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MagAO-X threw a bit of a tantrum today, but Jared got it calmed down before sunset. Ever since Eden gave it a swift zapatazo, the operator workstation has been moody and fractious. Compounding our difficulties, one of the rack computers was on the fritz at the same time.

Jared says that in the world of Navy nuclear power, you don’t conduct drills for two simultaneous faults. That means what happened today is simply not allowed in the Navy, which should reassure us all. (I have informed our instrument computers that we will be adopting this same policy going forward.)

Tonight Alycia Weinberger, the forever young Las Campanas Frequent Flyer, is obtaining more disk imagery. Conditions have been passable, though I hear past midnight things started getting good. Stay tuned.

At this point even the newest graduate students have become adept at driving the AO system. Still, they mustn’t get complacent, because we continue to add more complexity in order that more things may go right.

For example, I am hiding in the rec room trying to refactor Lookyloo, the “quicklook” script that has grown additional responsibilities. Not coincidentally, I’m going through my headache meds faster than the chocolate-covered espresso beans. (Does anyone know what Excedrin is sold as in Chile?)

The goal is to bundle up the relevant image archives and system telemetry files that encompass an ‘observation’ and stuff them into a single unit for uploading to the CyVerse Data Store back in North America. CyVerse operates scientific computing infrastructure in connection with the University of Arizona, meaning we have a hotline to their head honcho for our data hoarding. The idea here is that our highly compressed data formats will use the limited bandwidth between continents more efficiently, allowing us to “rehydrate” the observations into more conventional formats upon demand.

Fortunately, CyVerse has no relation to Facebook’s Metaverse, and we will not be issuing NFTs of our observations. (For archive-browsing readers of the future: NFTs were a bubble/pump-and-dump scam of the early 2020s, with JPEGs taking the role of tulips.)

In further news from the software side, we ran our first all-Python MagAO-X device last night! My PurePyINDI2 library successfully allowed us to command Sebastiaan’s VIS-X camera from the same interfaces we use for scripting and interacting with the rest of MagAO-X.

Of course, that doesn’t look like anything, so here is a picture of a guanaco:

Technically, it was our second PurePyINDI2 device, as Maggie-o-X had already been taunting the observers through Jared’s add-on speaker for the operator workstation. Its repertoire includes:

• “Beep boop bop” when activating Low Order Wavefront Sensing, with or without Ms. Lowfs in attendance.
• “Gaan met die banaan” when taking exposures with VIS-X, our most Dutch camera.
• “P.I. is asleep. I am the P.I. now.” (among other choices) when nothing alert-worthy happens for 15 minutes.

It alerts on more useful criteria, as well, like changing targets and AO loop events. But those messages are strictly business.

Being out of the critical path for operations tonight means I have taken the chance to do some (lower-tech) astrophotography. It turns out that the image processing on an iPhone can wring detail out of moonless nights, as long as you have a tripod and some patience.

I have speculated that “computational photography” boffins will eventually forward-model the whole sky and paint the stars in after the fact. Recently, it was revealed that Samsung has taken this conspiracy theory as a product suggestion for their latest phones.

Once our image processing is allowed to make up details that aren’t there, I predict we’re going to find loads of planets.

Song of the Day

There were never any ‘good old days’. They are today, they are tomorrow! It’s a stupid thing we say, cursing tomorrow with sorrow.

The world’s foremost Gypsy Punks were also my first ever show as a wee teenager in Atlanta, Georgia. I didn’t know much about live music, but a Ukrainian dude capering around the stage and emptying a bottle of red wine on the pit seemed pretty punk rock to me.

Lead singer Eugene Hütz also had a starring role as Alex in the movie adaptation of Everything is Illuminated. They even worked the band in in this one scene:

It’s been more than two weeks since the run began and the team’s mood clearly shows a bit tired today, with less jokes and also, less people (thats surprisingly). I am Carla and will tell you about my days with you.

After my very long-awaited vacations I came back to the mountain with zero desire to work, but I was notified I will be with MagAOX team for the entire week. This news made me happy, and I started to think about the chilean sweet treat I was going to bring them. My favorite is ‘CHOKITA’ (a hard biscuit filled with vanilla cream dipped in chocolate) soooooo that’s a fully yes, even if you find it too sweet I hope you enjoyed it. This time I tried to find the very chilean ‘alfajor’, I hope you liked them because it’s a very traditional kind of cake we ate and prepared for the national holidays we have in september. I hope to be here next time you are here to bring more chilean sweets.

I had to admit I still get a bit nervous every time I had to operate a no-daily instrument, and MagAOX is one of them, specially this time because Jorge Araya wrote new notes in our procedures file. So I came early the first night – with all of the sandwich that I have to carry in two trips from my car to the kitchen – to go over all the “super long” procedure I have to follow for the night. As I am used to be physically alone most of the time at the control room, I was hoping to read quiet this webpage. But for my surprised you were all here, and you help me carry out the food. It was a nice surprised.

Apparently you are always 10 people team and this time there were new faces I didn’t recognized from before … it was very nice to meet you. And now my no-desire-to-work mood it turned in a very crowded office but fun week. We began with the “XKID_blablabla.cat” catalog which makes me laugh, XKID sounds like a child channel in the tv, but I didn’t ask. Also the very new procedure was we can’t go inside the dome with cellphones, weird but you said something about the instrument would received signal from it. Again, I didn’t ask to much. Just today you explained to me that it was a new camera that you used this week and today it was packaged off the telescope. Amazing techonoly you are working on!!! I fill super privileged to know you!!!!

I am also very thankfull for your kindess and for saving me from the very big tarantula. I am sorry if I scared you with my scream, I can not avoid it. But we are finishing the summer here at LCO and the spiders are all over the place. I am suffering with my aracnophobia … so thank you very much to put it back where it belongs … outside.

I have to admit that operate the telescope for MagAOX feels like I am useless, you do almost all the work. But I enjoy your company, hearing your stories and jokes, I loved we had time for night pictures (thaank you!!!) … also I enjoy your snacks.

Thank you for allowing me to witness the new technological generation for astronomy.

Song of the day

Here is my song, I hope you enjoy every instrument.

Los Jaivas are a group born 60 years ago, they perform this year at the “Festival Internacional de la Canción de Viña del Mar 2023” to celebrate their trajectory doing music from Latin American roots and their unic way of making sounds of ancestral instruments. Mira Niñita is song about a father talking to his daugther. I have never listening alive but the musical instruments lifts you into a cloud of emotions. Also my father always sings it to me. Try to listen to this group, is a very iconic chilean gruop.

See you nex time!

We don’t want anyone reading at home (Katie) to think we’re slackers here. OK, actually, I’ve never actually found Slack useful except here. Basically, MagAO-X has just precipitated my mid-life crisis. First, having joined the observing remotely in 2022A, and maybe it was the effect of all these young people, I decided I wasn’t too old to learn a new programming language. Sure, I thought, I’ll just write a whole new pipeline for a new type of data in a new language (Python). After years of telling everyone that the best programming language is the one you already know, I’ll prove that I’m actually a hip, young programmer. I tell my husband that he should be happy this is the form my midlife crisis took. I didn’t go out an buy the Ford Mustang of my dreams (red, convertible). No, I wrote Python. I didn’t quit my job as an astronomer to vagabond across the world. No, I wrote Python. And yes, starting with being here in person last Fall, I also joined the MagAO-X Slack channels. Because that’s what hip young astronomers do, right?

What would my post be without a tarantula photo of the day? It’s ok team, you don’t have to look away, I won’t post it. I don’t want to precipitate a different type of crisis (arachna-crisis?). Instead, I’ll post Jared’s sunset selfie that I got from Slack (see, I can use it!).

Alright, song of the day. It has to be Forever Young, because that’s what Python and Slack are evidently doing for me. Alphaville’s album came out in 1984, but I associate the song with my freshman year of college in 1987, because my roommate had the album on tape and played it a lot (for those not alive in the 1980s and therefore not yet ready for a mid-life crisis, tapes are a magnetic medium used to store information, in this case analog music). Somehow the song became an anthem of sorts for my then boyfriend, now husband of nearly 25 years, and me. The song is pretty emblematic of 80s youth: fear of nuclear war and suspicion of one’s elders. Each generation has its own angst.

Sometime in college, I bought him his own copy of the album on tape. At some point, I got the CD (for those not alive in the 1990s, CDs were a medium used to store digital information). Some years later when a my grad school office-mate figured out how to rip CDs, I used the IR astronomy group’s Sun Sparcstation and our CD writer (this was hot stuff back then!) to make “mix tape” CD of songs for the then still boyfriend, including, of course, Forever Young. When we finally got married, we asked the band to learn it for our wedding reception. There are some lyrics we have had wrong for so many years that we just keep singing along with ours even though we’ve looked up the words (I can’t hear them sing “perish like a fading horse” and I think “perish like a sea house” makes as much sense and fits the meter and rhyme scheme better).

Just before sunset tonight we held an “enstickening” ceremony to officially add XKID as part of MagAO-X. We’re happy to have the whole XKID team become part of the MagAO-X traveling circus.

We then had another great LCO night of low winds, slow jet stream, and great seeing. The big engineering achievement of tonight was finally getting the infamous low-order wavefront sensing loop working with all of its modes on the light rejected by a coronagraph. Amazingly, this happened on Avalon’s last night at LCO for 2023A.

We also welcomed Alycia to the party. As usual, she came well supplied with AO operator food (pringles and wasabi peas of course).

You can tell it’s going well when screensavers turn on.

The night was briefly in danger of being lost due to another tarantula incursion, which trapped our TO Carla on the wrong side of the staircase to the control room. It turned into an excellent opportunity for training and personal growth as Eden was the only human left to run the entire observatory.

The obligatory viscacha pics:

I started my long story about that one concert I went to that time. The surprise first opener was KoЯN. The expected 2nd opener was Marilyn Manson. And oh my gosh was it bad. We hung out at the front rail for a couple of songs, and all I can say is that it was weird. Maybe if this run goes on for long enough I’ll get to the fun kinda crazy, like seeing Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails tackle his keyboard player and then throw the remains of that keyboard at a different keyboard player. But this was the . . . not fun kind of crazy. Everybody in the place ended up sitting down at the back of the concert hall, like we were trying to get away from Manson and his . . . weirdness and bad music. Just awful.

But later on, I came to like at least one Marilyn Manson song, because of The Matrix. I guess this qualifies as a sea story, so there I was, in Nuclear Power School, studying all of my ass off. I didn’t have a TV, and was really only in my apartment for a few hours a night. So I had never heard anything about The Matrix. One Friday night a few shipmates and I decided to ditch the books and go to a movie, and one of them was really excited about this movie I had never heard of. Having seen no previews, not even a poster, I sat down having absolutely no idea what was about to happen. I think it’s rare experience to take something like that in with no preconceptions. Mind blown.

So anyway, this is on The Matrix sound track and I probably saw it live but have blocked it out:

Day 14 of this observing run marked my first full night and the first full MaxProtoPlanetS night. Despite having a few bumps, it was overall a 0.5″ seeing kind of night! This allowed us to take great data on a target without ADC tracking and driving the telescope to below 30 degrees, which I believe is the first in MagAO-X history.

There were lots of interesting conversations going on in the control room. Jared shared a sailor story beginning with the mandatory opening phrase of “so, there I was”, slightly interrupting the “Would you rather” game that was happening among the junior graduate students. Here are a few prompts that I overheard thought were interesting:

• No elbows or knees
• Cold spaghetti or the smell of cold spaghetti
• Receding or preceding hairline

When doing the customary “blinking” technique to see the small differences between two wavelengths in the data, the exoplanet imaginers and instrument builders in the control room turned into a group of paleontologists amazed by the recovery of a dinosaur skull.

Happy International Women’s Day!

As a celebration of International Women’s Day, the chefs surprised us with a decadent chocolate cake for dinner. A big shout-out to all the women (and girls) of the MagAO-X team, guest observers, and telescope operators!

Song of the Day

Song of the Day was a tough choice as there were so many great songs that are great representations of female empowerment. I have chosen the one that is considered one of the “fiercest female anthems” in the 2010s. Now comes the awkward part of me attempting to explain how I came to know this song. Truth be told, I do not recall when, where, how, and why. Whenever I think about the celebration of female strength and beauty, this first song pops up in my head.

One of the earliest memory I associate this song with is my schoolyard with the radio often blasting the hit songs. So I guess I know this song from the radio?