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Hello! It me, back on the mountain finally. As stated yesterday, I arrived finally yesterday afternoon (after high-fiving the departing Warren and Joseph at the La Serena airport through the window). I managed to stay up for sunset, then quickly went to bed after sleeping not a wink on the plane the night before. I slept all through the night and all through the day, finally rising for good at around 4pm. (note: this was partially on purpose so I could switch onto a night schedule, but my body did not object).

One thing that is super nice compared to our last run is that the nights are much shorter and we have a good amount of time after dinner before the sun sets around 9pm. Last run the sunset was basically during dinner, so we had no time to enjoy it before the work began.

We begun this evening with a vizzy hunt. We have yet to see any clean room vizzies, which is disappointing, but we can climb down a smidge from the telescope to a vizzy wonderland in the rocks below. Tonight was epic vizzy spotting, with a vizzy family and a little vizzy baby!

Laird caught an awesome video of the vizzy family! We decided the one is the mom and the little one is her baby.

But the fun didn’t stop there. We went to see the dome opening, and the TO was kind enough to put on a little show for us!

But the fun doesn’t stop there. After it got dark Jared and Laird took us to the spoooooky tunnel under the telescope:

“Avalon there is a statistically significant number of pictures with your eyes closed that exceed what it should be for random chance.”

And Laird visited an old friend:

Last night we did a little surgery on VIS-X. It seems that manufacturers think that it’s mandatory to put a blinking or blaring LED on your tech. One of the science cameras in MagAO-X has a bright green LED on the back that shines right into VIS-X’s optics. It was giving ~700 counts just from the LED alone! Bad for science. So we activated VIS-X’s ghost mode:

Problem solved!

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Now onto some science. Sebastiaan spent the first half with VIS-X, the integral field unit (IFU) spectrograph. He observed the huge and close giant star R Doradus. This guy is sooo big and soooo close that we are able to spatially resolve the star. That means that we can observe the surface of the star, instead of just a point source like pretty much every other star!

Unfortunately the seeing is terrible tonight and the wind is HOWLING. Bad for science! Jialin and Laird took over around midnight, and we spent the next many hours fighting the seeing and getting terrible AO corrections.

But it wasn’t quite bad enough to foil VIS-X, our champion for the night. Sebastiaan hopped on and did another spatially-resolved star, Betelgeuse! He has now gotten 3 of the 4 spatially-resolved stars with VIS-X. Soon he’ll be first kid on the block to collect the whole set!

Despite our vizzy-blessed night, Jared once again banished our lucky vizz from the desktop. Hope that doesn’t bode ill for our observations.

#ripvizzy

But wait! There’s more! In a moment of triumph, Avalon got her much-labored-over low-order wavefront sensor closed and controlling 16 modes!! WOOO! She can now use past-tense in her phd applications and finish up her masters thesis.

Let’s end with some sunset telescope + Jupiter pics

Some quotes:

Damn she thicc

On several things tonight…

I had the flipaqc in again! It’s flipping me out!

On flipping out the flip mirror

There’s nothing like a pack of wild dogs to ruin your day at the beach

There sure isn’t.

I should have watched Super Troopers between the last run and now so I’d be briefed up on my quotes.

On inside jokes on runs.

We had nubbins. Now we don’t even have subnubbins.

On the poor seeing and it’s effect on our observations.

Observing runs are fueled by coke.

For legal purposes this is clearly about coca cola.

“<slightly judgementally>How long do you want to be on this target Laird?</slightly judgementally>”

“It was your dumb idea to go to it Sebastiaan”

Difficult seeing makes for strained interpersonal relationships.

“Avalon don’t listen to this crap”

“Oh I have been, as they say, lost in the sauce.”

On the requirement of luck for impactful science.

I gotta go yell sh*t at Laird

On doing science.

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Song o’ Day:

Thank you Carla for the wonderful blog post yesterday, and also for taking such good care of us. I of course really mean thanks for delivering our empanadas on Sunday. We’ll see you next turno!

I know it looked like a lot of food, but I was actually somewhat disappointed in our team’s commitment to Empanada Sunday. This tradition at LCO is one of my favorite experiences here, and part of what makes this place so special. I have seen the lounge table tiled with empanadas. A friend of ours even flew home once with her carry-on full of empanadas.

So yes, I ordered 4 empanadas. But that was only because the new night lunch order form limits you to 2 carne and 2 queso. I would have ordered 8. But the trick to hording empanadas here is that you have to defend them.

We said goodbye to Joseph and Warren this morning. Joseph was debugging software while Warren was frantically taking PIAA characterization data until the Sun forced us to close up, and they then ran down the hill to pack and catch the bus. After some sight seeing in La Serena they met up with our fellow Stewardites for the traditional Papas Fritas at the La Serena airport.

On-telescope optical characterization can be pretty draining.

Tuesdays are shift-change day, “turno”, at LCO. So fittingly our departing AOistas passed their relief.

Logan has returned! She managed to stay awake after the 24+ hr journey just long enough to watch the sunset with us.

Some of our crewmates manage to avoid the stresses of cutting edge astronomical instrumentation research, and just go with the flow.

Since the day after thanksgiving one of the features of sunset watching from the Clay telescope has been the intense glow of the lodge Christmas Tree.

I am (Carla) so glad to be at the first and hopefully last night of this MagAOX run.

I was here the last first night too (2022A) and both of them were very chaotic. To add one more word to your chilean vocabulary I hope that I am not the YETA one here. To be Yeta means that every time I am around, bad things happen … but that’s the reason for engineering, to have a looooong time to solve problems. Maybe we will meet again on your next run jujuju.

As TO, there is not much work to do. I am just responsible for centering the field and then you unfocus whatever we do so, the rest of the exposure I have the time to get to know you all better and talk about different things, from science to travel across Chile.

I am so excited about this revolutionary science project that I hope to see you over the years and to continue learning from you. This week I learned a lot about the coronagraph. I have never had the opportunity to see this in action, it is exciting so I wish this works better every time. And thus I can read more about your science results. I never told this yet but I have an astronomy outreach project for BVI people, so I want to absorb all of your knowledge to make a tactile model of something new. This is my secret plan through the week xD.

I love your spirit, even when the things are not working or you have problems with the installation or something doesn’t fit or the ADC is bothering, somebody in the room finds the right solution or the right joke that raises and spreads the energy that we all need.

Just want to highlight one fun fact that I have never expected. During these 4 days I need more than one canasta to transport all the food from the hotel to Clay. Especially on Sunday, the kitchen staff prepare two whole trays full of empanadas and meals for all of us. Thank you for helping me carry all the food these days.

I really look forward to meeting you again in 2023A. I wish you a nice trip back home, a very good and deserved break for all of you and a very happy holidays. 

PS: I hope to remember to bring you chilean candies for the next one!

PS:: We are at Clay jujuju.

Song of the day:

The beauty of astronomy is the geographical union through the world atlas. 

After the embarrassing fate of only the 3 professionals at the helm yesterday, our elders decided that today was the day to teach the youth how to run things. So this post is by and for the young ones. I took the reigns of the AO correction Mega Desk and closed a loop on my own for the first time on sky!

What is my actual project here? I’m syncing! (and it’s even going alright.) As of today we’ve set up a function generator to guide our wavefront sensing camera. Right now we are just using it to remotely stabilize the acquisition rate for the pyramid WFS camera, but eventually we will connect the pyramid modulator and WFS camera for applying incoherent speckles.

On the LOWFS side, Avalon successfully closed on nine modes in Z-band. But is still battling the good fight against speed. The team is planning on testing again with the camera going faster, which will hopefully will help them towards defeating the plague of astigmatism.

Her continued experiments are not the only thing that makes her a star grad student. She also was the finder of Jared’s glasses, which he had already searched the whole mountaintop for.

Jialin, after a few day’s heroic efforts on our observing schedule, got to her first science target tonight. Though seeing deteriorated, we were still able to get several hours of well corrected data and even resolved a disk.

Warren continues to survive marathon PIAA alignments, conjugation errors, and testing. Today he worked further at better alignment and characterization, but did not respond to requests for further comments.

Our merry crew continues to chug along, as our engineering nights start to transition to science and our system is better prepped than ever.

Finally, our first science result of the run, an extended source brought to us by Dr. Haffert that we collected yesterday.

Anonymous, (mostly) Out of Context Quotes pt.2:

“If you look at the DM, all it is is sparkles!”

as it should be

“It turns out that we put it in the wrong place”
“Well at least we put it somewhere”

our optics bench is quickly running out of room

“Eden, some things Jared says can be safely ignored”

a growth moment the PI did not disagree with

“It’s not loose, it’s a delicate construction. It’s a miracle that it works at all.”

from the creator, about the creation

“I feel like all of your sayings are … farmish”

to someone who is farm-adjacent

“Sometimes small true-true can’t apodize big true-true”

regarding PIAA, the everlasting mystery

“oh, I think I need to do… advanced sh*t.”

the group’s catchphrase

We cannot name the new workstation the “Coronagraph Operator Computer”

lines that conventions can’t cross

“I just get a bunch of old men optical engineers viewing my LinkedIn profile. Where are all the fun singles in my area?”

when job hunting is your only social media exposure

“I am currently rederiving s- and p-polarizations for waveguides”
“yeah, that’s a good thing.”

no sympathy for cramped hands

“I’m high-maintenance as heck.”

a princess and the pea moment

“Would you be terribly offended… if I spooned you?”

dinner table conversations

“What kind of a emergency?”
“… I don’t know, low Strehl?”

regarding why observatory parking space are back-in only

“What kind of bananas university do I belong to?”

“If anyone is going to eat my pear, it’ll be Warren”

playing defense on the midnight lunches

“When the f*** did we get a twitter?”

Upon being featured on our twitter @xwclab

Song of the Day:

From a dad rock get away to having the whole world on your shoulders.

After an eventful 24 hour day, a record might have been broken at the Las Campanas Observatory; we have welcome 3 more University of Arizona scientists, making a total of 12 Arizonians on the Chilean mountains.

Second night on sky began with the customary group sunset viewing photo taken by UA Professor Xiaohui Fan.

With Avalon’s efforts, 10 low order wavefront sensing modes were closed on sky for the first time! “10 might not seem like a lot, but don’t most close on 2?”

Science targets were observed while working towards engineering goals throughout the night. Sebatiaan captured beautiful images of R Aqr. If you’d like to see them, like, comment, and subscribe to this blog to hear the newest updates. Warren continued on PIAA alignment and tested it on a binary, possibly multiple star system, HD 20121.

PDS 201 is the first target observed for the Max Protoplanet Survey on this run. With the great seeing around 0.4, the 3 hour observation through its transit resulted in the total of about 80K high quality images. This also means a grad student will be reducing data happily throughout the next day. And the night ended with some more effort in engineering, characterizing vibration and making Strehl measurements.

While in the kid’s lounge… some might say they are having too much fun.

Since we went on a journey yesterday, let’s go on a getaway today!