Home of MagAO and MagAO-X.
[We love Logan but we aren’t always great at getting Blog posts out :S ]
Editor’s note: This blog post was left in “draft” status for eight months, and Logan is long since back in Tucson, but its contents are too important to leave unpublished. The management regrets this delay.
MagAO-X is up and off to the great mountain in the south! As we are approaching our next great observing run, this time in two parts: 2024Aa in March (14 nights) and 2024Ab in May (10 nights). We spent the week packing her up and buttoning her down, and today saw her stuffed into the shipping truck and waved goodbye.
Our mascot for this run is the Bubo Magellenicus, or the Lesser Horned Owl (of fluffy–butt allsky cam fame)
Please enjoy this video and pics of the week’s events.
The song of the day is Yakety Sax
Tonight we sought refuge from the snow at the Ridge and then in Tucson.
Here’s what we woke up to:
We had to clear the Bowl and Summit due to snow accumulation and possible ice. The Ridge was safe, but we also saw that we wouldn’t be opening tonight or tomorrow, and there aren’t enough rooms at the Ridge, so we decided to go down to Tucson. If the weather clears up we’ll go back up on Tuesday for our last night.
Animal of the day:
The lynx is a genus of medium-sized wild cats.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx
And here’s Lynx, a medium-sized domestic cat who likes to do astrophysics and help close the MAPS AO loop with CACAO:
We didn’t open tonight due to thick clouds. The MIRAC team took a lot of darks and dome “skies” to assess their QE and background noise. It started snowing around 2am and we left the dome around 3:30 with snow already accumulating on the ground.
Animal of the day:
The animal of the night is the Torbie cat, a combination of Tabby + Tortoiseshell
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tortoiseshell_cat
Such as seen in this snuggly bug that is helping Jared test his AO loop calibration procedures back in Tucson:
It’s a MAPS/MIRAC run! The semester is still 2023B but the year is 2024 and we are back commissioning again, this time the 10 micron Geosnap-enabled instrument MIRAC. Tonight we spent a lot of time on alignment, as we have changed pretty much everything post-telescope, from the dichroic to the detector placement! Pointing and centering with non-linear tri-axial mounts on a cold night in the dome made us really appreciate the bright wintry touches:
Here are some neat alignment tricks: And don’t forget the pupil imager lens!
After alignment, we got some closed loop calibrations and have also been training new AO operators!
Blog Rules for the Jan. 2024 (2023B) Run:
Today’s animal of the day is a coatimundi or coati https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coati
5 of us saw this one as we caravanned up the MMT access road around 4pm near the basecamp:
