Hello dear blog friends, I’m back after being away due to beautiful, robust, inquisitive, dynamic, gregarious, exuberant, thoughtful reasons. And here we are at the MMT to observe adaptive-optically again!
The installation was more challenging than usual because both MMTO and MAPS teams were somewhat short staffed, but was still all done well by sunset.
As per usual we started with alignment. Once we got the star on Pisces (with, again, disturbingly unique-to-this-run Az-El offsets), we did a rotational centering test in order to find the chief ray. Not the one where you rotate your images and see where the star goes on the pixels, but the one where you rotate the instrument and see where the star goes on the camera. We started the rotator at -60 and went all the way to +60 — the result was a compact bean (looks kinda like this). We started the rotator at +60 and went all the way to -60 — the result was a large arc (looks kinda like this). (Images taken in strip scan mode.) The center of the bean did not coincide with the center of the arc. The arc did not overlap the bean. We saw the same behavior on the acquisition camera, so it’s not the Pisces mount wobbling. It seems the rotator itself is jumping at the start of a move. And it appeared to be when started from any initial position.
With that diagnosed and the star set to somewhat the average center, we decided to stop messing with the instrument rotator (which we don’t generally move as of yet) and moved on to WFS alignment. This included working on the fibers for the newly re-installed IR WFS, adjusting the tip/tilt mirror settings and checking whether differences between Vis and IR were due to any common optics, and finally closing up at dawn with still an open question about co-alignment. To be continued tomorrow night!
The song of the night is “The Happy Song” by Imogen Heap:
Hi I’m here to blog the third and final day of the Magellan Science Meeting. It was a short day, the meeting officially ended after lunch. We spent the morning with talks focused on the future of the observatory and current and upcoming instruments. Including G-CLEF, a high resolution spectrometer designed to be coupled to GMagAO-X on the GMT, to feed diffraction-limited 25.4m primary sized PSFs into fibers for getting high high high contrast spectra of planet atmospheres in reflected light, specifically targeting the O2 absorption line on something like Proxima Centauri b. IF Prox b has an atmosphere and IF G-CLEF + GMagAO-X can achieve contrasts of 10 billion and IF there is life on Prox b then we MIGHT see a deep O2 absorption line. A high risk observation but the highest of rewards! Oh, and IF GMT gets built. Melting-face-emoji. Until then G-CLEF is planning to travel to Magellan to be coupled to our favorite child MagAO-X.
Andrew Szentgyorgyi talking about G-CLEF
We said goodbye to Jay in the middle of the morning as he is flying off home.
The meeting concluded with discussion groups focused open questions for the future of Magellan. Some of the major topics under discussion: 1. How do we handle the numerous incredible and in-demand instruments that all want to live on the Nasmyth West platform for long times, including yours-truly, 2. How do we handle interruptions for targets-of-opportunity, such as supernovae that need to be observed immediately once they go off, and how do we compensate observers who lost time due to the interruptions, 3. Is there a better way to handle scheduling than giving someone one full night when they may only need 2 hours at the same time over multiple nights. This last one hasn’t affected us so much since we run our own mini-queue during MagAO-X’s blocks, so we can accommodate those types of things, but it is definitely a problem with other instruments and observers.
Then it was lunch and then it was time to go. Jialin and I are both boarding trains to New York, although not the same train… Shrug. Jialin is meeting her mom and they are bopping around NYC, I’m meeting blog-favorite Dr. Joseph Daniel Long for a visit to Flatiron Institute, and a little bopping around as well, as a treat. Jialin got a happy meal at the train station.
One thing I really enjoyed about this conference is even though it was a diverse set of science topics, everyone was doing observing. The speakers did a really good job talking to the diverse audience and making every talk accessible and interesting to folks from different fields. It was nice to see how everyone was using all the numerous instruments and expansive science impact of the observatory we all know and love. Special thanks to Dr Johanna Teske for all the hard work she did to put this together while also supporting the ongoing PFS run!
Spring is a great time to be in DC (when it isn’t raining…!). The day started with a typical spring morning in DC and maybe some slight mechanical issues with a certain dishwasher, but we made the ~8 min commute to the Earth and Planets Lab campus without a hitch soon after.
After coffee and light snacks, the morning session was ripe with ienteresting talks from the transiting exoplanet community, which was nice to see. Eventually we broke for lunch where we had some sick mediterranean food and engaged in some colorful dicussions on asteroid mining.
Immediately after lunch Alycia gave her talk on the new upcoming spectroscopic instrument, MagNIFIES. I didn’t realize that this instrument is essentially GMTNIRS and will be installed on one of the Magellans as we wait for GMT, great plan.
We were all treated with a glimpse of CAD Alycia…! Don’t be fooled, but if you suspect that you are, CAD Alycia is apparently ~4 inches taller than her true height. So that’s the distinguishing feature, FYI.
The rest of this session detailed new and upcoming instruments for the Magellan telescopes and was (for me) the most interesting session of the day. In particular, there was a talk on a new instrument (LIGHTSPEED) that makes use of one of the new Hamamatsu qCMOS cameras that had me on the edge of my seat…! Those cameras are impressive (and cheap) pieces of imaging technology.
In the afternoon, a subset of the attendees coalesced and had a nice discussion on efforts towards exoplanet science at Magellan. It was recognized that one of the current drawbacks for the community is a shortage of ports for all the various instruments, and there was some discussion about moving LDSS3 to a permanent position on one of the reinforced auxilary ports in addition to removing Four Star from the other Clay nasmyth platform.
Jialin, being the talented multitasker that she is, juggled participating in the discussion with managing her final exams.
After the breakout sessions, I had a super meeting with Alycia and her postdoc Daniel about our most recent efforts studying the dust that makes up the HR4796 disk. Recall, there isn’t a single grain model that can explain both the scattering function *and* and spectrum across all the data collected on this system so far. Our most recent observing runs have given us some really good data that should really help solve this problem.
We ended conference activities by eating Ukrainian food at a local restaurant with Lennart van Slujis, who is from the Netherlands (now a Univ. of Michigan postdoc) and apparently has attended lectures given by Sebastiaan. Astro is such a small world.
We would like to thank Alycia very much for her hospitality and hosting us during the duration of this conference. Of course, Jialin and I quickly found that the best way to end the work day at Alycia’s house was with a few intense bouts of air hocky and foosball!
Song of the Day
How about some early 2000’s action courtesy of John Mayer?
Majority of the MagAO-X team traveled to DC in 2023 for the GMT community science meeting , so this is the second time the (partial) MagAO-X team has assembled in Washington. But this time, it’s focus on all sciences done with the not-so-giant Magellan Baade and Clay telescopes.
David Osip, the LCO Associate Director, gave the first talk of the day, which was an overview on the state of the observatory. As someone who miss out on the 2025A observing run, I got a bit emotional (just a very…small…bit), when some familiar faces showed up on the screen.
Max, I have paid for my stay… Lots of our guest blogger!
Of source, MagAO-X has made an appearance within the overview talk despite not being included in the Magellan instruments FOV slide. And the rest of the morning was filled with IFU instrument talks.
Yay! MagAO-X“Apologies to to MagAO-X team but putting the tiny dot for the FoV was not practical”
During luncheon social, Jay has found a familiar face here at the conference, Marcelo. To us who attended this conference in person, Marcelo is the one who gave a non-IFU talk earlier this morning. To those who are back home in Tucson, you may know him as the person-Jay-ran-to-for-coffee-machine-support-in-Baade-during-2025A-run. Marcelo showed us the face of Magellan, which now none of us can unsee.
Marcelo and the cute figure of the Magellan face 😉
All the major events happen after lunch. Logan was the first to be behind the podium and she took it away with the results of her Pup Search. Soon after her talk, Logan also presented a poster on her work on imaging planet with reflected light.
Showing off her survey yieldsLogan and her poster that doesn’t have the right color pallete
Oh, Logan didn’t just stop here. She also was the chair of third (!!!) spectroscopy session of the day and the second half of the imaging session, where Jay and I presented our work.
I started the second half of the imaging session with some protoplanets.
Sorry Sebastiaan… (for not explictly citing Haffert+2019)
And the microphone was immediately handed off to Jay for some debris disks.
Slide with all the appropriate and proper acknowledgments, along with a Jay
The rest of the afternoon was filled with talks on objects with non-negligible redshift (what even is that???).
After all the talks, we snap a quick group selfie before attending Alycia’s tour of the EPL campus.
Did you spot Alycia in the background?
We started the tour off in the Greenewalt building where the conference took place and got a introduction of the history of research done at Carnegie. The research span from project like The Carnegie, a ship that traveled the world to map the earth’s magnetism in the 1920s, to using radio telescopes to prove the prescence of the Earth’s iononsphere. Perhaps the one project that none of the conference attendees can ignore is the Atomic Physics Observatory (APO) located right outside the Greenewalt building. This “observatory” does not house any telescopes, but rather a Van de Graaff generator (designed by Van de Graaff himself) used for splitting the Uranium atom. And it is carefully disguised as an observatory to please the neighbors.
Alycia beginning the tourIs it really a dome of a telescope?globe with all the point the Carnegie has traveled toA cool library in the Abelson buildingVera Rubin used this exact instrument!Sketch of the southern sky from 400 years ago
Jay and I got an additional tour of the research building, where Alycia’s office is located. We got to see a lot of the items used by Vera Rubin herself and visited one of Alycia’s colleague, Paul Butler, who was observing at Clay tonight. While crashing Paul’s observing run party, we “ran” into our guest blogger and TO, Carla!
Low resolution Carla! Hi Carla!
The (partial) MagAO-X team and Dr. Daniel Lin, who is a collaborator of Alycia here at Carnegie, ended the night with some amazing greek food. Unfortunately, I do not have any photos during this social gathering as my phone battery was drained throughout the day for the creation and documentation of blog-tent.
Song of the Day
Already, thanks for reading my full documentation of Day 1 of the MSM, which is full of action. Now, I am ready to goodbye to editing this post and head straight to bed. So please enjoy this fantastic Good Bye.
Another MagAO-X run in the books. Overall a successful one too. We got lots of new stuff working, and had several very good nights with some exciting discoveries. Great work folks. Now get to work on your data and maybe you’ll get a PhD.
This was one of the few times, however, that I’m feeling personally let down by Cerro Manqui. Our mountain usually comes through for me, just when it’s time to do my observations the skies clear and the stars still. But this time I only got one really good shot at my target (out of four planned observations), and the infamous last night included my time. I guess this is the problem with doing the things that require everything to be perfect — that’s hard to do.
As has been noted, the animals were pretty entertaining the last few weeks.
The Fox and Magellan
Cleanroom Vizzies were hit or miss this run, but on our last work day one made an appearance.
Burrows up to no good.
The addition of a cat is a major development. I really want to know the story — I assume it involves an epic journey.
It looked like she was headed towards the Bodega.
These aren’t condors, they’re people.
Look what I found at the summit. #10-32 rack screws.
One last sunset.
Now that we routinely leave MagAO-X here and set up for remote experiments, it has become traditional for me to put in a goodbye photo so we can remember how we left it.
This time there’s a twist. I set up a webcam on our workstation pointed at MagAO-X. At least when the lights are on it will give us a little view of home away from home.
Time to start working on the next sticker
I watched Fifth Element on the plane ride down. It contains a great way to describe an Empanada.
