Blog – Page 171 – Extreme Wavefront Control Lab

MagAO Commissioning Day 10: Thanksgiving, Lollipops, and Bird Poop

Happy Thanksgiving! I am thankful for clear skies, low winds, and contactless continuous facesheets.

Various mother #1 — To celebrate thanksgiving I gave my family a virtual tour of the Clay control room. Meanwhile, the Arcetri team was busy taking interaction matrices.

We are employing fine Italian craftsmanship to obtain the interaction matrices for our AO system, using the “penina” internal light source (an artifical star) and the CRO retro-reflector. These are crucial calibrations for the feedback loop to create the desired shapes on the ASM.

A set of orthogonal basis functions! — Alfio gestures at the pupil images making up the interaction matrices

Hmmmmmmm. — Laird, Alfio, Simone, and Enrico contemplate our pupils.

Here’s a short video of today’s action:

Watching that, you’d swear Laird speaks fluent Italian. Maybe it’s just Optics.

Okay Allora — Arizonans on the left and Italians on the right

There were a few issues having to do with the slaved actuators in the unilluminated part of the pupil, so we haven’t finished the interaction matrices yet — there’s more alignment that needs to be checked first.

We are looking carefully at the pupil to see if the CRO is aligned properly with the ASM. So let’s have a look at the pupil. The “lollipop” is the slot that was cut out to keep a crack in the ASM from spreading. You can see it in the lower center of the ASM in each picture in this collage. There is also bird poop on the tertiary — it’s the splotch in the upper right image, at about 8:00. More on the pupil images tomorrow.

lollipop, lollipop, ooh-lolly-lolly-lolly — The lollipop-shaped slot can be seen at lower center (6:00) of the ASM in each of these 4 images. Bird poop on the tertiary is at about 8:00 in the upper right image.

Heard at LCO today:

“We have three telescope operators? Just for Clay?” -Laird
“No. Just for you!” -Povilas

“If you don’t know which way is which, we’ll just drill two holes!” – Pato

“It’s the bird poop.” – Laird
“So we use the bird poop fiducial?” – Phil
(a helpful bird, which might actually live in the dome, gave us a nice way to figure out which way is up in our images)

“Alfio has a segmentation fault?” – Jared
“It’s not me, it’s IDL!” – Alfio

“A pupil only a mother could love.” – Laird
“In Italy we say, Every cockroach is loved by its mother.” – Alfio
“All the cockroaches are loved by their various mothers.” – Kids

There was no turkey today, but we tried to keep up some Thanksgiving traditions:

The youngest person in this picture is 32. And there is a Canadian. Hi, various mothers, eh? — The Las Campanas Thanksgiving kids table. No grown ups allowed.

MagAO’s official food blogger (Derek) grabbed a shot of our turkey substitute:

A sort of eel. — We had a really good fish for dinner.

We are all thankful for the 4-course meals, 3 times a day… as well as the plethora of snacks found in every building!

A well-fed AO operator is a good AO operator — I am thankful for the ubiquitous and well-organized snacks at LCO!

Star watchers. — It's a nightly ritual to watch the sunset from the catwalk that joins the telescopes. Unless you are busy aligning an AO system . . .

For Alan

Alan Uomoto has been teaching us about the power supply at LCO. Rather than calling it clean and dirty, the actual difference between the different circuitry is whether they go direct (white outlets) or through an un-interuptable power supply (UPS) (orange outlets). Alan, this one’s for you!

(And — despite how it looks from the outlets — we really are in Chile! The observatory is highly USA-compatible. I haven’t even used my plug adaptor yet!)

Update: And here is the MagAO-certified power protector I made to keep people from stepping on the plugs and cords above:

by KT — Power cords protector, standing around the plugs imaged above

MagAO Commissioning Day 9 – Nighttime Edition: Incorporating Clio

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 Gun as 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!

Integration — Clio, VisAO, W-unit, Nas, ASM, Clay: So happy together!

Here’s how it happened:

Top Gun — Removing Clio from the support cart with the crane — under PI Phil's watchful care

It fits! — Attaching Clio to the NAS ring — under Phil's watchful care

Clio at Clay — Clio at the Nas, flanked by Phil and Katie

Clio Hinz — Left: Phil and Clio instrument. Right: Clio electronics rack and Phil.

Phil, Katie, and Laird then aligned Clio’s cold pupil stops to the ASM.

That's cold — Heave-ho: Shimming Clio to align the cold stops

Phil has an Illuminati halo — How'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 + 2xLN2 — Mauricio brings up LN2 to the Nas platform to fill the Clio dewar

Pato Pato — Pato 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.”

Fig. 1 (click here) — 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.)

say -v 'pipe organ' "I’m pretty sure I would throw myself off the catwalk if Armando thought it would help" — Armandino

Jared: “I’m pretty sure I would throw myself off the catwalk if Armando thought it would help.“

Alignment alignment alignment!

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 juice

IMG_1748 - Version 2 — Chicken 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_collimated_0.6asec_image — A 0.6 arcsec image taken with our wide-field guider probe after collimating the telescope

Wanaco — A 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.