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MAPS Dec. 2024B Night 3: MAPS “Pop” Culture

‘Twas the night before running AO, when all through the telescope
The wind was violently stirring, we had lost all our hope;
The MAPS team decided that the night would finish
In hopes that tomorrow the gales would diminish;
There are 52 more lines in this old-time poem
So I will write the remainder of this blog in the way that we know ’em

༄ ⋆⁺₊❅.⁺˚⋆｡°✩₊･:*༄:｡

As soon as I stepped outside, I could tell tonight was the night we would be able to start running AO. The sky was clear, and the roaring winds of last night were gone.
It was silent… too silent. I couldn’t help but feel as if something else would soon stir up our night.

A nice, clear, calm sunset from the Bowl dorms
Another stunning, beautiful sunset. Photo credit: Bianca Payán

We all arrived at the telescope and set everything up just like any other night: Bianca and I filled BLINC and uncovered the science cameras, Amali booted up the ASM and prepared to start up CACAO/AO, Ben, our telescope operator, moved us to our first target, and Krishna and Jorge confirmed the absence of the target viewed from MIRAC.

Wait. What? Where’s the star!? Krishna and Jorge scramble around their work station trying to understand what is going on. Everything was fine yesterday! Why can’t we see our target tonight?? After two days of alignment, they are confused as to why this is happening.
Minutes pass by. *scramble scramble*
No star. *clickity clack*
Still no star. *brrrrrr… pop, pop!*
Popcorn is done!

In the heat of the moment, Krishna an ASU grad student (who is also looking to buy a car – check previous blog) fuels themselves with popcorn, hoping the sustenance will give them comfort in troubling times as well as the power to solve the issue. Everyone else joins in, munching on popcorn, as a call is made to MIRAC P.I. Jarron. The unnamed grad student’s popcorn munching intensifies. Right as Manny and the MIRAC team are about to head up to the chamber to delve into the instrument, a beautiful, amoeba-like blob appears on the MIRAC viewer. A star! During the stress-eating frenzy, we moved to a new target, made various telescope movements, fixed coma between the primary and secondary, and adjusted voltages on the MIRAC chopper. The combination of those actions allowed us to see our target on MIRAC as we desired.

The aftermath.

While we waited for Amali to get CACAO running, a few of us decided we wanted a break from staring at the sky on a screen so that we could instead stare at the sky with our own eyes. Conveniently, the Geminid meteor shower was happening tonight, and we were in the perfect place to view it. To my surprise, the meteors looked significantly brighter and closer to us than when viewing from Tucson. I stood out there for 20 minutes, attempting to get a picture of a shooting star for the blog (I am always thinking of you). I had hoped to capture a picture of a shooting star coming out from Orion and heading towards the telescope dome, as if Orion himself was shooting it. It got cold, and my arms were sore from holding my phone up in the sky, so I gave up and went inside. I shall leave you with a sky cam image instead.

Geminid meteor (circled in red) seen from the MMT sky cam.

We go back inside to continue working, still feeling the energizing effects of the popcorn that fueled us. Throughout the wee hours of the night, Amali works towards closing the loop on 50 modes. As expected, she is able to successfully do this, thus confirming we are back on track to continue where we left off in August! (For those of you who didn’t know, pushing the ASM to 100 modes during the August run resulted in the loss of 24 magnets. To keep things short, software issues lead to magnet detaching issues.) Four months of hard work pays off! Despite the seeing going between 1.5 and 2.2 arcsecs, Amali continues working. We even verified that CHAI responds appropriately to overheating actuators by going into ESTOP – we have learned this is a crucial part to not losing 24 magnets. Meanwhile, Krishna spends the entire last half of the night coding away, developing a script to find centroids of hot pixels. That popcorn really does work. Thank you, Manny!

MIRAC PSF of 50 modes.
Closed loop → open loop → closed loop
Krishna’s plot showing a MIRAC image and its corresponding PSF. The image is in L-band with the AO loop closed on 50 modes. The FWHM of the PSF is 0.13″ which is also the proposed slit width for the soon to be commissioned ARIES spectrograph!

The song of the night is “Popcorn” by The Muppets.

MAPS Dec. 2024B Night 2: Windy Boogaloo

We started the night with a group photo featuring the stars of the show: the 6.5-meter primary and our beloved ASM watching over us from directly above our heads. It’s a good thing Ruby, Dan and the MMT day-crew gang ensured its secure installation.

Courtesy of TO Ben Kunk. Peep Amali in her muppet coat! She’s just too cool for French fashion school.
(no muppets were harmed in the making of this fashion statement… that we know of)

Bonus photo! Obligatory mirror selfie with the ASM, courtesy of Krishna. In retrospect, we raised our hands in victory too early, we didn’t yet know how the night would go.

Amali and I are present as evidenced by the extra hands in the back, Krishna and Jorge are just really tall

We headed down to get work started and within the hour Grant, Oli and Maggie had aligned the dichroic. Amali’s judicious eye achieved us decent enough pupils that we could start looking for the culprit actuators keeping us from amazing pupils. Good progress so far!

But if there’s one thing I’ve learned on my handful of MAPS observing runs, it’s that the time equivalent of at least one night will be forced from our hands by adverse weather. This was to be our windy night, so around 7:30–a little over an hour after opening–we closed the telescope.

While we held out hope for the winds to wind down, Maggy, Oli and Grant kept us company. Manny found a floor heating pad to fight off the cold reaching up through the ground. Much to our dismay, however, a mouse had eaten through part of the power cable and after 7 glorious seconds of foot warming, the pad sparked and gave out. Thankfully, our boss was uninjured, our only misfortune being that our toes were none the warmer. Such is the price of commissioning magical mirrors.

Around 11 PM, Oli, Grant and Maggie called it a night and headed down the mountain. They made it back to Tucson safe, a testimony to our team’s spirit raging against the wind.

As we waged a war of attrition against the gusts, Amali trained Lauren and me to check how individual actuators respond to a “sweep” of current. 

Actuator 252 is not a problem child

Intermittently, Jorge kept our spirits up with Dad jokes, Manny made us popcorn, and Krishna read abstracts from the day’s arXiv feed aloud. (Yes, instead of doom-scrolling social media, Krishna scrolls through the latest astronomy and sometimes machine learning papers on the daily.)

Alas around 3 AM, the wind forecast pronounced we’d lost this battle and it was time to call it a night and head to bed.

WE INTERRUPT YOUR REGULARLY SCHEDULED PROGRAMMING TO BRING YOU THIS IMPORTANT MESSAGE: 

Krishna is looking to buy a car! If anyone is selling, any and all (legitimate and non-Craigslist-based) leads are greatly appreciated! He isn’t really picky so long as the vehicle is in good condition and runs nicely, but his top contenders are currently any model of the following makes:

  • Ducati
  • Kawasaki
  • Indian
  • Yamaha
Yes, this really exists! Totally unrelated: go watch The World’s Fastest Indian, you won’t regret it

Be present, enjoy nature

In keeping with Maggie’s blog rules, I give you a view of the MMT from the bowl dorms before heading up to the very same. Not only did this moment allow me to admire the mountain’s beauty, but it also made me wonder if the location of the bowl dorms along the winding road to the summit was determined by geography or by a thoughtful mountain road engineer who thought this vista would serve as the perfect inspiration for a night of hard work. Or, maybe some combination of the two.

It’s almost indiscernible, but the wind is starting to pick up

Song of the Day

Before Jefferson Starship (“We Built This City”, “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now”), there was Jefferson Airplane. The song of the day is Planes, by Jefferson Airplane:

MAPS Dec. 2024B Night 1: Who knew nasmyth platforms make you privileged?

Hello! I am a former MagAO-Xer cutting her teeth in the adaptive secondary world as a new member of the MAPS team. Last night, as winds hurdled through the dome, and I was crouched under the MIRAC mid-IR imager attached to the MAPS topbox (aka WFS unit), trying to see what knobs my fellow optical engineers were turning, I realized how privileged I have been in my observing experience. In contrast to MAPS, MagAO-X is fed by a tertiary mirror and mounted on a nasmyth platform next to its telescope. You are somewhat shielded from winds and there is far, FAR less crouching to adjust a filter wheel or a beamsplitter. Also, you know, the private chef thing at LCO.

Private chef or not, you can’t beat an Arizona sunset.

Despite these brief moments of discomfort, I am growing to greatly enjoy my new MAPS team! One of my favorite moments of the night was an attempt to rotate the pupil stop wheel. One of our optical engineers, Oli, was laying under the instrument fiddling with a knob that didn’t seem to be turning much of anything. We were getting live feedback from our technical manager, Manny, via radio. I asked Oli, “Do you think it’s broken?” Oli mused, “I don’t know, I am just sort of wiggling it.” Then, via radio, Manny exclaims “Stop! That’s it!”. If that doesn’t sum up the experience of optical alignment, nothing does.

We started the night by trying to get light onto the MIRAC detector. This involved reinstalling a dichroic in the topbox to feed our WFS and see if our source was centered on the dichroic, as light passes through it to feed BLINC which feeds MIRAC. This whole process involved a variety of sources which included some very bright stars, the moon, and everyone’s favorite giant planet – Jupiter!

Left: Light on MIRAC! Right: An excited group of AO operators and engineers (trust me they were happy about it)

Next, we tried to center the rotation of MIRAC – ie determine whether or not it is being fed by on or off-axis beam. If the star moves in an arc across the detector, it is being fed by an off-axis beam which we can correct with the ASM’s tilt. If the star stays stationary during the rotation, MIRAC is being fed by an on-axis beam and we are golden.

We were able to successfully center the rotation. Photo cred: Amali

Our next step of the night was to align the dichroic to the WFS so we could actually begin playing with the ASM and start working through Amali’s extensive wish list of technical tests. Unfortunately, we got clouded out and had to close. That didn’t stop the team from using our brain power though. Visiting observers from ASU, Krishna and Jorge, entertained us with geographical quizzes where we got to guess the capitals of each state and the locations of states within India. Guess which one we were better at!

Jorge trying his hand at placing the states within India. I’ll say he had moderate success.

Here are some other cool shots I took throughout the night:

ASM
Night view of Mt. Wrightson

Blog Rules

As the initial blogger of the run, that means I get to set some ground rules. I’ll keep it simple. Song of the Day required, and you must included a pretty shot of the mountains around you so we can be sure everyone is appreciating the beauty of this place.

Song of the Day

Messing with BLINC, which includes a set of relay optics to feed MIRAC, kept making me think of that line “play that Blink-182 song that we beat to death in Tucson, okay”.

MagAO-X 2024B Day 22: All you can fly

The Europeans

Once upon a time, not so long ago…

“Well, it can’t get worse than this!”

Elena Tonucci on the length of her journey, Santiago de Chile, 23rd November 2024

“I never lost my luggage!”

Sebastiaan Haffert, Santiago de Chile, 23rd November 2024

Yes, dear friends, these are real statements that our heroes have pronounced at the beginning of their journey back home, and I am sure you already know what happened next.

Sebastiaan and I started off our journey in the best way: We managed to get into the LATAM lounge in Santiago, chill and recharge with free food and drinks, and later reached Bogota without any troubles. Maybe this is why we were brave enough to pronounce those words. In the end, we were half way there and full of optimism.

The flight from Bogota to Madrid got delayed by about 2 hours and a half, to make us land exactly when our final connection to Amsterdam took off. But, hey, at least we had extra leg space during our flights.

At least we got each other, and that’s a lot. Ah, no, actually… At first, it seemed that the very smart LATAM system had already rebooked me to a new direct flight to Amsterdam at 20:30, operated by KLM. Great! I just needed to collect my luggage. Sebastiaan however was not that lucky, and there were no flights left for Amsterdam before the end of the day. We waited for news for a while, until he got two flights, with a stop in Milano Linate. Mamma mia! As the great PhD student I am, I offered to switch and let him have my direct flight. However, as the great supervisor he is, he refused and said (I quote) “You live for the fight when that’s all that you’ve got”. Okay, he didn’t say that but that would have been pretty cool, right?

This is how we parted ways with the promise to see each other the next day at the workshop we had to attend in Leiden. Sure….. When I got to the KLM desk to get my boarding pass, they weirdly could not find me in the system. Strange! The very very smart LATAM system had rebooked me to a new flight, what could have gone wrong??? Spot the mistake in the picture below.

At least, I was determined to find my luggage (I forgot to mention I had lost it in the meantime). In theory, Sebastiaan’s luggage was flying together with him to Milano and then to Amsterdam. Sure….. Fortunately, after going back and forth two times between terminal 4 and 2 of hell emmm I meant Madrid airport (if you want to remember the layout, go to Day 0) I finally managed to find my lost luggage!

Since I sadly couldn’t time travel back to the 24th of September to catch my flight nor wait for the 24th of September of 2025 or any other year after that, LATAM decided to pay for my food and accommodation in a luxurious hotel in Madrid. So sweet of them!

In the meantime, Sebastiaan got safely to Amsterdam and could make it to the workshop, but without his luggage. As of me, I slept (very bad) and finally got to Amsterdam on lunch time the day after. This is why our quotes at the beginning of this post are so ironic, but this is also how Sebastiaan became…

The New York traveler

Joseph, the lonely and brave New York traveler, had instead a lot of time ahead of him. After saying goodbye to the mountains, he started his journey and witnessed many interesting things. For example, a middle aged lady taking off at a right angle to the line and climbing through all the barriers. The immigration queue is an amazing place. At least he was alone and could just judge people internally while listening to the Cowboy Bebop OST to keep his spirits up. Then I think he literally kept his spirit up with some – maybe too much? – pisco. We gotta hold on to what we’ve got, you know? What matters is that, more or less at my same time, he landed in New York, but he left one day later than me. Great job Joseph.

Laird and Jialin

Sorry I couldn’t come up with a fancy title here, I am pretty lame. Laird was very disappointed at the start of his journey in La Serena: LATAM refused to give him the boarding pass for Atlanta and check his bags any further than Santiago. Not to mention passport control had a queue of over 2 hours!! Fortunately, Jialin and Laird had a layover of six hours, which was barely enough to get on the flight to Atlanta… But you know what?? They left the mountain one day after Sebastiaan and I and still managed to get home before us. It’s tough, so tough.

The last of us

After some final fun games, vizzy spotting, and sunset (with apparently the best green flash ever seen by human eyes) the last of us started their journey back to a different desert: Tucson. Stay tuned for the next blog post to hear about their journey!!

Song of the day

Although after three days of travel I could add multiple songs really, I will stick to the most important one, because during this trip we were really living on a prayer. See you next time, that’s all from Elena, folks! 😉

Livin’ On A Prayer – Bon Jovi

MagAO-X 2024B Day 21: The kids are alright

Did you know it’s voting day in Chile? A whole national holiday, everyone off the mountain to go participate in government. (Well not viscachas. But all the human crew.) Really! They brought the turno bus up on the weekend, instead of a typical Tuesday. The summit was going to be mine, a little staycation, some peace and quiet, boundless bouncing, etc.

But those kids… there they were. Here when no one else was. Cawing to my colleague Carlos. Scarfing down cold empanadas like it was 12 midnight instead of 12 noon. Napping on public couches. Rolling on public pool tables. Crawling around the boulders. Cracking open stones. Performing impressionistic rock percussion (hearing bells chime). Staring off to the vistas.

Now I’m a humble viscacha. I have my perch, and I stick to it. I huddle close to the eves in the mornings, and I sun bathe in the evenings. It’s demanding, standing watch over the cleanroom. I don’t mind. What better place to keep an eye on things?

Want to know what I notice? That every few seasons there are these astronomers that just don’t quit. They’re here week after week, even when the turno changes. Even when they think, or even mutter to themselves “I know I got to get away.” So of course these were the astronomers to upend a quiet weekend.

I’m a Vizzy who minds his business. But even I noticed a regular wasn’t here this time. Not that I was prying, but there were a lot more questions and running around this time. Like “are you sure that’s where that cable goes?” and “wait did we remember to grab the nitrogen tank?” and “what do you mean it’s not in the handbook?” and “dos? Dos? Dos mas??” Not that I’d get involved, but seemed a lot like a tricycle operation learning to be a bike. Whole new levels of confidence and skill to get things off the ground.

But they did it. Just in case anyone needed some kind of, oh I don’t know, summary or conclusive account. From someone in a senior position.

Those kids worked themselves and their telescope to the bone. Who else would let so much morning light into Clay’s dome? Who else would have a TO shuttle up 20ish pounds of empanadas? What other crew would attempt to commission a half dozen new technologies in just two weeks? What other team could get so many of them to be success?

(Please see: documentation of dawn observing submitted to evidence.)

I think this means something. Like they’ve grown up. Or that shiny box they keep shuttling around has passed some sort of say, bus test.

After weeks of this nonsense, seems like they’ve finally packed up. The AO kids have been trickling out for the last few days. I know if [they] don’t, [they]’ll go out of [their] mind. I got some good byes, some good last chats. This final crew? I think they got a good last sunset too. The whole package, green flash and all.

So. The kids are alright. Old kids and new kids (and new new kids). And kids who didn’t make it this time. I know them all pretty well. I’ll look forward to seeing big smiles next time they see me. Which will probably be in what, three months, four? They just can’t stay away.

Song of the Day

The Kids Are Alright by The Who