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Day 8 saw the arrival of two colleagues and one hefty tarantula.

Despite having to negotiate the Atlanta airport with speed, they made their connection to Santiago, where they obtained their Mountain Names: Iden and Jackke.

Nobody captured the exact moment they alighted from their servicio especial van, and they’re extremely asleep right now, so you’ll have to trust us: they’re here.

Today we crammed in quite a lot of science and engineering before shutting the instrument down for the night before its Friday morning trip up to the telescope platform. We also wrap it up to prevent heating and intrusion by dust.

Anyway, all that means: tomorrow we’re doing the thing! This means we wake up for breakfast, make approximately 100 trips back and forth between the summit and the almost-summit where the cleanroom is, plug a lot of things into other things, and then do astronomy until it’s time for breakfast again.

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As the only graduate student present who has been on a MagAO Classic run, it fell to me to implement the speech-synthesis ops concept that Jared has long coveted for MagAO-X. (Only so many people can crowd around MegaDesk, but everyone in the control room can hear “loop is closed.”)

Speech synthesis has changed a lot since Jared was a grad student, and professional-grade deep-learning models are surprisingly good these days. Of course, the budget for this was $0.00, so I used OpenTTS. OpenTTS lets you sample a wide variety of synthesis packages with a common API, and I had the container running on AOC (that’s our Adaptive optics Operator Computer) in a few minutes.

The next challenge was to hold auditions. For my auditions I imagined some things MagAO-X might want to say, and gave them to the various models: “Target changed. High-order loop closed. Data saving started. Loop is open. Smoke ’em if you got ’em.”

The previous-generation models were there for comparison, and sounded like absolute butt:

On the plus side, espeak was one of the only included engines with a non-US/non-UK English voice:

Island vibes aside, the synthesis was just not that good. I kept looking. This MaryTTS voice seemed all right:

Just one small problem: Maggieo-X is clearly not male. This voice clearly is. That simply won’t do. How about this from Larynx?

Not bad. But are we sure Maggieo speaks English?

I also ran the Dutch voices past Sebastiaan Haffert, local Dutchman:

Verdict?
“They’re all… very Flemish.”
“Is that bad?”
“No, they’re just very… soft.”

It’s true. The characteristic throaty “g” of the true Dutchman was let down by these synthetic voices. Just click the speaker icon on here to have Google’s model read the same to you. See?

Anyway, auditions continue, but I have a pretty good idea of who will be narrating our ops tomorrow night. Until then,

Song of the Day

Okay, maybe when I posted Bring Me To Life and then Jared had Korn it started a bit of a nu metal trend, but in the end it doesn’t really matter.

I don’t play many video games, mainly because I am usually in the business of telling computers what to do, and therefore really resent them telling me what to do. One recent exception was Sayonara Wild Hearts, which is incredible. More of an album-length interactive music video than a “game,” I guess, but anything that includes:

• firing heart-shaped projectiles
• from your motorcycle
• at a three-headed robot dog
• as a metaphor for overcoming heartbreak
• (narrated by Queen Latifah)

has to be good. And, of course, the music complements the v i b e s perfectly. (And is strongly inspired by CHVRCHES, no doubt.)

For some reason, nobody’s taken the unadulterated audio and overlaid it on gameplay for a ready-made music video, but if you can ignore the dings and bleeps this should give you some of the flavor.

Bonus Tarantula

Content warning: incredible arachnid. Click to tarantulate.

This little guy took up residence on Avalon’s door this evening, requiring XKID xpert Noah Swimmer to remove him.

Warren and I took different paths to Santiago but were able to meet up at the infamous Starbucks in the domestic terminal.

We continued our journey onwards took the plane to La Serena and then the bus to the observatory. It took me only 78 days this time to come back to LCO and it feels like I never left. Like a certain PI said: “home is where the wifi connects”. This rings very true for LCO.

Our days immediately started with work due to tight schedule because of the many projects that we are doing at MagAO-X. Warren dived into the clean room to assemble his new monstrosity to mount the PIAA lenses. And, I started aligning a laser into a single-mode fiber. This was necessary to take some calibrations to improve the reduction of data from our last run. Its quite tricky to get enough light out of a single mode fiber when not all axis of your mount work. After spending about 2.5 hours I finally got enough light through and I was able to finish my calibrations. I finished at 2 AM! However, the night sky at that time is always amazing.

During daytime we were able to make big strides on the integration of the camera software of VIS-X IFU and MagAO-X. This will hopefully mean I won’t have to leave my laptop beneath the instrument again during the observations.

I choose a song from Bon Jovi which is one of the few artists I have actually seen IRL. This was part of the Royal Dutch Beach concerts almost 10 year ago.

I’m a C++ programmer, which means I’ve been here for a week. Consequences include I’m doing laundry already, and I have no idea what day of the week it is (that might be a memory leak joke).

Sebastiaan and Warren arrived today, and immediately started tearing the instrument apart (as expected).

The XKID crew warmed it up today to inspect some things on the inside, which gave us an opportunity to go visit and see the guts up close.

We’ve been seeing these Neotropical Stick Grasshoppers a bunch. This one was flexing for me after lunch:

The machine shop sink outside the cleanroom has been decorated:

I think one of our cleanroom friends overdid the sun bathing today, and was a little out of it at sunset.

As in all things in life, there are ways to separate the people who have really made it. The signs are there if you look:

So you could title my series of songs “concerts I went to with my best friend Ben.” Here we switch from country to hard rock and metal, and this will be the first in a sub-series about a specific show. We went to a concert in Omaha to see a band (coming up, no spoilers here), for which there were two openers. The first opener was a total surprise, that no one there had ever heard of (we didn’t even know there was going to be a first opener). I’m not trying to be that guy, you know, cool before it was cool.

They come out, and I’m grumpy “who the F is this?” And then Ben looks at me and says “are they . . . do they have … bagpipes?”. And then it was on, into the mosh pit we went. The band was KoRn (I can’t do the R right here). Awesome show. Ben still has a dollar bill signed by Jonathan Davis in the CD case he bought that night. KoRn got huge shortly after and we get to say we saw them when.

So here’s my favorite KoRn song:

Update: I am a big enough deal that I travel with my own personal tech support. Thanks to Joseph I can now write KoЯN.

Today Laird and I continued alignment on MagAO-X with some frustration but ultimately success. The MKIDS team has provided us (among other additions) with a new dichroic that has made a nice addition to the instrument.

Occasional robotic and sometimes chipmunk-like sound bites were heard around the cleanroom today, indicating that MagAO-X may be soon equipped with some auditory additions…

Laird and I (now sometimes referred to as Lardy and Eva) will be freed from our bubbles tomorrow as long as we pass our nose-swabbing tests in the morning. This means I can very soon visit my good friend the espresso machine! Non-bubbled members got to enjoy a visit from Carlos the culpeo at the lodge.

Not to worry, vizzy activity near the cleanroom has kept all members happy – bubbled or not.

Some of my favorite mountain dwellers were spotted by the PI today as well.

Group members Warren and Sebastiaan are en route to LCO so we will have new familiar faces arriving soon!

Song of the day is brought to you by Melanie:

This song was introduced to me by both my dad and aunt in conjunction I suppose. Back in the days of cds, my dad’s sister burned a cd for him with some of his favorites and songs they had shared a likeness for growing up together. This charmer made it on that cd and was played nearly every morning by my dad – quite loudly through the house – in order to encourage my brother and I out of bed to get to school on time. On that same cd you can find the song I was named after (I’ll let you guess the title) by Roxy Music. Both of these have found their way onto my personal playlists, and sometimes help me get out of bed in the morning to this day.