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MagAO-X 2024Aa Day 10: Scientists Reveal Shocking Secrets in Exclusive Interview – You Won’t Believe What They Confessed!

Clay and the moon, aka the massless particle in a RTBP, at sunset.

It’s the first double digit day of the 2024Aa run! As the master scheduler, tonight’s time is finely chopped up into four different blocks. Let’s hear what the MagAO-X scientists are doing for the night, and maybe ask them some fun questions. Ok, maybe they are just questions randomly popped into the minds of the deliriously tired interviewer and scientists.

Before we go to the main event, here are some animal spotting! Can you spot the 4 different viscachas and the guanaco?

iEFC on Sky Commission with Josh Liberman

What is iEFC and why is it so important?

Josh: iEFC is implicit electric field conjugation, a technique for removing quasi-static speckle and it allows us to reach higher contrast.

How did commissioning go?

Josh: We drove up at 3pm and performed calibrations. Everything went well, and we opted to skip dinner to finish calibration before sunset. The telescope dome opened after sunset viewing. When we returned to the control room, MagAO-X was in a state of extreme distress: the DM got really angry and the system was misaligned. Everything that could go wrong went wrong.

What were the immediate thoughts that went through your head when the system misaligned after dome opening?

Sebastiaan: God Damn it!

Josh recreating the recreaction of Sebastiaan
Sebastiaan recreation of himself

If you can befriend a fictional character who would it be?

Josh: Flat Stanley, he just gives off good vibes you know?

What is an insignificant petty gripe that makes you extremely angry?

Josh: When someone replies all to a group email.

YSES Survey Follow Up Observations with Sebatiaan Haffert

What is the YSES Survey and what observations are you doing?

Sebastiaan: YSES stands for the young suns exoplanet survey. I am doing a follow up of systems with confirmed companion. So far, 2/3 of my targets are successful.

Look at this binary!
Look at this binary!

How is it like being both an engineer and an observer?

Sebastiaan: I am not an engineer.

Logan: But you built an instrument!

On a scale of 1 to 10, where 10 is the most tired, please rate how tired you are after working from 3pm to 6am?

Sebastiaan: A three, it kind of feels like dinner time.

Flying or invisibility?

Sebastiaan: How important is invisibility if you have to be naked?

If you were to be a traffic sign, what would it be?

Sebastiaan: The “Watch Out” sign with the deer on it.

If you could make an office rule that everyone had to follow for a day, what would it be?

Sebastiaan: Everyone should walk backwards

What is an insignificant petty gripe that makes you extremely angry?

Sebastiaan: When the toilet paper roll is put in backwards!

Pup Search Observations with Logan Pearce

What is the backstory of the name of the survey?

Logan: the first White Dwarf-Main Sequence binary ever “made” was Sirius A and B. Sirius A, the main sequence star was known as the dog star. So Sirius B, the smaller companion was nicked name the pup. Now I am looking for more pups!

Logan and her new discovered pup!

Pup Search and Xoomies (Logan’s project on fetching companions to accelerating stars in Scorpius Centaurus Star Forming Region with MagAO-X) are all related to dogs, will your next project named similarly?

Logan: Man, it takes so much time to come up with names. We (Sebastiaan and I) spent all of the astrobiology conference coming up with the Xoomies names.

Sebastiaan: Mine will be about a stroop waffle. I don’t know what it will be about, but I already have the logo made.

Flying or invisibility?

Logan: Hands down flying! I don’t get those who chooses invisibility…

If you were to be a traffic sign, what would it be?

Logan: Parking signs with a bunch of confusing texts.

What is an insignificant petty gripe that makes you extremely angry?

Logan: Double doors with one side locked. WHY DON’T THEY UNLOCK BOTH DOORS?????

Debris Disk Imaging with Jaylycia Kuenberger

What kind of objects are you observing tonight and what are you trying to get out of your observations?

Jaylycia: I am observing circumstellar disks, which are rings of dusty materials encircling its host star. I look at disks at all stages of extrasolar system formation. But this particular target tonight is a debris disk and I am just trying to get an image of the disk to characterize it.

Disks are generally thought to be difficult, what are your thought about that?

Jaylycia: Yes, they are more difficult than point sources, but they look cooler! They are very faint and they are easily removed during image processing, by accident.

How does it feel to be an AO operator and an observer at the same time?

Jaylycia: I don’t.

Who came up with your new name?

Jaylycia: Maggie-OX did. It’s the best thing that’s happened to me.

If you were to be a traffic sign, what would it be?

Jaylycia: NO PARKING! I DoN’T KnOw!

As a former pastry chef, which dessert do you think best describes you?

Jaylycia: A hefty cream puff with vanilla custard filling.

Song of the Day

Hmmm… What would be a more fitting music than the BBC News Intro music for an interview?

Well, thanks for tuning into the special program of today!

MAPS/MIRAC Mar. 2024A Night 3: Closed loop calibrations

A much better night!

Sunset from the Bowl

So we were joined by our CACAO friends in Chile and Hawaii to take AO calibrations:

But we learned the camera lens loop was still a hold up so we spent a good long while trying to get it working as well:

The song of the night is the sound of a mouse being trapped (in a live trap) in the kitchen. The sample track is the sound of Rory when he discovered said mouse in the sink (yesterday).

MagAO-X 2024Aa Day 9: Another Day, Another Disk

Now’s about the time of the run where the nightly routine just starts to become second nature; eyes are less bloodshot and twilight is here before you know it. We’ll start this post off with some sunset glamour shots…

Biiiig telescope

Today we were all a bit sad to bid farewell to Katie and Maggie who are off to La Serena to rehydrate and relax at the beach. However, we gained a Logan who was eager to join the festivities and contribute her science.

Bye Maggie and Katie… hello and welcome Logan!
Logan confirms that traveling up the mountain is never a dull time — even the traffic is cool.

Tonight’s program featured Logan for most of the night and she definitely #nailedit, finding an impressive amount of white dwarf companions in a very short timespan. There’s probably more to come, as she still has yet to reduce her data and uncover what faint objects could be hiding in the bright halo of the host star. I think it’s safe to say that if finding binaries were a crime, she’d be on death row…!

While Logan was winning, the rest of us got to work on doing some networking and installing a bunch of fancy software to be able to control MagAO-X from our own computers. After a bit of labor, I successfully got my laptop connected and was encouraged to parade the fruits of my labor to the others to raise morale. This is needed because it’ll just make our nightly operations more efficient since anyone can contribute to an instrument procedure or data collection without needing to displace anyone in the control room.

So I guess this VM install *is* possible
“My screen looks like I downloaded The Matrix”

The conditions tonight, especially in the later half, were a real treat and encouraged some challenging observations of circumstellar disk HD 145560 (for Dr. Alycia Weinberger at Carnegie) that we would have otherwise not been able to effectively observe. The only way to know if these observations were successful is to perform the full data reduction (coming soon), but we all have a really good feeling about this one!

Taking full advantage of the excellent seeing, we stayed on this target as close to sunrise as possible which presented some interesting photo opportunities.

I guess the morning sun was *just* beginning to perfectly glow through the louvers of the Baade telescope or something.

Song of the Day

MAPS/MIRAC Mar. 2024A Night 2: Tunisian crochet

Tonight started cloudy and even with a little precipitation! (Which we just can’t bring ourselves to actually complain about, being children of the drought-stricket desert southwest.)

Image description: A closed telescope dome in front of thick clouds on a rocky mountain peak, with snow amongst the rocks and fluffy-looking pine trees in the foreground.
Image decription: Same closed telescope dome from a different angle, with thick clouds in the sky, and the red light of dusk making the mountain ridge redden as well.

So it was time to learn some Tunisian crochet, courtesy of a book authored by MAPS and CAAO colleague Lori Harrison: Exploring Tunisian Crochet: All the Basics Plus Stitches and Techniques to Take Your Crochet to the Next Level; 20 Beautiful Wraps, Scarves, and More.

While we were clouded out, I called in to the MagAO-X run to eavesdrop for a little while on the MagAO-X AO GUIs:

Finally the clouds cleared up around 11pm and we went on sky! Only to have trouble finding our stars. We even pointed at the moon (which is 31 arcmin in diameter) and we could find that! But we tried to focus on the limb and just weren’t able to get the adjustments we needed to sharpen it up. This was all most likely due to the primary mirror cell throwing an error with a garbled measurement that was causing an unknown piston and tip/tilt that we just weren’t able to take out with pointing the mount and focusing the hexapod. We do wish our cameras had a larger field of view to help with finding stars when there’s a trouble issue like this, but ultimately it seemed we didn’t even have the range to take it out.

Meanwhile MIRAC was still working on adjusting its pupil alignment, which was actually a fine thing to do when all you can see is the sky (but no stars). This time Manny and Rory went up and turned one of the screws on the bellows, with little effect. We also tried rotating the instrument rotator, and were gratified to see it did indeed rotate the one bright spider we could see, but still did not help to center the telescope pupil with the MIRAC pupil. Ultimately we had to call it a night around 2am.

The song of the night is the sound of water dripping from the trees.

MagAO-X 2024Aa Day 8: Pigs in a Duvet

Well, that went fast. Maggie and I are the first team members of the run to embark on the long journey down the mountain and trade the Atacama back for the Sonoran desert. But, before then, we had one last night to make the most of our time here at LCO.

After some daytime calibrations (and some very interesting hot dog-based pastries at dinner), we headed up the mountain for a full night of observing. Per tradition, we officially kicked things off with a sunset photo:

Do not ask where Eden's left hand went.
Isn’t Clay just so pretty?
She's here in spirit
Logan joins us for sunset from La Serena
Don't worry, her left hand is intact in this photo
Clouds? in MY Atacama Desert? It’s more likely than you think.

Now, don’t get me wrong: the clouds put on a gorgeous show for sunset, but they are not generally harbingers of good astronomy. Nevertheless, we were determined to get as much good science done as we possibly could, and we were pleasantly surprised; clouds passed, and we saw seeing hold steady below 0.5 (and even dip below 0.4) arcseconds for a good portion of the second half of the night.

Maggie, Laird, and Sebastiaan started things off with our dear friend the HDFS, performing some of the first phasing tests on-sky:

Look at those fringes. Beautiful.
I’ve decided that astronomy is in fact a spectator sport

Unfortunately, the timing worked out so that Maggie and I will be coming down the mountain at the same time that Logan comes up, so we won’t get the chance to have the whole team here at the same time. Tonight Logan joined via Zoom to observe some of her targets, with a white dwarf companion making a very exciting appearance:

Joseph wants me to say that "Logan is bravely soldiering on from the La Serena ICU" but I'm afraid that might be a little too dramatic for some of our fans
No feet pics, please
When the companion appeared, the students were summoned to the control room by the promise that "Astrophysics is happening!!"
Look at that lil guy!

As the night went on, Laird and Jialin got their turn to conduct cutting-edge science in the control room. What was going on in the “kids room” downstairs, you might ask? Only the most important of shenanigans:

Yoga is good for the body
And the soul.

This much science is exhausting for anyone, especially the PI of the project. Unfortunately for Jared, MaggieO-X saw the opportunity to usurp and seized it:

You heard her. She’s the PI now.

I’m about to follow the PI’s example and try and catch some sleep before Maggie and I head down. But, before I go, I’d like to share a bit of personal news in honor of my last night at LCO:

Soon my excuse of "but I'm just an undergrad" will be a distant memory

And to go with it, the song of the day:

Graduate – Third Eye Blind