We finally had an all-night good night. Started with what we call engineering, which means testing new ways of operating the instrument. The big news is that Sebastiaan got his “implicit Electric Field Conjugation” algorithm to work on-sky. This brings MagAO-X almost to its as-planned fully capability. Here’s what that looks like to one of our highly trained operators:
A fully armed and operational MagAO-X station.
Why would one want to conjugate an electric field? Let’s let Sebastiaan explain:
Speckles are why twinkling is bad for science
After the instrument-science experiments, we spent the rest of the night hunting planets. Tonight was almost one of those legendary Cerro Manqui nights that keeps us coming back over and over again. It was essentially 0.5″ seeing all night, but we were plagued by our version of the low-wind effect. However instead of Mickey Mouse, we get the Bouncey House: when the wind drops to 0.0 the telescope gets bored and starts to bounce. It makes our control loop more or less impossible to optimize.
If you’ve been around this blog a time or two you’ve probably heard our woes with respect to seeing — the measurement of just how twinkly the stars are. Twinkling is bad for science, and our instrument can’t operate well if the seeing is too high.
We started this run with some pretty good seeing! In fact, two nights ago was the first night for my program and the seeing was excellent! I was able to observe a lot of my targets and get great images. You might have seen that last night was less spectacular, and I’m sad to see tonight is no different.
Off the charts seeingThat’s 2.5 arcsec seeing, wind gusts of 35.
Before we closed for wind and more engineering, Jialin got to drive some and I took some maybe-useable data.
Driver’s ed
Some animals and nice shots from the day.
Some of Eden’s lovely telescope night shots
BUT WAIT! The night’s not over yet. Immediately after my time was up and I left the control room, seeing tanked just in time for Jay’s disk observations
Ooh a dark holeJosh and Jared drive the coronagraphJay getting data
The night ended strong with Jay riding out his target until sunrise.
Moon setJoseph’s sky pic
Some of you may have clocked that I arrived a bit late to the mountain this time. Well here is the quick story time.
In May last year I had a foot surgery that through many ups and downs has still not fully healed today (that’s a story for another time). I haven’t been able to bear weight on my left foot since May, approximately 10 months of not using my foot. About three weeks ago I got the go ahead to start walking on it again, and I was slowly and carefully transitioning back to bearing weight. But even though I was mostly walking, I couldn’t walk long distances, so I decided to bring my knee scooter to get around the airports easily.
In Santiago customs I got selected for an extra security scan and as I was hauling my luggage around I lost balance and fell over the front of the scooter, which severely messed up my left first metatarsil bone (the main bone through your foot leading to each toe). I couldn’t put any weight even on my heel or move or touch or even put my croc shoe on my foot. So I decided to stay in La Serena and see a doctor to be sure it wasn’t broken. It wasn’t. But the long period of disuse makes it incredibly lucky that it wasn’t! I saw the dr again a few days later, then headed up on Thursday.
I’m doing a lot better now! Still not walking, I’ve got crutches now to get around the site. But definitely better. At this trajectory I might be able to walk some by the time we leave.
So that’s the story!
The song of the day is The Calamity Song by The Decemberists
Night 5 started out with Manny and Dan cooking a delicious pancake/egg/sausage/bacon breakfast for the whole crew! Dan came up just to help Manny out, and a great time was had by all.
Post-breakfast, pre-sunset game of pool.
At sunset we were closed due to high winds, then the thick clouds rolled in. It looked like the wind was dropping, but actually the anemometer must have frozen because the winds were still very high in real life!
This picture is supposed to illustrate high winds and building-up clouds at sunset on Night 5. It’s hard to depict wind in a still jpeg though. But those pine tree branches were really blowing!
Around the halfway point of the night it started to graupel, and there were thunderstorms 30-50 miles away. So we never opened, and we put the telescope and instruments into lightning shutdown mode. The MAPS and MIRAC teams waited out the weather until around 3am when we and our TO agreed that the weather seemed to be behaving according to the forecast, and the forecast was calling for more snow and wind the next day and night. Therefore, towards the end of night 5 we decided to call off night 6, and the MAPS/MIRAC teams fled the summit and the snow for the balmy Tucson rain.
Some of us left around dawn, others slept a bit longer, but here was my dawn between Nights 5-6:
The song of the nights is the sound of wind-driven graupel striking the side of the metal dome.
The day-to-day operation of an experimental extreme adaptive optics instrument, pushing all the boundaries at once, can feel like lurching from crisis to crisis. We need to get better airflow in the bowels of our electronics rack. We need to automate the fifty-three step alignment process. We need to debug this segmentation fault in our control software. We desperately need to do laundry, but we’re unwilling to sacrifice sleep or work time.
Today, a portentous wind blew all through dinner. Jialin and Laird got on right at sunset, and it looked for a minute like we’d have an okay night. Windy.com predicted calm conditions. In fact, it’s continuing to predict calm conditions.
However:
Yes, the wind line is going into the humidity plot.
We have to close the telescope for average wind speeds of 35 mph, and it’s gusting to 52 mph. Jialin is no longer allowed outside without a tether in case she blows away.
Some days you feel mega and some days not so mega.Say it ain’t so!
We tried to open the door to the outdoors but nature said “no. ❤️”
The conditions at Las Campanas will blow you away.
At times like these, the hard-working AOistas thank Mother Nature for delivering exceptionally bad conditions so that we can focus on what’s important: software development, esprit de corps, and blog #content.
We did take some data before we got shut down, though. And, who knows, maybe this will all just blow over. Meanwhile, Jared was not satisfied with the amount of wind and went to get some extra fans for our instrument. Armed with a couple of graduate students, he went to hunt in the storage building between telescopes.
Inside a box cryptically labeled VisAO (possibly some viscacha-themed instrument?) were some fans for cannibalization. This will hopefully help us even out temperatures in the electronics rack.
“Hello old friend”— Jared
2024-04-24 00:00 CLST
Sparkles “Eden” McEwen turned 25 today! We only use UTC for consistency in our instrument, but birthdays are celebrated in local time.
We’re happy you were born!
2024-04-24 01:27 CLST
Wind’s dying down! Finally!
Jared took some data down at the lodge while he was checking on his laundry. Seems like he got a bit of sky rotation.
If you visit the southern hemisphere you can see the Magellanic Telescopes, discovered by astronomers in 2001.
Tomorrow’s a half-night for me, so I’m taking advantage of my last full night to file my second and final blog post for 2024Aa. Until next time, enjoy some hair-metal revival from STARBENDERS.
Song of the Day
We can face the darkness, baby. It’s all in the way you play the game.
“The Game” by STARBENDERS
#content
I know we’re not the first ones to use AI image generation, but its ability to capture South American animals has greatly improved since I last tried it out.
O B E Y (prompted by Sebastiaan)The tail-less giant mountain viscacha has not been seen since the last ice age.The ELBT (Extremely Large Banana Telescope) (prompted by Jay)
Despite the partly cloudy night, we fixed several issues and made a lot of progress!
MIRAC pupil alignment — an errant detent was corrected and the ellipsoidal mirror internal to MIRAC solved the mystery of co-aligning telescope, AO, + MIRAC pupils!
AO camera lens loop — finally got it calibrated, and working beautifully on-sky!
Pupils tracking and 20 modes loop!
AO calibrations — got a successful 20 modes loop, and discovered that a better SNR is needed for higher-order loops. SNR can be increased by raising the amplitude/stroke (but need to test where the linear range ends), and/or by increasing the number of iterations (we went from 500 to 2000). We also received wisdom on inverting the calibrations and making our own masks.
Pinwheel mode being calibrated!
However, the partially-cloudy conditions made it impossible to actually take a long-enough running calibration to raise the SNR enough to go to 100 modes. So that awaits another night.
