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Today was full of action!

To prepare for install tomorrow, we had a whole lot going on. Laird and Katie had some alignment work, me and Eden were finding new focus positions for the camsci stages, Rob and Viktoria worked on camdurham, and of course there were still grad students in the library working on their code as usual.

Maybe they know we’re observing soon… because we got lots of visits, including one from Roburro!

At 5 pm we had our safety brief for packing and installation on the telescope, after which we went right to the clean room for clean up.

With a couple of us new to the procedure, there sure were a lot of helpful hands. We got to work de-cabling, wrapping up the instrument, and moving it in place for tomorrow’s transport further up the mountain.

Song of the day

Welll apparently Jared says he plays a version of this song very often..

Color of the day

Aureolin / #fdee00

Color of that Super K fiber optic cable I learned about today.

They say every day is a school day and despite it being a Sunday in sunny Las Campanas I would definitely say it’s been another good day for learning! 

Lesson 1, Size matters: My first lesson of the day was that a 32 oz cup (946 mL to those metrically minded) exists and is considered a normal drink size. To prove this point, Parker was on his third refill by 9am. I have to say I was very impressed, as that’s a lot of liquid for a person to hold. I was even more impressed to find out that 64 oz cups are a thing, though unfortunately one was not on the mountain to demonstrate. Luckily AI is your friend and has shown me what I truly believe will be the next sensation to sweep Las Campanas. 

Lesson 2, With great power comes great responsibly: A day of vibe coding was fun and I’ve never been so close to solving a problem for so long. However, at the end, the main thing I have learnt is that copilot and I do not fully understand each other.

Lesson 3, As we work to create light for others, we naturally light our own way: Today the team were exploring vignetting in the system. Now, I’m not talking about motorway tolls, short stories or an allowance to enter a country, but where your light is cut off in an optical system by things getting in the way! Through some valiant efforts the team have proven that you can add a whole bunch of extra tubes to an optical bench and still not cut off the light from the beam.

I wish you all a pleasant end to the weekend and a good week of learning ahead.

Colour of the day:

Song of the day (points for how many song titles you get):

You know it’s optical alignment day when you open your camera roll to write a blog post and it just looks like this:

It’s been an all-hands-on-deck kind of day. Our activities have ranged from the very low-tech (cardboard tubes) to the very high-tech (new infrared camera in the visitor port) to the sort-of-medium-tech (refractometer to measure glycol concentration). While all that’s going on, at any given moment there are a handful of graduate students in the library furiously writing code to do any number of things when we go on-sky soon.

This morning, Laird and I monopolized the instrument to obsess over cubes. MagAO-X has three different science beamsplitter cubes, which allow us to create an image on two cameras at once. Last run, we replaced our old 50-50 beamsplitter with an r-i beamsplitter, which gets us more throughput by splitting the beam by color rather than just sending half in each direction. A couple days before heading down to Chile, we noticed the r-i cube behaving oddly, so today we took a crack at fixing it. Long story short, we learned two things:
1. If your clamp is too loose, bad things happen.
2. If your clamp is too tight, worse things happen.

Around lunchtime, we got some really exciting news: the infrared camera from our Durham collaborators finally made it onto the mountain! My roommate Viktoria and I swapped spots, and the joint Durham/Leiden team has been gowned up in the cleanroom working tirelessly all afternoon/evening.

And, there’s nothing better than getting to see the fruits of your labors:

Now that’s an Airy disk if I’ve ever seen one.

Honestly, I think this means the color of the day should technically be “infrared.” But humans, unlike snakes, can’t see that far into the electromagnetic spectrum, so I present to you: beamsplitter-cube green – a color that makes an appearance on the left side of the middle cube in this photo.

Song of the Day

Today started with Tiffany putting in some plumbing work for MagAO-X. We added a new glycol port to go into the side instrument panel to cool the new IR camera being installed within the next week.

In order to make space for the new IR camera, Sebastiaan and our collaborators from Durham University, Rob and Viktoria, performed surgery to remove VisX from its home in the instrument. The goal of this upgrade is to allow for first ever IR imaging with MagAO-X and to measure the overall throughput and strehl ratio of the instrument at IR wavelengths to drive design considerations for a future spectrograph.

Luckily, we are still working in the cleanroom since some healthy-looking clouds are making tonight look unpromising for observations.

Despite a rather brisk and windy night last night, I was able to take advantage an extremely dark night and get some pretty impressive pics of the Milky Way and Small/Large Magellanic Clouds with just an Iphone14.

Color of the Day

First, I have to give a shoutout to AZ for having the largest margin win in nearly 3 decades in the tournament. But more importantly, BIG RED is one step closer to making the trip to Indianapolis for the national championship game! With the being said, the color of the day is BIG RED!

Song of the Day