Blog

We’re only so many days in and the team has made leaps and bounds during both our engineering and science hours. MagAO-X has all its shiny bits and pieces working in one extreme(ly complicated) and beautiful orchestra.

A list of just a few things the team is celebrating:

• XKIDS first light – Noah’s blog post says it best, but today we were able to take even more exciting long wavelength observations with our inductance imager. Stay tuned for more results from the UC Santa Barbara team
• lowfs commissioned – Avalon can’t catch a break, everyone wants lowfs on their target! She’s bringing significant flux improvements to the table with her fancy loop. “Dreams really do come true” – Jared, probably
• PIAA upgrade success– If you couldn’t tell from Warren’s post, his long armed masterpiece has worked amazingly well with hardly a pineapple to be seen. He’s run off to the Chilean beaches, but we can safely say the PIAA trials and tribulations of 22B are a thing of the past.
• Stellar data! – After the abysmal weather of 22B, even just seeing the stunningly sharp X of a high contrast imager brings joy to our weary souls, plus all the companions we’ve seen so far!

Today Jialin finally joined us! She also had a close call with her layover pre-Santiago flight, and we’re so glad to have her here instead of her being stuck in Huston an extra day. It’s a momentous milestone of the run, she’s our last arrival. From here on out, we’ll just be losing members.

I know we seem extremely productive, but don’t fret! We haven’t forgotten to enjoy the finer parts of LCO living and loafing.

We’ve been enjoying cleanroom vizzy spotting, a staple of the uphill observatory hike:

Joseph brought out his IR camera to find out who’s the hottest in the control room:

Though it ruined our loop, we fell asleep to a fiery sunrise:

We always appreciate our TO Jorge and his whimsy:

Following direct PI orders, no one forgot about this past empanada Sunday:

We’ve been teaching the newer team members the finer arts of green flash catching:

And Laird caught a vizzy at sunset, the best of both worlds:

To top it all off, we got a NYT photographer poking their nose (and drone) around the telescope tonight, so keep an eye out for our very own Avalon to make the front page!

Song of the Day

My chosen song is “From Far Away” from a musician my mother raised me on. Jeff Tweedy, lead singer of Wilco but solo performer in his own right, has a voice so distinct it never fails to throw me back to long hot car rides and sleepy backseats. I’ve seen him three times, at a Wilco concert when I was 13 and then more recently twice at a small hole in the wall venue during his yearly winter LA visits. He can sell out stadiums for thousands all over the world but chooses the 200 seat Largo theater to host a weekend of shows in early January. My family went to his show this year, and his opener was none other than Fred Armisen, who spent the 15 minute musician-themed comedy routine parodying acoustic guitarists across the globe, playing a few tunes himself, and of course mocking his good friend Jeff. So please enjoy the soothing sounds of a man I’ve listened to most my life, as you look at our extrasolar companions from far away…

We weren’t allowed to take pictures inside, but here’s my silly family being silly while we waited for the doors to open:

So I’m still kind of reeling from and processing it because it’s been so long in the making but we got first light tonight with XKID (that’s the MagAO-X MKID Camera – don’t you just love an acronym that’s made up of nested acronyms? me too). We did it!

This doesn’t look like a whole lot, but that right there in the middle is the first starlight we ever put on our detector in this instrument. Things got better pretty quick.

Still not the best looking thing in the world, but we threw a corongraph in there, added a filter, and could actually see everything! After all the work it took to get the camera working, I’d say that’s pretty neat.

I’ll blog again, next time with more fun stuff, but right now I’m just riding out the emotional high of getting here to the telescope with this camera and actually looking at some stars with it. It’s not perfect but after all the twists and turns it’s taken to get here, all the times we had to perform surgery on the instrument that the manufacturers advised us not to (related picture below), all the modifications we made taking this part from that instrument, that part from this instrument, redesigning and refabricating parts until the last possible second, and all the times I really thought I (and the rest of the amazing team who has worked so hard on this) wasn’t going to be able to get it to work, I’m super happy about it.

Stay tuned, because it’s only getting better. We’re just getting started here at LCO with MagAO-X, but it’s going up up up. Gonna do some real cool science.

Song of the Day

I wanted to do a song about light because we got first light and there’s a lot of great ones, but as I was walking back to my room I realized that for all the ideas I had (and as tempted as I am to list a bunch of them because I’m indecisive and want to give a bunch of options), I realized there’s a better option.

It’s partially cheesy ham-fisted metaphor because doing science is challenging and getting XKID working and sent down here to use it is one of the hardest things I’ve done, but in a more literal sense we’re at the top of some mountains here and each day I’ve been walking up and down a bunch of different pretty damn steep hills (seriously, my phone had to die on this mountain so XKID could live and I could get up to the telescope)

and – last but not least – this song is just an absolute banger.

This song is never going to disappear from YouTube because it’s fantastic so I’m tempted to break the rules and not mention that it’s The Climb by Miley Cyrus, but there ya go. There’s a million and a half reasons this song is great, be it the fantastically campy music video, how it’s impossible not to sing along to, and that it holds up even if you haven’t heard it in years (but let’s be real, it’ll never be that long between times hearing it because it’s excellent).

I saw Miley Cyrus at Austin City Limits in 2021. I tried to get to her set early to get a good spot and even showing up a half hour before start I was still stuck 150 rows back because everyone there wanted to see her show – and for great reason, it was awesome. There were old hits, new hits, she covered Stevie Nicks and Dolly Parton (shout out Stevie Nicks and Dolly Parton), it started raining mid-set and the whole concert turned into a mud pit but nobody left because it was just. so. damn. good. The last song she played was The Climb and it turned into a giant sing-along with me and my thousand or so best friends in that moment, it was a blast. I’d post a picture from the show but there are none, I was too busy losing my mind. I don’t care who you are, if you get a chance to see Miley in concert, do it, you won’t regret it, not even when you lose your voice rocking out to a live version of the Climb.

Coda

Thanks y’all from the MagAO-X team for being so welcoming, thanks to everyone who has worked on XKID who made its first light possible, and thanks to the three of you who made it this far in the post and listened to my sleep deprived stream-of-consciousness ramblings. It takes a village, and what a great village this is.

Astronomers are a fairly adaptable or masochistic lot. Regular switches between day and night are sought after, locations without much oxygen are prized, and network systems are designed around blocking communication with our own instruments. Observing runs are an oscillating balance between excitement and dejection, determination and delirium, and sleep and awakeness. In this world of contrasts, resilience is honed and prized. There are some times where the hardened star dust of astronomical grit wears thin, however, and this usually comes on the second night of the run. Our circadian rhythms have not yet been forced into submission yet, and the long day followed by a bewildered sleep tends to run its course by 3am. The adrenaline rush of the first milestones have passed, and we aren’t yet settled into the comfortable routine of known problems and sandwich forms.

We will pass through the fire of the transition, and are looking forward to more coherent days to come. In the meantime, I am running out of writing steam and will follow the guidelines that Eden suggested when arguing why I should write the blog tonight.

“I think that you would do such a better job. Topics Warren can put in a blog:
“Him doing PIAA stuff”

“Him staring hard at PIAA stuff

“Him doing random walks and taking astrophotography”

“How he is leaving in two days and will miss Las Campanas“

“How Eden will be here for 14 more days and will have to write so many more blog posts than Eden“

“How much Warren cares about Eden and her mental health and how she has to stay up until sunrise”

As a group we made it through the night, and look forward to many more nights making progress and working together. See you all tomorrow.

Edit: Song of the Day

The carpool left promptly at 7am and, bleary from late night picture captions, I forgot everything about finishing blog posts with a song of the day. Tonight is filled with the nostalgia of being my last night at LCO. My fondest memories are filled with late night delirium and accomplished resolve. Laughter against the ever-present backdrop of the night keeps evoking the line:

The sunshine bores the daylights out of me
Chasing shadows, moonlight mystery

The memorable association of this song is from walking down the mountain amid the sunrise, squinting against the growing light and looking forward to the dark nights to come.

Edit²: the lost blog post

Eden and Jay convinced me last night to finally post the blog entry that I had started for the AO summer school. It is retrodated here:

AO Summer School Day 1: Closing the loop on California mysteries

Yesterday I arrived with Eden and one way to gauge how chaotic the journey to LCO was is the level of shin splints experienced the next day. That is to say, the trek was not without some hiccups. From semi-justified TSA traffic stops…

…to major flight delays. If anyone reading this has the clearance to retrieve security footage of ATL’s B Terminal you’d find two grad students running faster than a supercharged V8 and scattering many meandering airport families while doing so.

The language barrier was a bit higher than anticipated which caused a few more delays at SCL but nonetheless we made it! After a long rest we prepared to do the big move and install next.

The gory details might be left to future post but the first task of the day was to push MagAO-X onto the transport vehicle and drive it (slowly) up the hill from the clean room to the telescope platform.

Once it was at the telescope we made ample use of the many convenient tools integrated into the building to make our lives a lot easier.

The scariest part (for me) is always the crane operations, but everything went by without a hitch. After the table legs were placed under the floating MagAO-X it had to be lowered just right to ensure everything buttons up together nicely in the end.

One of the last steps before first light was the cabling procedures. Here we see our DM-cabling gurus hard at work.

The rest of the night didn’t offer many more photo opportunities and was honestly a bit of a blur (perhaps due to being awake for nearly 24 hours) but MagAO-X is being fed real stellar photons and it’s working great!

Well this “first light” post could have undoubtedly gone a bit deeper into the operations and science, except we’ve all been up since 7:30a and it’s well past 4:00a now with a few more hours to get through before we can call it quits. So we’re all very tired (except Warren apparently), so it’s time to sign off….

Song of the Day

As per the 2023A blog rules a song must be chosen for each day of the run. One stipulation is that you must recount who recommended the song to you. So today it’s “Tell Her About It” by Billy Joel. One realization that dawned on me today is that the compressor on the cool new kid on the block, XKID, pumps along to the tempo of this very song (or it’s dang close). So I guess you could say MagAO-X’s new friend XKID recommended this song to me. That counts, right?

Day 8 saw the arrival of two colleagues and one hefty tarantula.

Despite having to negotiate the Atlanta airport with speed, they made their connection to Santiago, where they obtained their Mountain Names: Iden and Jackke.

Nobody captured the exact moment they alighted from their servicio especial van, and they’re extremely asleep right now, so you’ll have to trust us: they’re here.

Today we crammed in quite a lot of science and engineering before shutting the instrument down for the night before its Friday morning trip up to the telescope platform. We also wrap it up to prevent heating and intrusion by dust.

Anyway, all that means: tomorrow we’re doing the thing! This means we wake up for breakfast, make approximately 100 trips back and forth between the summit and the almost-summit where the cleanroom is, plug a lot of things into other things, and then do astronomy until it’s time for breakfast again.

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As the only graduate student present who has been on a MagAO Classic run, it fell to me to implement the speech-synthesis ops concept that Jared has long coveted for MagAO-X. (Only so many people can crowd around MegaDesk, but everyone in the control room can hear “loop is closed.”)

Speech synthesis has changed a lot since Jared was a grad student, and professional-grade deep-learning models are surprisingly good these days. Of course, the budget for this was $0.00, so I used OpenTTS. OpenTTS lets you sample a wide variety of synthesis packages with a common API, and I had the container running on AOC (that’s our Adaptive optics Operator Computer) in a few minutes.

The next challenge was to hold auditions. For my auditions I imagined some things MagAO-X might want to say, and gave them to the various models: “Target changed. High-order loop closed. Data saving started. Loop is open. Smoke ’em if you got ’em.”

The previous-generation models were there for comparison, and sounded like absolute butt:

On the plus side, espeak was one of the only included engines with a non-US/non-UK English voice:

Island vibes aside, the synthesis was just not that good. I kept looking. This MaryTTS voice seemed all right:

Just one small problem: Maggieo-X is clearly not male. This voice clearly is. That simply won’t do. How about this from Larynx?

Not bad. But are we sure Maggieo speaks English?

I also ran the Dutch voices past Sebastiaan Haffert, local Dutchman:

Verdict?
“They’re all… very Flemish.”
“Is that bad?”
“No, they’re just very… soft.”

It’s true. The characteristic throaty “g” of the true Dutchman was let down by these synthetic voices. Just click the speaker icon on here to have Google’s model read the same to you. See?

Anyway, auditions continue, but I have a pretty good idea of who will be narrating our ops tomorrow night. Until then,

Song of the Day

Okay, maybe when I posted Bring Me To Life and then Jared had Korn it started a bit of a nu metal trend, but in the end it doesn’t really matter.

I don’t play many video games, mainly because I am usually in the business of telling computers what to do, and therefore really resent them telling me what to do. One recent exception was Sayonara Wild Hearts, which is incredible. More of an album-length interactive music video than a “game,” I guess, but anything that includes:

• firing heart-shaped projectiles
• from your motorcycle
• at a three-headed robot dog
• as a metaphor for overcoming heartbreak
• (narrated by Queen Latifah)

has to be good. And, of course, the music complements the v i b e s perfectly. (And is strongly inspired by CHVRCHES, no doubt.)

For some reason, nobody’s taken the unadulterated audio and overlaid it on gameplay for a ready-made music video, but if you can ignore the dings and bleeps this should give you some of the flavor.

Bonus Tarantula

Content warning: incredible arachnid. Click to tarantulate.

This little guy took up residence on Avalon’s door this evening, requiring XKID xpert Noah Swimmer to remove him.