Here is a picture of Juan: Juan Gallardo managing installation and removal operations
So today we were back to a day schedule. Laird supervised Nas uncabling and ASM removal. T.J. supervised Clio uncabling and removal. And Juan managed the LCO crew, for a safe and successful instrument removal.
T.J. uncables Clio at the end of the nightLaird uncables the NAS in the morningLaird and Pato disconnect the ASMFelix and Nelson lower the ASMFelix redies the ASM on its cartThis is what a non-adaptive secondary mirror (NSM ?) looks like. Felix and Nelson raise the f/11 secondary to the top of the telescope, now that our ASM has been removed -- to prepare for the next observing run.T.J. and Kate pack up Clio electronicsNelson, Felix, and Victor remove Clio on its cartOur day was coming to a close as the sun set. Which was weird because sunset marked the beginning of our work for the past couple weeks!
Tonight is the last on-sky night for MagAO in 2012. Don’t panic. We’ll be back with a vengeance in Spring, 2013!
And just in time too! Jared and KT's coffee supply ran out tonight!
We began the night tonight by looking at a bright star that Runa chose for calibration. Upon further inspection, and much to our surprise, it turned out to be a heretofore unknown binary! We’re calling it “Runa’s star” and will have to follow up on our next run.
These images were taken in greater than 0.8" V band seeing. That's roughly 75%-ile here. VisAO has performed very well.
We also commissioned a few of the more exotic Clio modes today, including the Apodizing Phase Plate (technical link, non-technical link) and Non-Redundant Masks (technical link, non-technical link). Both of these techniques are designed to probe the regions close to a star. One (APP) allows you to achieve extra high contrast close to your star (distinguishing faint planets from bright stars) and the other (NRM) allows you to image the inner regions of a system at extra high spatial resolution.
Katie with an NRM image... and soup.
On the VisAO side, we managed to achieve, as our PI describes it, “the highest resolution image ever taken in the universe”. This means that we had great seeing and great AO correction and looked through our shortest wavelength (“bluest”) filter – [OI] at 6300Angstroms. We were able to achieve resolutions of <25milliarcseconds. An arcsecond is 1/3600th of a degree, so 25 milliarcsecond resolution means we can distinguish objects that are separated by only 0.0000007 degrees on the sky! By contrast, the resolution of the human eye is a paltry 16 arcseconds or so. Stay tuned for Laird to write a paper with a title something like his quote above.
Me operating VisAO. Jared wanted me to post this to demonstrate that he's not the only one who can operate it. In fact, his GUI is excellent. I'm pretty sure he'll be obsolete soon.
Don’t stop reading the blog because we’re pulling MagAO off the telscope tomorrow either! We’re taking lots and lots of data home that we will have to analyze “for real” instead of on the fly at 3am. We expect to do much better when we return to Arizona, triumphant and well rested! We’ll be keeping you updated as we begin to quantify our on-sky performance for future observers, establish bragging rights, prepare for conferences and make new scientific discoveries.
Quotes of the Day:
“Clio sucks!” -nameless Clio operator
[sadly] “What? Your TO sucks?” – Jorge, the TO (Telescope Operator)
“Time to leave this valley of tears” -Runa. Apparently having a new star named after him wasn’t enough to counter the valley of tears effect.
“If my plane crashed, I would still want you to graduate” -Kate to Jared, after he showed her the data drive she would be taking back on the plane with her. We’re sending several copies on several planes just in case. I swear this was going to be a quote even before I agreed to write the blog post!
In honor of our last night on sky, I’ll leave you with some of the nighttime shots that I’ve taken this week.
Before I learned to focus my camera properly for star shots, I took this slightly blurry picture of the southern Milky Way. You'll see the southern cross near the lefthand edge of the frame and the LMC (more on this in the next caption) on the right.The Large and Small Magellenic Clouds, two satellite galaxies of the Milky Way that are visible to the naked eye in the southern hemisphere. Although he certainly wasn't the first to see them, Magellan noticed them on one of his voyages and so they are named after him. The red dashed line on the left is a plane with it's lights flashing, and not a UFO.More like a sunset shot than a nighttime shot, but I thought that I should point out that the moon has gone through almost a full cycle since we arrived!A 2hr star trail that I took last night. I set my camera up outside at sunset to take three of these during the evening. You can see that the telescope was pointed at several places during this interval, as several dome orientations are superimposed. After the first shot, my camera blew over. TJ thought this shot was cooler than the first one. I was confused at first because I thought one of the other telescopes on the mountain had a laser guide star system... and was pointing it at the ground (dummies!). It's actually a highway, which makes much more sense!The skies of LCOMy favorite. A 2hr star trail shot that I set up before I hiked up to the telescope one night. The psychedelic red lights are the taillights of cars driving up and down to the telescopes. No headlights though!
