Blog

MAPS/MIRAC Mar. 2024A Night 3: Closed loop calibrations

A much better night!

Sunset from the Bowl

So we were joined by our CACAO friends in Chile and Hawaii to take AO calibrations:

But we learned the camera lens loop was still a hold up so we spent a good long while trying to get it working as well:

The song of the night is the sound of a mouse being trapped (in a live trap) in the kitchen. The sample track is the sound of Rory when he discovered said mouse in the sink (yesterday).

MagAO-X 2024Aa Day 9: Another Day, Another Disk

Now’s about the time of the run where the nightly routine just starts to become second nature; eyes are less bloodshot and twilight is here before you know it. We’ll start this post off with some sunset glamour shots…

Today we were all a bit sad to bid farewell to Katie and Maggie who are off to La Serena to rehydrate and relax at the beach. However, we gained a Logan who was eager to join the festivities and contribute her science.

Bye Maggie and Katie… hello and welcome Logan!
Logan confirms that traveling up the mountain is never a dull time — even the traffic is cool.

Tonight’s program featured Logan for most of the night and she definitely #nailedit, finding an impressive amount of white dwarf companions in a very short timespan. There’s probably more to come, as she still has yet to reduce her data and uncover what faint objects could be hiding in the bright halo of the host star. I think it’s safe to say that if finding binaries were a crime, she’d be on death row…!

While Logan was winning, the rest of us got to work on doing some networking and installing a bunch of fancy software to be able to control MagAO-X from our own computers. After a bit of labor, I successfully got my laptop connected and was encouraged to parade the fruits of my labor to the others to raise morale. This is needed because it’ll just make our nightly operations more efficient since anyone can contribute to an instrument procedure or data collection without needing to displace anyone in the control room.

The conditions tonight, especially in the later half, were a real treat and encouraged some challenging observations of circumstellar disk HD 145560 (for Dr. Alycia Weinberger at Carnegie) that we would have otherwise not been able to effectively observe. The only way to know if these observations were successful is to perform the full data reduction (coming soon), but we all have a really good feeling about this one!

Taking full advantage of the excellent seeing, we stayed on this target as close to sunrise as possible which presented some interesting photo opportunities.

I guess the morning sun was *just* beginning to perfectly glow through the louvers of the Baade telescope or something.

Song of the Day

MAPS/MIRAC Mar. 2024A Night 2: Tunisian crochet

Tonight started cloudy and even with a little precipitation! (Which we just can’t bring ourselves to actually complain about, being children of the drought-stricket desert southwest.)

Image description: A closed telescope dome in front of thick clouds on a rocky mountain peak, with snow amongst the rocks and fluffy-looking pine trees in the foreground.
Image decription: Same closed telescope dome from a different angle, with thick clouds in the sky, and the red light of dusk making the mountain ridge redden as well.

So it was time to learn some Tunisian crochet, courtesy of a book authored by MAPS and CAAO colleague Lori Harrison: Exploring Tunisian Crochet: All the Basics Plus Stitches and Techniques to Take Your Crochet to the Next Level; 20 Beautiful Wraps, Scarves, and More.

While we were clouded out, I called in to the MagAO-X run to eavesdrop for a little while on the MagAO-X AO GUIs:

Finally the clouds cleared up around 11pm and we went on sky! Only to have trouble finding our stars. We even pointed at the moon (which is 31 arcmin in diameter) and we could find that! But we tried to focus on the limb and just weren’t able to get the adjustments we needed to sharpen it up. This was all most likely due to the primary mirror cell throwing an error with a garbled measurement that was causing an unknown piston and tip/tilt that we just weren’t able to take out with pointing the mount and focusing the hexapod. We do wish our cameras had a larger field of view to help with finding stars when there’s a trouble issue like this, but ultimately it seemed we didn’t even have the range to take it out.

Meanwhile MIRAC was still working on adjusting its pupil alignment, which was actually a fine thing to do when all you can see is the sky (but no stars). This time Manny and Rory went up and turned one of the screws on the bellows, with little effect. We also tried rotating the instrument rotator, and were gratified to see it did indeed rotate the one bright spider we could see, but still did not help to center the telescope pupil with the MIRAC pupil. Ultimately we had to call it a night around 2am.

The song of the night is the sound of water dripping from the trees.

MagAO-X 2024Aa Day 8: Pigs in a Duvet

Well, that went fast. Maggie and I are the first team members of the run to embark on the long journey down the mountain and trade the Atacama back for the Sonoran desert. But, before then, we had one last night to make the most of our time here at LCO.

After some daytime calibrations (and some very interesting hot dog-based pastries at dinner), we headed up the mountain for a full night of observing. Per tradition, we officially kicked things off with a sunset photo:

Do not ask where Eden's left hand went.
Isn’t Clay just so pretty?
Don't worry, her left hand is intact in this photo
Clouds? in MY Atacama Desert? It’s more likely than you think.

Now, don’t get me wrong: the clouds put on a gorgeous show for sunset, but they are not generally harbingers of good astronomy. Nevertheless, we were determined to get as much good science done as we possibly could, and we were pleasantly surprised; clouds passed, and we saw seeing hold steady below 0.5 (and even dip below 0.4) arcseconds for a good portion of the second half of the night.

Maggie, Laird, and Sebastiaan started things off with our dear friend the HDFS, performing some of the first phasing tests on-sky:

Unfortunately, the timing worked out so that Maggie and I will be coming down the mountain at the same time that Logan comes up, so we won’t get the chance to have the whole team here at the same time. Tonight Logan joined via Zoom to observe some of her targets, with a white dwarf companion making a very exciting appearance:

As the night went on, Laird and Jialin got their turn to conduct cutting-edge science in the control room. What was going on in the “kids room” downstairs, you might ask? Only the most important of shenanigans:

This much science is exhausting for anyone, especially the PI of the project. Unfortunately for Jared, MaggieO-X saw the opportunity to usurp and seized it:

You heard her. She’s the PI now.

I’m about to follow the PI’s example and try and catch some sleep before Maggie and I head down. But, before I go, I’d like to share a bit of personal news in honor of my last night at LCO:

Soon my excuse of "but I'm just an undergrad" will be a distant memory

And to go with it, the song of the day:

Graduate – Third Eye Blind

MagAO-X 2024Aa Day 7: Anti-Lunch Lunch Club

Hard to believe I’m back here! I was so convinced 2023A would be my last trip to Chile with the MagAO-X team that I tried to do all my tourist stuff in one go last year. In the past year, I’ve defended my dissertation, moved across the country, and begun a fellowship at the Center for Computational Astrophysics of the Flatiron Institute, a division of the Simons Foundation. (That is officially how we are supposed to refer to it, officially. Unofficially, it’s just “CCA.”)

Today’s lesson is that sometimes you try your best to sleep all day and just can’t manage it, even if you exhausted yourself working the longest day. Those of us with this problem were today’s accidental day crew: myself, Sebastiaan, Maggie, and Eden. We got up for lunch and did some daytime engineering on MagAO-X.

An HDFS introduced in the first act must go on-sky by the fifth.

Maggie and Sebastiaan prepared to test the Holographic Dispersed Fringe Sensor (patent pending?) on-sky, shoring up its credibility for inclusion in the Giant Magellan Telescope project’s plans. I helped Eden get started with fixr, my Python library to read the format for our images that have been extremely reordered. I did some work on packaging fixr as well as getting various guest observer software creature comforts working consistently once again.

We all met up at dinner (save Jialin, who had to attend a class online). Tuesday is turno day, where the crew that’s been working since last Tuesday gets replaced by all new staff fresh from their week off-duty. While I will miss Sr. Verdugo’s desserts, this turno‘s cooks are breaking new ground in LCO salad bar operations. Imagine, sliced strawberries in a salad! I’ve never seen the like here before.

Josh Liberman regaled us with tales of the risks of excess cheese and the good sense of always traveling with Strunk & White’s elements of style. Katie always carries nail clippers instead. (I’m not sure why either of those were needed at dinner, but it’s certainly preferable to be well-spoken and well-groomed than the opposite.)

Stylish.

Meanwhile, down at El Pino, Logan Pearce was enjoying the local wildlife and natural environment.

The viscachas look different in La Serena
Wait for the green flash

Today also saw the arrival of Jialin Li, who arrived on the mountain after a one-day delay not unlike my own. (Did you know LATAM has a ninety minute cutoff for accepting checked bags? Well, I do now.)

Jialin is not only Laird Close’s graduate student but is also a heuristic interactive algorithm for observer time scheduling. Each astronomer has certain targets, which rise and set at certain times, and a certain number of nights (or fractional nights) allocated by their institution. Balancing these constraints is hard, possibly even NP-hard. Unfortunately, Jialin was incommunicado in transit yesterday, and the schedule was pulled in all directions in her absence. Sebastiaan began compiling constraints based on when people would be ready for various engineering tasks, when they’d be arriving onsite, when they’d be leaving, and whatnot.

So, when she arrived, the schedule was still very much in flux. The control room at dusk was alive with furious multitasking. At one point Logan Pearce called in from the hotel in La Serena (where she is recuperating) to try and understand the scheduling spreadsheet, which was live updating rapidly before her very eyes. After much hemming and hawing and proverbial horse-trading, an acceptable schedule solution was reached—just as the sun set.

Figure 1: Ph.D. advisor elated that his student (center) survived her travel odyssey

For tonight’s scheduled performance, the role of Dr. Alycia Weinberger was played by the understudy, Jay Kueny. Jay acquired more data of some of Alycia’s favorite debris disk targets. MagAO-X can image shorter wavelengths than MagAO+Clio could, and produces better images than MagAO+VisAO did. This means the residual light from the star doesn’t spread out as far, making it easier to detect and characterize the parts of the disk closest to the star in our images.

The bad seeing conditions we had initially mellowed out to more typical 0.5–0.6” seeing after the sun had been down for a little while, and we got some good data on HD 61005 for Alycia. Alas, it could not last. Clouds began to gather on the horizon, and the wind picked up something fierce. The telescope can’t operate in high winds, so this kiboshed a lot of our plans for the evening.

You can see what happened on the plot below, most easily recognized by the big chunk of missing seeing data. Winds got above 35 mph average, which meant we had to shut down. Since there’s never any shortage of things to do, and MagAO-X has an internal “telescope simulator” source, we attempted to make the most of this time for engineering.

!!!!

While Jared continued polishing MagAO-X Halpha performance with internal calibrations, a few of us retired to the break room to audition songs for Song of the Day. There were a few rejected choices (too sad, too raunchy, contains swears, etc.) but I think I picked a good one.

Around 4:58, Sebastiaan popped his head outside and reported seeing “a ton of stars” so we all traipsed back upstairs bright-eyed and bushy-tailed… only to hear Jared say “don’t get excited.” Although a ton of stars were visible, the humidity was climbing fast, and threatening clouds were gathering in the North.

We all got less excited. As we got close to sunrise, humidity plateaued and the average wind speed stayed low long enough that our telescope operator (the incomparable Alberto Pastén) decided it was safe to reopen. At this point, science was off the menu: not only was engineering scheduled for the end of the night, but the conditions were too bad for any but the brightest targets anyhow.

The Chekhov’s HDFS introduced in the beginning of the blog post must go off by the end, so Sebastiaan quickly slotted it in to take some data under realistic 90th-percentile conditions. It was tough to keep things stable, and the dispersed fringes occasionally disappeared entirely, but we took some data of a double star and got to see all the fringes doubled. That’ll be fun to disentangle.

it’s like a dandelion!

After we finished, Sebastiaan and I stayed up for breakfast and were rewarded with this view of the valley filled with clouds trapped in the inversion.

Today’s song of the day expresses a desire for a counterfactual reality in which the clouds are absent and the seeing is always below half an arcsecond. I think that’s what they were singing about, anyway.

Song of the Day

“Say it Ain’t So” — Weezer