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Yesterday, we did an amazing job in setting up MagAO-X. Even without direct presence of the PI. Go team! We got the system working at sunset and we spent the whole night performing engineering tasks. One of the last tasks of the night was testing the first coronagraph that Elena made. Below in the picture we see Elena performing her first observations with a successful test of the PIAACMC! Can you find the two planets in the picture?

After a long day of almost 24 hours, we al were very tired and decided to go to bed. I was looking forward to a long day of sleep because I stay out too late if we observe. However, the Earth had other plans for us.

First I thought the Earth was just being rude but then I realized it just wanted to wake us up in time for lunch. So a short 20 minutes later a large part of the team was having fun at lunch.

After a nice lunch, I went up to the telescope for calibrations and engineering work. We are preparing to make MagAO-X smart by adding all kinds of AI. The most important one that gave MagAO-X its voice was of course already added by the amazing Dr. Long. And now, it’s time to give it brains for AO. Yesterday we noticed that we were missing the most important ingredient in the kitchen (or at least to me). We were very short on our supply of coke zero (“observing runs are fueled by coke.”). Somehow the observatory staff was able to read our minds and stocked up the kitchen with about 3 gallons of coke zero. You can not imagine how relieved I was when I stepped into the kitchen and saw the picture below.

Our night started off a bit rough with seeing up 1.7 arcseconds. For those that are not astronomers – so much seeing makes me want to give up. But Laird was sayin’ it’s gonna be alright because the start of the night is often rough. And he was right, the seeing started to come down and we actually had an amazing second half of the night. Our observations this night were taking for guest observers from Michigan. We had a great observing guest to keep us motivated and on our feet.

At the end of the night, I stayed up after the rest of the crew went down to sleep. This precious morning time was used to take data to get MagAO-X its brains. Hopefully, I took enough data and we will see in a couple of days if it will actually work! But I stay out too late thanks to these engineering tasks and I got nothing in my brain anymore so I will head off to bed. But just before that I got this music in my mind that I need to share with you all.

Hello all! I am excited to have received the opportunity to write my first ever blog post and we have had a jam-packed Day 4!

Today was the real deal of installing MagAO-X on the platform. We started the morning by splitting into two crews: one to get the instrument on the platform, and the other to get the computer rack on the platform.

Laird and I tackled many of the hardware tasks, which required us to be in some less than comfortable positions.

This photo not only described our mental state after many hours of installing MagAO-X, but also may cause future nightmares. Thank you Katie.

The greatest cabling team ever assembled, flawlessly carried out the cabling operations with little to no mistakes. Shoutout to the girls!

The computer rack loaded up diligently onto the Isuzu and made it up to the Aux safely!

A great picture after a long successful morning of getting both the instrument and computer on the platform. Laird looking photogenic as always.

One would think this is a staged photoshoot for an ad showing off the latest and greatest tool sets. However, it is just a natural Laird picture.

We headed off to lunch after a satisfying morning of work, only to stumble upon unsatisfied reactions to Joseph pulling out a blob of peaches from a mysterious juice.

Despite everything running smoothly for the most part, Jared’s face talking to Joseph said otherwise. I am not sure the context of this conversation, but it had me slightly worried.

MagAO-X installed on the platform!

After working day and night, we achieved a beautiful PSF of Beta Pic @875nm.

After nearing the 24 hour mark of being awake, I started hearing people singing songs they had stuck in their head. One of which was, “Say you can’t sleep, baby, I know”. This is probably because we’ve had so many Espressos today.

All in all, this was truly a great learning experience for me, and the team as whole. We checked off many of the engineering tasks planned during this first night including star acquisition, testing focal plane masks, calibrating the ADCs, and working on PIAA’s. Oh, and don’t think I forgot the fan favorite… Viscachasssss!!!!!!!!

Song of the Day

Well, folks, it’s been a few days but the content you crave is here. That’s right: viscacha photos! Just scroll past all this boring stuff.

Today was a sort of sneak preview of install day. MagAO-X exists as two separate and arguably equally important halves, the electronics rack and the optical table. We eventually need both halves on the platform. However, they must be sundered in two for transport, as they are connected only by a delicate umbilical of electronic cables.

We have started staging the main part of the instrument at the summit in the auxiliary building, which saves a fair bit of time on our install day. This means cables are coming off the day before.

As always, the most delicate part of the operation is the disconnection of the hand-soldered ribbon cables that carry commands to our MEMS deformable mirrors. Eden, Parker, and Katie carried out this fiddly task (along with removing many other, less fiddly, cables).

Once the cables were disconnected and secured, MagAO-X had to be wrapped for transport. I always think it looks like a foil-wrapped burrito.

The burrito had to be lifted off its legs, which we did with the help of the staff here at LCO (and a big honking crane).

The legs are a little adaptive acoustics system of their own, which can remove vibrations transmitted from the ground before they mess up our images. The legs get a separate ride, while the main part of MagAO-X rides up to the telescope on its little cart. Which is in turn on a truck.

I cannot be sure, but I believe the above image was the result of Katie Twitchell imagining a world in which the active leveling system was able to keep the orientation of MagAO-X constant despite going uphill.

Alas, the electronics rack is now lonely. It stays in the cleanroom overnight to be available for last-minute software work before we move it to the summit for installation on the platform.

Fortunately, I was there to keep it company.

Literary Interlude

I have chosen the option to embed a quotation rather than lyrics from the Song of the Day (as per blog rules for 2024B). Many of us spent good chunks of this day in the library at Las Campanas trying to finish other related work in the lulls between major operations.

This quote from “The Library of Babel” seems relevant to exoplanet direct detection in general:

Visiblemente, nadie espera descubrir nada.

A la desaforada esperanza, sucedió, como es natural, una depresión excesiva.

For the obligate Anglophones:

Obviously, nobody expects to discover anything.

Naturally, this inordinate hope was followed by a profound depression.

Jorge Luis Borges is one of the quintessential magical realist writers, and “The Library of Babel” is one of my favorite short stories about … libraries, (in)finity, combinatorics, information theory, and perhaps cosmology? You should go read it (or en Español, si quieras).

Viscachas

The viscachas have been harder to spot this run, but we got a bumper crop today courtesy Laird and Parker, with five confirmed viscacha sightings.

Song of the Day

Today’s song of the day is unrelated.

So far, Laird and Sebastiaan have been doing an excellent job directing the in-person crew and we’ve made great progress towards the many tasks that needed to be done before the start of the big move on Wednesday.

Here, we see a lot of the team watching and learning during Tuesday morning’s initial alignment procedures as we prepare to install all the fancy new Lyot and focal plane masks brought down from Tucson.

The first optomechanical task of the day was to install the special masks for the new self-coherent camera. Check out the pinhole on the very upper edge of the mask when held up to Eden’s computer screen! That little pinhole, we’ve since learned, is the key for fancy new speckle-nulling strategies, like Coherent Differential Imaging. Sebastiaan’s and Parker’s faces says it all

… and after a bit of alignment work from the team, the mask is aligned!

Here is the result: there are fringes on the camsci images indicating that light from the pinhole is interfering with the light that transmits through the Lyot stop. Neat! If I were a quasistatic speckle I’d sure be sweating right now.

We broke for lunch and afterwards, it was time to finish up other miscellaneous tasks such as some interior cable organization, reconfiguring the power pathways for the Zaber stages, and squashing some LED lights inside the instrument.

We were initially just assigned the Suzuki for Clay observers “Lil Red” for our daily needs but we quickly realized that our transportation needs weren’t being met. After an email or two, we got permission to use one of the Suzuki Jimnys a.k.a. one of the super cool, white Jurassic Park-looking cars. Score!

One of the smaller tasks of the day was installing a small cable tray inside MagAO-X to help tidy up some of the pico motor cabling we had installed last month during the engineering run. These plastic trays required some slight modifications, which required a trip to the machine shop in the ASB. It’s not often any of us find our way in here, so it was cool to see…!

We had some time after dinner to enjoy the fading of the evening sunlight. some of us drove, some walked, and one of us ran.

From the Rocky Theme Song. We were attempting to do some vizzy spotting on the north slope of the telescope summit with P. Johnson who suddenly looked like he saw a ghost after looking at his phone. We asked what was wrong since this caught all of our attention and he, with a slight mumble of “Jared wants me…!”, ran off into the setting sun. So, when you’re checking out the telescope summit and you get a Slack message from Jared saying it’s time to Zoom, you best start zooming son.

“
Trying hard now
It’s so hard now
Trying hard now

Getting strong now
Won’t be long now
Getting strong now

Gonna fly now
Flying high now
Gonna fly, fly, fly…
“

These summer sunsets are great. Hasta mañana.

Song of the Day

We’re off! The Tucson MagAO-X crew (notably sans PI) set out for our 2024B run at pretty much the crack of dawn on Sunday. Delta Airlines must have heard through the grapevine about Jay and Jared’s intercontinental sprint from last time and opted to intervene—when we booked these flights, the only option from TUS-ATL was taking off bright and early at 7:10 AM. We all found each other at our departure gate (we congre-gate-d? that one’s for you, Josh), redistributed the snack load, and boarded the plane without a hitch.

Given that I don’t normally wake up at 5 AM, I was asleep pretty much the second I found my seat. I woke up about an hour later convinced that we must at least be somewhere over Texas, but when I pulled up the window screen I was dismayed to discover we hadn’t moved an inch; perhaps the lack of jet-engine noise and air turbulence was the reason I’d slept so well. From what I gathered from the captain’s announcement (in which I heard an airline pilot say the phrase “this is really embarrassing” for the first time), there had been a minor computer malfunction. Maintenance had been called in to deactivate the broken computer so the backup could be used, but instead they disabled both the broken and the working computer. Oops. This resulted in our sitting on the tarmac for about 2 1/2 hours, de-planing, and then re-boarding before leaving sometime around 10:30 AM. If any of us had wished for a later flight, our wish was certainly granted.

Despite the maintenance difficulties, we arrived at ATL with ample time to grab a smoothie, stretch our legs, and get some homework done. I guess a 6-hour layover really does make you delay-proof.

We boarded our second flight with no issue. However, as a fun little treat and test of our patience, the captain again came over the PA system to let us know that maintenance needed to fix something up before we could take off. Thankfully, this time it only resulted in about 10 minutes of delay, and a (not) short nine hours later we arrived in Santiago!

We learned a few lessons in the Santiago airport, the chief being that the line to re-check bags with LATAM is fast if you have Delta Status, but if you don’t have status you can skip the long “regular people” line by being declared a “problem” by the airport staff. Not naming names. 

An obligatory Starbucks run and a short flight later, we made it to La Serena, traded some Doctor Pepper Zero (a USA special) for some Nespresso at El Pino, and headed up to see our favorite telescopes. At LCO we met up with Sebastiaan and Elena, ate a group dinner, and—of course—watched the sun set.

Welcome back, everyone.

In honor of our journey, the song of the day is Traveling On by the Decemberists: