As a current resident of Arizona and a former resident of New Mexico, part of me must celebrate when water falls from the sky in these drought-stricken drylands or deserts. As an astroengineer and astrophysicist, it does make observing …difficult. Either way, it’s still beautiful:
Afternoon at The Ridge. [Image description: A mountain scene straight outta the SouthWest. The valley floor is covered in brown rocky foothills that look like choppy waves in the ocean. The nearby mountainside is covered in dark green foliage with a scrubby texture. The sky is filled with thick heavy dark rain clouds. Yet a beauiful orange glow peaks through a gap below the clouds and above the distant valley where a sunbeam illuminates shafts of rain falling in the distance.]A photo of the MMT today. [Image description: In the foreground are the crowns of some green and brown pine trees. In the middleground there is some sort of a brown ridgeline, kinda hazy. In the background there is white mist/fog (where the telescope dome is, but cannot be seen).]
You’ll recall yesterday we had trouble with our WFS controller. We reached out to our network of contacts for a spare part. We also began preparations to switch to our other WFS. And we even opened for around an hour tonight in a gap in the humidity and clouds! But we need more time… so we’re staying hopeful for tomorrow night.
The video of the night is “OUR LAND Episode 5: Dry Land”
What’s this, another MAPS run? Yup, the moon is almost full, and here we are again!
Unfortunately tonight we are 0 for 5 on AO engineering/commissioning productivity. Here are the 5 things:
Can we safely open the dome? No, the humidity is so high that condensation could ruin all the sensitive equipment.
Can we safely expose the ASM to the elements? No, the wind is too high, it could damage/contaminate the shell.
Can we see stars? No, there are clouds. Lots of very thick clouds.
Can we close the AO loop? No, the controller of our wavefront sensor camera detector failed.
Can we get PSFs with our science camera? No, it took longer to remove the previous instrument so longer to install ours.
Well the best night to have instrument failures is when the weather is bad anyway. We’re working on a solution. And now it’s time for bed.
No way we were opening tonight. [Image description: Photo of the observatory status screen showing humidity at 99%, winds at 40.1 mph, and a completely socked-in all-sky cam.]Part of trouble-shooting the Little Joe controller involved racking out the computer and directly connecting it to the controller, to make sure it wasn’t the extenders. Manny discovered the problem when he started examining individual boards. [Image description: Manny adjusts the cables and connectors of a computer placed below the Top Box, with cables directly connecting it to the instrument.]
Blog rules:
There must be a post every night.
There must be a “Video of the Night.” Something interesting to share. A song is allowed.
Video of the Night: “How this midcentury modern house harnesses the sun”
I suspect all of our readers will be aware that last Saturday there was an eclipse event over the US. At 9:30 am Tucson Time was the peak of the annular eclipse, an eclipse where the moon is at the furthest point on its orbit, called apogee, so the disk of the moon is a smaller angular size on the sky than the sun (where normally they are essentially the same size) so it doesn’t block the whole disk and you can’t see the corona. Instead you get a “ring of fire” caused by the moon’s antumbra on the Earth’s surface.
Tucson was not in the area of max shadow, it only got about 80% coverage. So some XWCL members traveled to regions getting the full antumbra effect.
I met up with XWCL alum Lauren Schatz and UA OpSci grad Silvana Ovaitt. When Lauren was at XWCL she was my hiking and camping buddy, so we reunited for more L&L adventures by camping in Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park!
Campsite cookin’The view from The View CampgroundHey look it’s Lauren!SunriseEclipse!Early morning after a cold camping night!
We also went on a backcountry guided tour off the public access road and led by a local named Larry
Tour timeLauren and Silvana climbed this crazy high dune!1300 year old petroglyphsApparently this was the hole they used to film Indiana Jones going down into the tomb in Raiders
This past weekend, the MagAO-X team got to take part in a historic event, the casting of the 7th and final GMT segment! The Giant Magellan Telescope is made up of 7th petal-like segments, and the Mirror Lab—a facility on the University of Arizona campus—is the only place in the world that can make them. These 8.4-meter segments have been in production for decades now, and this weekend the final one has started the 6 month journey of melting glass in the 5-rpm rotating furnace, until it cools to a room-temperature parabola. On Saturday the furnace reached its peak temperature, and from there it begins to cool. Interested parties, donors, and investors gathered to celebrate this milestone for the GMT.
On Friday and Saturday, some of the MagAO-X team helped the mirror lab staff give tours. Jialin and I have been training as tour guides for the last few months, Jared’s been doing it since his grad days, and Maggie was there as a GMagAO-X expert. First stop on the tour is the main attraction, the Furnace Room!
The GMT Segment melting in the spinning furnace.
The furnace is actually two levels, with the lower level focused on controls and system monitoring. You can see the large holder where the mirror segment will be hosed out.
Second view of the spinning furnace.Ohara glass, what goes into the furnace.
The furnace room was hot! You could feel the difference in the oven heating just between Friday and its peak on Saturday. The next room over, where mirrors are ground and polished, is noticeably cooler than the first room. It’s kept at a constant temperature so that there’s no expansion of the glass as it’s brought to nanometers of the specified shape.
Polishing a 6.5m mirror.
Past the polishing room is the integration room, where GMT mirrors are stored in between their different stages of production. One of them, covered in blue, is actually on it’s way to being stored off site! Others are upside down, as they need their actuated backs attached, and so on. This set up is affectionately called the “CD Switcher”.
CD switcher with 3 different GMT segments.A mirror almost ready to ship!
The three of us were stationed at the end of the tour in the integration room. This isn’t usually a stop on public tours, but it was opened up for the festivities. We got the honor of explaining how excited we are to do the science that the Giant Magellan telescope is built to do!
Prepping the talks and setting up the posters.
In the marching order, I was first! I introduced what MagAO-X is (an extreme AO instrument directly imaging exoplanets on the Magellan Clay telescope) and explained some of the basics of AO.
Me showing MagAO-X in action.
Next was Jialin, talking about the exciting science we get to do with MagAO-X, and the motivation for wanting to make our pretty pictures even prettier.
Jialin explaining what exactly is so cool about H-alpha acreating proto-planets.
Maggie then got to talk about the plans for GMagAO-X! Her work on HCAT, where we’ve done phasing development in lab, is a huge step forward in the feasibility of the project. She got to show the visitors what a GMT pupil would look like.
Maggie explaining the phasing problem in the next generation of ELTs
Finally, Jared got to talk about his favorite planet. Not caught in action, but by the end of his talk, everyone in the audience was thoroughly convinced of the impact that GMagAO-X will make on the exoplanets we love.
Jared prepping his slides, finding the best fake image of Prox-Cen B.
Hanging out with giant mirrors and speaking on the projects we work on was a huge honor! We hope to get to be back when they pull the mirror out of the furnace in March, and for plenty of tours in between.
The team after all the mirror lab tour madness.
Bonus Video:
The team talking about the GMT in an interview recently! This was shown to some of the guests this weekend, and will be around Steward for a while, I’m sure.
The full moon is waning and that’s a wrap on the first MAPS run of 2023B! We have 3 more runs, on the full moons in October, November, and January.
On this run we successfully closed the loop with our new software algorithms, which required taking new timing data and calibrations. We also got offloading within the loop working, and made progress on our other goals. (I made an executive decision to redo how I was numbering the nights, so careful blog readers may notice I edited the night numbers in the previous blog posts, since when I was writing our telescope proposal for next semester I realized it was overly confusing to try to keep the Arizona nights separate from the MMT nights.)
Grant crosses off our top goal for this run: offloading tip/tilt to the mount! [Image description: An astroengineer writes on a white board. On the white board are the Run Goals and the Tonight Goals — one can read a few words such as Alignment, Pisces, Mount, Hexapod, Pupil, Interaction Matrix, Close Loop.]Taking a 50-modes calibration. [Image description: GUIs and displays showing the real-time pyramid pupils, integrated/averaged pyramid pupils, ASM commands, slopes, ]
Manny made cookies!
[Image description: In the telescope control room, Robin offers a plate of cookies to the photographer. Amali and Katie strategize ASM tricks in the background.][Image description: Manny is very happy to cut open the watermelon!]
Thanks everyone — run report to come.
Song of the day: Say Hey (I Love You) by Michael Franti \& Spearhead
[Median description: High energy, joyful, rhythmic song with scenes of the people of Brazil.]
