Warren and I took different paths to Santiago but were able to meet up at the infamous Starbucks in the domestic terminal.
The tradition of name swapping continues. We lost Warren today, but we are quite happy with his replacement Juan.
We continued our journey onwards took the plane to La Serena and then the bus to the observatory. It took me only 78 days this time to come back to LCO and it feels like I never left. Like a certain PI said: “home is where the wifi connects”. This rings very true for LCO.
Our days immediately started with work due to tight schedule because of the many projects that we are doing at MagAO-X. Warren dived into the clean room to assemble his new monstrosity to mount the PIAA lenses. And, I started aligning a laser into a single-mode fiber. This was necessary to take some calibrations to improve the reduction of data from our last run. Its quite tricky to get enough light out of a single mode fiber when not all axis of your mount work. After spending about 2.5 hours I finally got enough light through and I was able to finish my calibrations. I finished at 2 AM! However, the night sky at that time is always amazing.
The milkyway at LCO.
During daytime we were able to make big strides on the integration of the camera software of VIS-X IFU and MagAO-X. This will hopefully mean I won’t have to leave my laptop beneath the instrument again during the observations.
I choose a song from Bon Jovi which is one of the few artists I have actually seen IRL. This was part of the Royal Dutch Beach concerts almost 10 year ago.
I’m a C++ programmer, which means I’ve been here for a week. Consequences include I’m doing laundry already, and I have no idea what day of the week it is (that might be a memory leak joke).
Sebastiaan and Warren arrived today, and immediately started tearing the instrument apart (as expected).
The XKID crew warmed it up today to inspect some things on the inside, which gave us an opportunity to go visit and see the guts up close.
The view down the pipe at the actual super conducting microwave kinetic inductance detector at the heart of XKID. Because it was at room temperature, it was neither microwaving, kineticing, nor inducting at this time. Noah Swimmer likes to dance with his PhD project.Ben explains it all to Laird, Joseph, and Avalon, while Noah and Jeb (he’s back there) work.
We’ve been seeing these Neotropical Stick Grasshoppers a bunch. This one was flexing for me after lunch:
The machine shop sink outside the cleanroom has been decorated:
Not as desolate as you’d expect
I think one of our cleanroom friends overdid the sun bathing today, and was a little out of it at sunset.
sleepy vizoh, yawn, are you taking my,yawn, picture? (I didn’t observe actual viz yawn)
As in all things in life, there are ways to separate the people who have really made it. The signs are there if you look:
How to know that one is a Certified Big Deal.Alpha Cen-rise. The Southern Cross is 60% up and 25% over. Follow the short arm down to the first star, then go one more.
So you could title my series of songs “concerts I went to with my best friend Ben.” Here we switch from country to hard rock and metal, and this will be the first in a sub-series about a specific show. We went to a concert in Omaha to see a band (coming up, no spoilers here), for which there were two openers. The first opener was a total surprise, that no one there had ever heard of (we didn’t even know there was going to be a first opener). I’m not trying to be that guy, you know, cool before it was cool.
They come out, and I’m grumpy “who the F is this?” And then Ben looks at me and says “are they . . . do they have … bagpipes?”. And then it was on, into the mosh pit we went. The band was KoRn (I can’t do the R right here). Awesome show. Ben still has a dollar bill signed by Jonathan Davis in the CD case he bought that night. KoRn got huge shortly after and we get to say we saw them when.
So here’s my favorite KoRn song:
Got The Life by Korn
Update: I am a big enough deal that I travel with my own personal tech support. Thanks to Joseph I can now write KoЯN.
Today Laird and I continued alignment on MagAO-X with some frustration but ultimately success. The MKIDS team has provided us (among other additions) with a new dichroic that has made a nice addition to the instrument.
Keeping up with MagAO-X fashion to consistently sneak new things onto the table in fun mechanical ways!
Occasional robotic and sometimes chipmunk-like sound bites were heard around the cleanroom today, indicating that MagAO-X may be soon equipped with some auditory additions…
Laird and I (now sometimes referred to as Lardy and Eva) will be freed from our bubbles tomorrow as long as we pass our nose-swabbing tests in the morning. This means I can very soon visit my good friend the espresso machine! Non-bubbled members got to enjoy a visit from Carlos the culpeo at the lodge.
Perhaps looking for leftovers.
Not to worry, vizzy activity near the cleanroom has kept all members happy – bubbled or not.
Vizzy enjoying sunset at the ASB with a nice view of the Baade in the background.
Some of my favorite mountain dwellers were spotted by the PI today as well.
My kind of caravan.
Group members Warren and Sebastiaan are en route to LCO so we will have new familiar faces arriving soon!
Song of the day is brought to you by Melanie:
This song was introduced to me by both my dad and aunt in conjunction I suppose. Back in the days of cds, my dad’s sister burned a cd for him with some of his favorites and songs they had shared a likeness for growing up together. This charmer made it on that cd and was played nearly every morning by my dad – quite loudly through the house – in order to encourage my brother and I out of bed to get to school on time. On that same cd you can find the song I was named after (I’ll let you guess the title) by Roxy Music. Both of these have found their way onto my personal playlists, and sometimes help me get out of bed in the morning to this day.
For better or worse, the original MagAO-X NSF proposal included funds to bring a brand new type of camera to the party – a superconducting sensor array that runs at 0.1 degrees above absolute zero. The big idea is that these arrays can tell you the energy of every photon that hits them, without the pesky noise sources that typically degrade astronomical images. These detectors, called MKIDs, are also VERY FAST, which lets you play all sorts of fun games to pick faint sources out from the background starlight that MagAO-X hasn’t bothered to deal with.
This camera, called XKID, was originally meant to just be the DARKNESS instrument from Palomar moved down to Magellan. However, DARKNESS uses liquid helium for cooling, and that has become outrageously expensive, so we actually took the old ARCONS fridge and did a massive upgrade. This resulted in the beauty you see above.
XKID will extend the wavelength range of MagAO-X out to 1400 nm (J band), allowing astronomers to look at older, colder exoplanets, and also provide low resolution spectroscopy and eventually focal plane wavefront sensing to help MagAO-X clean up all the meshugas the damn atmosphere gets up to.
Jeb Bailey, Noah Swimmer, and I are in the process of getting this bad boy cooled down and tuned up, which is always an adventure. Later in the week we will mate it up to MagAO-X (for the first time!) and hopefully see stuff… Stay tuned!
Song of the day
Say what you want, I’m a sucker for the classics.
The Milky Way, taken 2/25/24 from Las Campanas with my iPhone.
This blog post was titled—somewhat optimistically—earlier today, but rest assured, dear reader: MagAO-X is even more alive now than when I wrote that. There is a polemic I could write about the Linux kernel’s casual attitude toward hardware support, but the short version is: we got everything reinstalled and connected and closed the loop in lab this evening on 1,564 modes.
As you may have heard, our Instrument Control Computer was supposed to get a software remodel, but instead ended up with the equivalent of a spit-shine and a new coat of paint. (One can imagine worse outcomes.) The best efforts of our hardware partners to provide Linux support were no match for Linux itself, which continues to defeat all comers in its ability to break software that once worked.
On the plus side, I hear the new way to write drivers is, like, super convenient. Shame about all those old drivers y’all have.
The highlight of the day (other than the loop closing thing) was the arrival of Eva and Lardy:
This afternoon a van disgorged a Professor Lardy Clos (optomechanics lead, natty dresser) and Eva Maklaod, soon-to-be-Ph.D. student in the XWCL.
It was a bit disappointing to spend all that effort on the computer upgrade and then roll it all back, but getting here early means I’ve run out my quarantine days already. And that means I’m allowed in to the dining room to dispense cappuccinos from the fancy machine, and that is an outcome worth celebrating on its own.
The third most exciting thing to happen today was spotting this neat bug:
Song of the Day
A review of the blog archives (blargchives?) revealed that nobody had ever used 2000s classic “Bring Me To Life” by Evanescence as a blog post Song of the Day before. (Jared didn’t believe me.)
“Bring Me To Life” by Evanescence
Required Song Context Per Rule 2023A§5(c): It is hard to pinpoint when I became aware of this masterpiece. To date myself (and/or upset my elders) I was a melodramatic 13 year old when it came out. That alone is reason enough to resonate with the subject matter. (Wikipedia research reveals the songwriter was 19 when it was written, which tracks.)
Per the blog rules I should explain a memorable occasion when the song was played, but “being 13” might not cut it. Instead, I offer the following important facts:
“Bring Me To Life” reached #5 on the Billboard Hot 100, but #1 on the US Alternative chart. (And was the number one song of the year in the Australian Rock charts, what the heck.)
The sudden dude energy that kicks in at 2:50 in the song was apparently due to record executives being too chicken to release a song with female lead vocals and heavy guitars. I always thought it was incongruous and now that all makes sense.
I have just learned that it served as the official theme song for WWE’s 2003 No Way Out event, a totally normal stop on the route to international fame.
