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This evening Dr. Matías Díaz, a support astronomer here at Las Campanas Observatory, helped us take a next-level team photo.

Of course, we have more people in our group than pictured, and by the time we visit again in 2024A (!) we’ll probably have even more new members. By then I will have decamped for the Flatiron Center for Computational Astrophysics in New York, but it’s famously hard to see stars there. Maybe they’ll invite me back.

It’s our last night on sky, which is always bittersweet. Tomorrow’s a long day of removing from the telescope. So, what have we got to show for the past 22 days?

• 14 terabytes of high-contrast astronomical data (and counting)
• a new observing mode that keeps light where it should be, allowing us to pass these savings on to the consumer (shout-out to Ms. Lowfs)
• a handle on our induced DM ✨sparkles✨, which will let us unravel the profound mysteries of pyramids (thanks Eden McSparkles)
• a lot of improvements to VIS-X (gaan met de banaan, Dr. Haffert)
• one new extreme-AO-fed instrument (shout-out to Noah & the Ex-Kids, opening for Weezer on tour this summer)

We’re about to commission our knife-edge coronagraph, but this blog post can’t wait. It’s time for the prospective students to choose their Ph.D. institutions, and we must put our best foot (feet?) forward.

Song of the Day

I went to a liberal arts college, which makes some people assume I didn’t study physics or something. In fact, astronomy is one of the quadrivium of artes liberales, and my college had a Department of Mathematics and Astronomy before it had a physics one. It’s physics now, though. So there.

Still, a smaller student body and more flexibility in courses of study meant some interesting cross-pollination between departments. One of my classmates in Advanced Intro Astronomy was named Maurissa, and she was actually a music major. She took astronomy with us, but she also had a band, did stuff with electronics, and was in a Balinese gamelan ensemble. Anyway, she was the one who introduced me to Brian Jonestown Massacre, the above psych-rock band with good vibes.

Bonus Song of the Evening

Sometimes you don’t need something musically interesting, and swoopy synths suffice. Anyway, the blog title reminded me, and after all—we are almost home.

Whelp, it’s getting to be that time. The sun is rising as I type, and it’s officially the 16th. Tonight is our last night on the Clay for 2023A, and tomorrow morning we tear it all apart, box it up, and GTFO.

Another night of awesome seeing let us all catch up on some coding and analysis.

The conclusion of my concert story, which started with the surprise KoRn and went though an awful Marilyn Manson performance, is the band we actually went to see: Danzig. It was every bit as good as one could hope. We were right in front for the whole show. At one point Glenn Danzig reached out and clasped Ben’s hand – legendary. Here is Danzig’s iconic “Mother”:

Recently, a tragic event occurred on the mountain and I am here to tell the tale of the “Empocalypse.” It all began with a hungry astronomer who walked into the kitchen, ready to heat up the favorite meal of the crowd… Upon opening up the fridge that was supposed to be filled with a mound of carefully wrapped empanadas, the astronomer discovered a fridge devoid of empanadas. As the news went around the telescope, the cries of the grieving observers filled the rooms. The empanadas are one of the few things that hold value within the MagAO-X group while we are at LCO, and their sudden disappearance almost started a riot. The dissatisfaction has been reported to telescope officials and hopefully, it will be taken seriously. On the brighter side of things, since the calamity, the snack selection has increased, one of which being a miniature version of the hangry astronomer’s favorite.

On the contrary, we have been treated well on the science side, some might even say spoiled. The seeing read by Dimm dropped below 0.3″, which is a rare occurrence. The TO even called his buddy over to witness such an event. Just when we thought the night would continue to have spectacular seeing and a smooth sail, the seeing doubled by midnight. However, great spectral data were still taken with VIS-X.

Per the title of the blog post, I feel obligated to continue to share other moments of this run that embodies similar energy. Well, truth be told, I am feeling like an ExAO, thus, I am writing a blog post full of content that is deserving of some love and attention (according to me, BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!)

We have our second special visitor in the telescope. This bird scared me more than the occasional “Chicken Nugget.” In addition to almost giving me a heart attack, it brought a special gift of bird dropping. It was our unsung hero, Jay, who cleaned up after the surprise visitor.

As we are nearing the end of this observing run, it would not be proper to think the kids can still be considered “normal.” Ok, maybe I should only speak for myself, but I do have some evidence of abnormal behaviors.

Regular Animal Spotting

Song of the Day

During my last visit here in December, my music app of choice sent me a recap of my 2022 music journey. My top album was “Bad Mode” by Japanese Artist Hikaru Utada and its title track is my chosen song of the day. I first discovered them a decade ago through my older cousin’s iPod playlist, and ever since, their songs have been on my playlist. As they have risen to fame and become less active way before I was a fan, I have not been able to catch their live performance. It is, however, on my bucket list to be at their live performance at least once.

There are a few hiccups to expect on a night-to-night basis, but in general at this point we’re pretty fine-tuned to the MagAO-X workflow. This means there has been more opportunities to enjoy the finer details of #LifeatLCO before and after our shifts. From going viscacha family spotting on the rocky ridge next to the Magellan telescopes…

…to taking neat synthwave/outrun inspired photos at sunset and twilight. Being my first time here at LCO, it’s a pleasant surprise that this place isn’t *just* a bunch of old telescopes in an extremely arid desert. Actually, not only are the accommodations really nice but the food is also pretty memorable too. If you missed it, check out Eden’s food blog post here. But apart from the nice rooms and good food, I’m happy to see some thought put into various amenities to make life here a lot more bearable.

For instance, there’s plenty of space to exercise and even a well-equipped gym near our rooms to help offset the sedentary nature of astronomizing. I also probably speak for the students among us still taking demanding optics and astro classes when I say that the lodge and astronomer support buildings have super nice libraries and areas to study/read/work.

But back to the telescopes! We were all sad to say our farewells tonight to Dr. Alycia Weinberger (it was nice to finally meet you in person, btw!) because she, in addition to bringing us many tasty snacks, brought a great aura to the control room and we all enjoyed hearing about her colorful experiences over the years here at LCO. She also graciously brought the interested among us to tour the Irénée du Pont and Swope telescope installations. Jialin, Noah and I were captivated by the rich history contained within these buildings and got to see some seriously cool old school machines, astro almanacs, and photographic plates. Thanks again, Alycia!

Of course, nothing beats the Magellan telescopes in terms of splendor but it was still really cool to see how smaller, older telescopes still contribute significantly to science. One evening, seeing estimates from the DIMM and our sister telescope the Baade varied significantly which prompted the idea to go straight to the Baade telescope control system and look for ourselves to see if the online reports were accurate. It then dawned on me and Eden was that we had never seen what is was like in our sister telescope…! So, utilizing the cover of night, we executed a bit of a spy mission to see if the grass was greener or not. Dude, they have a full size fridge, bookshelves filled with actual books, and their living room is way cozier with barely-used furniture, what’s up with that?

I also can’t ignore the times when we have the opportunity to take a break and let MagAO-X do all the heavy lifting for a bit. Although this may come off as us being lazy, rest assured it’s a sign that things are going incredibly well for science.

Song of the Day

Back when I was just a crouton in a wide-open baguette world, I went for glory cooking professionally for a few years before deciding to go back to college and pursue a more technical career. Back then, one summerly tradition was to go with a large group of Arizona chefs to cook for a 3-week long event at a resort deep in the NorCal redwoods for members of the infamous and secretive Bohemian Grove. We Arizonan chefs went to chase those California wages and sweet overtime pay (…aaaand that juicy double-overtime pay for the inevitable 12+ hour days) so in a way, our long hours of observing and the remoteness here at LCO reminds me of my Grove days. Every year, we joined a literal army of chefs in a huge kitchen cooking daily, near Michelin Star quality breakfast and dinner for about 2000 members. This sounds grueling, but actually looking back I really only remember the fun times of the 7 years I returned as a chef at the Grove. (Ehhh, for the most part, at least… well, there *was* a particularly bad year with a couple of very, very catastrophic mishaps concerning 200 pounds of beets and 15 gallons of garden pea coulis that I’m convinced gave me PTSD for a couple of months afterwards, and I to this day STILL get occasional nightmares about this, but we’ll save that for another blog post.)

The song of the day has special meaning to me and my good friend Big Mike. One tradition at the Grove is an employee-only talent show held during the last weekend of the event. Historically, it was ALWAYS a server, or bartender, or valet driver or something who won every year; never any kitchen staff. I guess it was natural that chefs never competed, because we were always exhausted and generally always had too much to do to really find the time to rehearse. But one year Big Mike and I set out to with a plan to finally change that. That morning, I remember bringing my guitar with me to the kitchen and safely stashing it in the dry storage area upstairs during breakfast service. Then, during the small afternoon lull before dinner service where everyone was either putting the final touches on that night’s dinner prep or prepping for next day’s breakfast, we snuck out of the kitchen and went to a quiet corner of the redwood-shaded outdoor dining circle, acoustic guitar and hastily drawn-up lyrics in hand, and did a cold rehearsal for no more than 30 minutes still in our chef whites and aprons. I don’t remember much between practicing and actually performing our skit being that this was back in 2014, but I’ll never forget the assistant general manager on the mic during the employee dinner announcing the winners of that years talent show to hundreds: “And the winners for this years talent show… for the first time in Bohemian Grove history…. are from the kitchen!”

So the song of the day is House of the Rising Sun by The Animals, because this is the song we had performed (in this style) almost impromptu in front of the entire Grove workforce and somehow did it well enough to win the talent show that year. It wasn’t the original lyrics though, we had modified lyrics to describe that year’s experience of being a couple of sleep-deprived cooks surviving in that insane kitchen. I think it actually came out pretty funny, which probably helped our performance out a whole lot. I’m sure those lyrics are still in one of Big Mike’s old notebooks, I really should find the time to ask him to find those pages again when we return back home.

MagAO-X threw a bit of a tantrum today, but Jared got it calmed down before sunset. Ever since Eden gave it a swift zapatazo, the operator workstation has been moody and fractious. Compounding our difficulties, one of the rack computers was on the fritz at the same time.

Jared says that in the world of Navy nuclear power, you don’t conduct drills for two simultaneous faults. That means what happened today is simply not allowed in the Navy, which should reassure us all. (I have informed our instrument computers that we will be adopting this same policy going forward.)

Tonight Alycia Weinberger, the forever young Las Campanas Frequent Flyer, is obtaining more disk imagery. Conditions have been passable, though I hear past midnight things started getting good. Stay tuned.

At this point even the newest graduate students have become adept at driving the AO system. Still, they mustn’t get complacent, because we continue to add more complexity in order that more things may go right.

For example, I am hiding in the rec room trying to refactor Lookyloo, the “quicklook” script that has grown additional responsibilities. Not coincidentally, I’m going through my headache meds faster than the chocolate-covered espresso beans. (Does anyone know what Excedrin is sold as in Chile?)

The goal is to bundle up the relevant image archives and system telemetry files that encompass an ‘observation’ and stuff them into a single unit for uploading to the CyVerse Data Store back in North America. CyVerse operates scientific computing infrastructure in connection with the University of Arizona, meaning we have a hotline to their head honcho for our data hoarding. The idea here is that our highly compressed data formats will use the limited bandwidth between continents more efficiently, allowing us to “rehydrate” the observations into more conventional formats upon demand.

Fortunately, CyVerse has no relation to Facebook’s Metaverse, and we will not be issuing NFTs of our observations. (For archive-browsing readers of the future: NFTs were a bubble/pump-and-dump scam of the early 2020s, with JPEGs taking the role of tulips.)

In further news from the software side, we ran our first all-Python MagAO-X device last night! My PurePyINDI2 library successfully allowed us to command Sebastiaan’s VIS-X camera from the same interfaces we use for scripting and interacting with the rest of MagAO-X.

Of course, that doesn’t look like anything, so here is a picture of a guanaco:

Technically, it was our second PurePyINDI2 device, as Maggie-o-X had already been taunting the observers through Jared’s add-on speaker for the operator workstation. Its repertoire includes:

• “Beep boop bop” when activating Low Order Wavefront Sensing, with or without Ms. Lowfs in attendance.
• “Gaan met die banaan” when taking exposures with VIS-X, our most Dutch camera.
• “P.I. is asleep. I am the P.I. now.” (among other choices) when nothing alert-worthy happens for 15 minutes.

It alerts on more useful criteria, as well, like changing targets and AO loop events. But those messages are strictly business.

Being out of the critical path for operations tonight means I have taken the chance to do some (lower-tech) astrophotography. It turns out that the image processing on an iPhone can wring detail out of moonless nights, as long as you have a tripod and some patience.

I have speculated that “computational photography” boffins will eventually forward-model the whole sky and paint the stars in after the fact. Recently, it was revealed that Samsung has taken this conspiracy theory as a product suggestion for their latest phones.

Once our image processing is allowed to make up details that aren’t there, I predict we’re going to find loads of planets.

Song of the Day

There were never any ‘good old days’. They are today, they are tomorrow! It’s a stupid thing we say, cursing tomorrow with sorrow.

The world’s foremost Gypsy Punks were also my first ever show as a wee teenager in Atlanta, Georgia. I didn’t know much about live music, but a Ukrainian dude capering around the stage and emptying a bottle of red wine on the pit seemed pretty punk rock to me.

Lead singer Eugene Hütz also had a starring role as Alex in the movie adaptation of Everything is Illuminated. They even worked the band in in this one scene: