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After the embarrassing fate of only the 3 professionals at the helm yesterday, our elders decided that today was the day to teach the youth how to run things. So this post is by and for the young ones. I took the reigns of the AO correction Mega Desk and closed a loop on my own for the first time on sky!

What is my actual project here? I’m syncing! (and it’s even going alright.) As of today we’ve set up a function generator to guide our wavefront sensing camera. Right now we are just using it to remotely stabilize the acquisition rate for the pyramid WFS camera, but eventually we will connect the pyramid modulator and WFS camera for applying incoherent speckles.

On the LOWFS side, Avalon successfully closed on nine modes in Z-band. But is still battling the good fight against speed. The team is planning on testing again with the camera going faster, which will hopefully will help them towards defeating the plague of astigmatism.

Her continued experiments are not the only thing that makes her a star grad student. She also was the finder of Jared’s glasses, which he had already searched the whole mountaintop for.

Jialin, after a few day’s heroic efforts on our observing schedule, got to her first science target tonight. Though seeing deteriorated, we were still able to get several hours of well corrected data and even resolved a disk.

Warren continues to survive marathon PIAA alignments, conjugation errors, and testing. Today he worked further at better alignment and characterization, but did not respond to requests for further comments.

Our merry crew continues to chug along, as our engineering nights start to transition to science and our system is better prepped than ever.

Finally, our first science result of the run, an extended source brought to us by Dr. Haffert that we collected yesterday.

Anonymous, (mostly) Out of Context Quotes pt.2:

“If you look at the DM, all it is is sparkles!”

as it should be

“It turns out that we put it in the wrong place”
“Well at least we put it somewhere”

our optics bench is quickly running out of room

“Eden, some things Jared says can be safely ignored”

a growth moment the PI did not disagree with

“It’s not loose, it’s a delicate construction. It’s a miracle that it works at all.”

from the creator, about the creation

“I feel like all of your sayings are … farmish”

to someone who is farm-adjacent

“Sometimes small true-true can’t apodize big true-true”

regarding PIAA, the everlasting mystery

“oh, I think I need to do… advanced sh*t.”

the group’s catchphrase

We cannot name the new workstation the “Coronagraph Operator Computer”

lines that conventions can’t cross

“I just get a bunch of old men optical engineers viewing my LinkedIn profile. Where are all the fun singles in my area?”

when job hunting is your only social media exposure

“I am currently rederiving s- and p-polarizations for waveguides”
“yeah, that’s a good thing.”

no sympathy for cramped hands

“I’m high-maintenance as heck.”

a princess and the pea moment

“Would you be terribly offended… if I spooned you?”

dinner table conversations

“What kind of a emergency?”
“… I don’t know, low Strehl?”

regarding why observatory parking space are back-in only

“What kind of bananas university do I belong to?”

“If anyone is going to eat my pear, it’ll be Warren”

playing defense on the midnight lunches

“When the f*** did we get a twitter?”

Upon being featured on our twitter @xwclab

Song of the Day:

From a dad rock get away to having the whole world on your shoulders.

After an eventful 24 hour day, a record might have been broken at the Las Campanas Observatory; we have welcome 3 more University of Arizona scientists, making a total of 12 Arizonians on the Chilean mountains.

Second night on sky began with the customary group sunset viewing photo taken by UA Professor Xiaohui Fan.

With Avalon’s efforts, 10 low order wavefront sensing modes were closed on sky for the first time! “10 might not seem like a lot, but don’t most close on 2?”

Science targets were observed while working towards engineering goals throughout the night. Sebatiaan captured beautiful images of R Aqr. If you’d like to see them, like, comment, and subscribe to this blog to hear the newest updates. Warren continued on PIAA alignment and tested it on a binary, possibly multiple star system, HD 20121.

PDS 201 is the first target observed for the Max Protoplanet Survey on this run. With the great seeing around 0.4, the 3 hour observation through its transit resulted in the total of about 80K high quality images. This also means a grad student will be reducing data happily throughout the next day. And the night ended with some more effort in engineering, characterizing vibration and making Strehl measurements.

While in the kid’s lounge… some might say they are having too much fun.

Since we went on a journey yesterday, let’s go on a getaway today!

From the long days comes an even longer night with the first engineering night of the run. What follows is a brief recount of the 24 hours spent getting MagAO-X running. Today started bright and early with getting MagAO-X up the mountain.

The final 200 meter climb resulted in the instrument finally getting to the summit and installed. The final vertical climb up the elevator was the fastest process of the whole day! It only took a mere 2 minutes, time lapsed in a cool 12 seconds below.

Once on the platform a myriad of tasks were then taken to get it into place. Starting with disassembling the cart and getting it onto the legs. After giving MagAO-X its legs back and getting it into its final position Warren, Eden, and Avalon graced us with this musical number, dubbed “Carol Of The Safety Toe Shoes”, to commemorate the moment.

After this great composition the group aligning the instrument took a break as the Baade telescope posed for us! (It totally wasn’t because of some press)

After seeing BAADE the team took a slight detour into the auxiliary building, specifically to see where the primary mirrors of the Baade and Clay telescope are re-aluminized. The students had fun with the acoustics!

We of course had to be inspected by the burros, they approved of our work.

And finnally after a long day of work the day ended and beckoned forth the night. So, as is per tradition, the team got together and was able to get one final photo with the last vestiages of light.

And thus as day faded into night we continued to work. There were some communication issues that were still working on, but Warren was able to align PIAA. We were also able to get on sky later in the evening. The image below is an image of our first target of the run Theta 1 Orionis B.

So with a long 12 hour work day which continued into the night we were reminded of the song “Don’t Stop Believing” by Journey. As even though the team was presented with different challenges through the day; we never stopped believing.

MagAO-X is here on the mountain, and we have been working to unpack it since its arrival at 10am. As such, anyone looking for coherent prose in what follows is warned to expect disappointment.

We got pics tho.

Unpacking is dirty work, but it’s all worth it.

Our hands look like this:

So his hands can look like this:

Today was very “astronomy with hard hats”

But also “astronomy with cleanroom gowns”

There were occasional meetings of the two, even:

“Maggie” unpacked his new grating for VIS-X:

It was shiny:

The P.I. hugged his electronics rack once again:

MagAO-X let it all hang out:

The success of MagAO-X quite literally rests on students:

There was also a small earthquake, but it’s all good.

Song of the Day

We had 1975, now we got 1977. Ana Tijoux is a Chilean-French MC I used to listen to long before I ever visited Chile.

Trying to rap along with that is challenge mode for maintaining your Spanish-speaking skills. (I used to be able to…)

As a bonus, here’s her 2020 protest song that taught me “guanaco” is slang for the water cannon police use to disperse protests in Chile (because they both spit at you, get it?)