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At the usual Chilean diner 
Satisfying our guac desires, 
Huge chips to dip at hand 
To face a long night ahead. 

“My comrade won’t join tonight” 
Said Sebastiaan with a sigh, 
“I shall bring him food at once, 
For EFC to have a chance”. 

As he ordered a full plate 
“His name is Josh”, he said. 
Yorch Clay – wrote the chef, 
For he did not understand.

Then everyone followed the captain 
And drove or walked up the mountain 
To observe the target PDS 70 
Which is forcefully our favorite. 

To set up for observations, 
One must meet some expectations 
This is why, behind the screen 
A known face started to peer. 

Are you pushing the right buttons? 
To ensure everything functions 
Jared glances, with narrow eyes, 
Guarding Josh as he drives. 

If you’re wrong you will hear 
“Well, this little maneuver 
Is gonna cost us 51 years!” 
And you don’t want this in your ears. 

Ps. The movie quote in the poem is from Interstellar, one of my favorite movies of all time!

Song of the day

Today the honour of blogging is all mine (Matthijs). A few of us went up before dinner to start preparing for a busy night full of experimental engineering observations (in particular Sebastiaan after he had stayed up until 10.30am to align VisX again). During daylight we of course managed to enjoy the company of some of the cute critters around here.

Sebastiaan started out the night with some observations of Betelgeuse, until it got too low and the ADCs which we only noticed because of our most underrated camera (which deserves more praise). After that, Elena spent some time looking at the self coherent camera (SCC) imaging.

During this observing run Sebastiaan and Josh have attempted multiple times to use EFC for some deep dark hole observations of Alpha Centauri (in order to please Jared). These observations have been tarnished by bad seeing, bad calibrations, fluctuations in the laser power and alignment issues. Here’s an impression of what that did to Sebastiaan:

However, today was the day that all the stars aligned, good seeing, good calibration, good alignment (scripts) and it finally worked.

Eden has been looking at some donuts all week (no one knows why) but she’s finally figured out to turn these donuts into some (possibly) correct Strehl estimates (camtip FTW).

Myself, I interjected myself between some observations just to try out my semi-analytical FLOWFS control loop (of which I forgot to take a picture…).

Elena also managed to get some pretty PIAA observations.

In conclusion, we are doing great and if I had to summarise it in a movie quote I would say: “Desert power” – Dune 2021 .

Song of the Day

Someone mentioned potentially observing a target with 1612 in the name (or I might have imagined it) but this song has been stuck in my head all night. Enjoy!

Tonight was another Laird night which means more of our favorite target, PDS 70!

Could PDS 70 have alien life? Will we find a new planet? Are the answers to these questions always ‘no’?

Who’s to say.

We will get back to the PDS 70 excitement shortly, but first, a recap of the day’s festivities:

Sebastiaan and Elena got the FAST-SCC (self-coherent camera) working in lab! In the FAST-SCC, a coronagraph yeets light through a pinhole in the Lyot stop. This spatially filtered light interferes with residual stellar speckles, creating a fringe pattern in the focal plane from which the wavefront can be recovered. With our wavefront measurement, we can diggy diggy a dark hole.

Meanwhile, Katie and I hiked out to the solar telescope, and we also saw a burro.

Following a brief interlude, we have returned to the scene of PDS 70. While Logan may have left us, the good seeing that typically follows her decided to stick around.

“How could this be?” You ask.

Enter…Stewart.

With Stewart’s steady hand, we got some of the best seeing of our entire run!

Our night also featured a beautiful moon.

Having reached the epic conclusion of this blog post, I am ready to go to bed. “The midnight hour is passed and my attendants have all retired.” I recently watched the 2024 remake of Nosferatu, and it was difficult to find an appropriate quote for this blog post.

Song of the Day

Dancing in the Moonlight – King Harvest

We are happy to report the successful and uneventful homecomings of the first half of our observing crew. Uneventful in that none was stranded in a city they didn’t mean to be in. Successful in that they ended in the warm embraces of various roommate species.

For the half of us who remain, the weather has been treating us. Poorly. Has us saying “”If What I Think Is Happening, Is Happening, It Better Not Be.”

So we did not have an alfCen kind of night. We had a “give it your best shot” engineering kind of night. Which stretched until we had to switch to our observer’s time. You’re welcome for the good seeing Gabrielle, Jialin ordered it just for you.

Our engineering is humming merrily along. Sebastiaan and Josh started the night with dark hole digging. Matthijs LOWFS’ed. Katie successfully wrangled dispersed speckles. Jared’s gain optimization is a huge hit. I’m enjoying my donuts. We’re as happy as we can be with seeing at an all time high.

Speaking of happy… a quick ode to the vegetarian cooking of our Chef’s this turno. Thank you for the beautiful meat free meals! For those of us up at lunch Sunday there was even a vegan empanada, eaten too quickly for the camera to catch. We have been absolutely spoiled.

The quote of today was inspired by the main characters of the Lodge, our very own fantastic foxes, our charming culpeos.

Keep an eye out for a sweet message from our TO Ivonne, who agreed to do a little blog on her last day. Thank you Ivonne!

Song of the Day

Yeah the song and the quote is gonna be from the same movie. It’s a good movie.