As a viscacha, I can’t claim to understand what “preparing a talk” or “attending a defense” or “de-bugging” mean (though I have some ideas about de-bugging).
I do know one thing, however, and that is that the chain of blog posts must remain unbroken. It seems like time has gotten away from the human members of this collaboration, so—if nobody else is going to do it—I’m going to have to write one!
It’s very hard to write without thumbs, so I’ll keep it brief.
Here’s a pic of my friend Carlos Culpeo, who has been hired by the MagAO-X team as the mascot of 2022A.
He’s kind of bashful, so please excuse him for not looking at the camera. You can see my apartment at the Magellans in the background at left.
And here’s the song of the day: The Time Warp from Rocky Horror Picture Show.
The XWCL had a rather successful day up here on the mountain, even considering the Covid-mandated limit of 4 people in the control room (including the telescope operators). The team adapted and built a mega-desk ‘junior’ in the kitchen/lounge area of the telescope, wherein the remaining members of the group could stay well connected to those in the control room.
Mega-desk Jr. seen with a target image and supported by some light reading.
Throughout the night the team successfully closed the loop on several targets and saved quite a bit of data!
Dr. Laird Close investigated a 6.7 mag young star with a protoplanetary disk, taking 93k frames in H-alpha and continuum in MagAO-X’s SDI mode with the 2 EMCCD cameras running at once. This observation was done over 2.5 hours running with 900 modes corrected at 2KHz in 0.6′ seeing and 1.5-1.3 airmasses.
Images of the young star in H-alpha (0.65 microns) and Continuum (0.668 microns). Shown here is the average of the best 10% of the images taken over the 2.5 hour integration.
These images are nearly diffraction limited with a 24 mas FWHM. Taking the differences between these images after a full pipeline reduction will reveal any H-alpha emitting objects – like protoplanets! To quote the astronomer himself, ‘Tonight was a good night for MagAO-X, it really proved it’s mettle!’ – Dr. Close
Along with this, Dr. Sebastiaan Haffert took a look at PZ Tel B – a low mass (in between 30 and 70 times the mass of Jupiter) brown dwarf companion orbiting its primary star PZ Tel A in the constellation Telescopium. The two have an angular separation of about 0.33 arcseconds, meaning they are separated by roughly 18 AUs. After some investigation, I discovered our very own Dr. Jared Males (though not yet a Dr. at the time) and Dr. Laird Close were on the team who discovered PZ Tel B at the 8m Gemini-South Telescope here in Chile in 2010!
Mega-desk Jr. Serving the team well by displaying some MagAO-X action during coronagraph alignment for PZ Tel B.
To view the brown dwarf companion, a Lyot coronagraph was aligned with the primary star. Once alignment of the pupil plane, occulting focal plane mask, and Lyot-plane stop were complete, the companion appeared immediately in the z-band!
PZ Tel B seen encircled in the lower right corner of this plot after occulting the primary star. For reference, the distance from the center of the primary star to PZ Tel B is about the distance from our Sun to Uranus!
In other fun companion news – Logan and I got very close to this run’s mascot Carlos Culpeo. I am certain he was hopeful that I had a snack for him, but unfortunately I did not have any left-overs from dinner to offer.
Mr. Culpeo interested in potential dinner-offerings. Imaged moments before deciding humans were indeed scary no matter what food they may have in their hand, and taking off into the sunset. The lovely twin Magellan Telescopes seen in the background!Logan buttering up the culpeo-companion, though unfortunately also did not have an dinner to share with Carlos Culpeo!
As it was a good day for the team and MagAO-X, so the song of the day shall reflect these good feelings as the sun rises, and we settle!
Song of the day: Walking On a Dream by Empire of the Sun.
Full disclosure: empanada Sunday is not going anywhere – that was just clickbait to lure in readers. However, this is my last empanada Sunday since I leave the observatory in just a few days. I think the chefs knew as much because they baked an enormous party-sized empanada for all to enjoy. And all of us who received a night lunch (sorry, Laird) also enjoyed individual-sized empanadas of the strictly meat or cheese variety.
After the post-empanada excitement haze wore off and we were headed up to the telescope, I was again beset by the reality that last night the guider in front of MagAO-X had absconded away with several hours of engineering time; the hope for tonight was that wasn’t a repeatable event. After some team introspection inside the telescope dome, we agreed that a sighting of a mountain vizzy was a good omen, as it had been for MagAO-X’s move up to the telescope.
A good omen.
While I was outside of the telescope dome trying to change our luck, Logan, Joseph, and Avalon were inside watching it open up!
The Clay dome opens, and MagAO-X prepares to start its night.
At some later point in time in the night after loops were being closed and ADC movements were being correctly sent without offsets (not featured in any images, but just know that stars were walking away, seemingly on their own, from Jared for a while), the MagAO-X operators wanted to show everyone how to perform coronagraphic alignment. Sebastiaan went through the process of aligning the ‘bump mask’ in the coronagraphic entrance pupil which covers the dead actuator from the tweeter DM, then the larger opaque focal plane mask, and just as he was about to demonstrate positioning one of the Lyot stops, well, he couldn’t. Why? Because he couldn’t move the filter wheel of course!
Sebastiaan teaching everyone how to align the Lyot coronagraph. Featured in this image is the alignment of a focal plane mask.
The lack of fwlyot movement initiated a fair bit of troubleshooting: first in software, then with respect to the hardware. In the case of hardware, Jared and Laird, then separately Jared again had to go out to MagAO-X to give the filter wheel a stern talking to about its performance. In the end, there could be some controller issues, but the big resolve in aligning a Lyot stop was re-seating a cable which had a bent connector pin.
After this hiccup the night was relatively smooth as the next two images clearly demonstrate.
A PSF core of a star and its first Airy ring at H-alpha.
First light through the aligned Lyot coronagraph. Thanks for the screenshot, Sebastiaan (and Joseph).
Very nice PSF and coronagraphic PSF images were taken with more and more modes used in closed loop, so MagAO-X is well on its way. Moreover, empanadas were enjoyed by all throughout the night, although at least in my case, there was a slight complication from eating an empanada and wearing a face mask right after: my mask smelled like fried pastry dough for a while. Nevertheless, a successful night in all regards, yet perhaps it wasn’t only the mountain vizzy, but also the empanadas yielding better outcomes for us.
Not to dwell, but last night there was a LOT of talking between the TOs and those in charge of the telescope, and not so much science or engineering. Tonight we’ve definitely moved forward, so one might say we were a little less talk and a little more rock: (Less talk more rokk, Freezepop)
When installing an instrument on a research telescope, the astronomers and opticians must transition from a day to a night schedule. This happens with an early start and a very (very, very) long day.
09:15: Crane operations begin at the cleanroom building
10:00: Bubble-inhabitants go to get nose-poked in exchange for their freedom
10:30: Formerly bubbled individuals encounter Gary Guanaco on their way back to the lodge
10:32: MagAO-X gets reacquainted with the Isuzu flatbed for its ride up to the telescope
12:00: Top Gun theme plays
Technically, since they were riding down the lift, the theme should be reversed:
12:40: Hunt for wild viscachas at the summit
(The hunt was unsuccessful.)
12:45: Boldly push the envelope and go to lunch with less than covid-mandated one hour offset from the crew (in the interests of getting back to work faster)
12:45 – 13:15: scarf down your lunch and get back because the crew’s lunch break is long over and they’re lifting the instrument already
14:00: Crane operations continue, now with a different crane
14:30: Crane operations conclude, alignment team springs into action. Meanwhile, MegaDesk is reassembled in the telescope control room.
14:35: MegaDesk experiences intense jealousy when confronted with UltraDesk, the Telescope Operator’s workstation. P.I. immediately orders more monitors.
14:35-17:45: Fine alignment proceeds
17:45-18:15: Dinner
18:37: sunset
18:43-23:51: cabling
22:00: Deformable mirror cabling begins
22:33: Deformable mirror cabling ends
00:01: Opening the dome
Taking some infrared astronomer data.
00:41: Light down the pipe, kinda
00:41-5:15: “For technical reasons it is not possible to determine all possible error causes”
No pictures exist of this inauspicious time. However, Laird did borrow my tripod and later send me this photograph, which he called “possibly the only data we will take tonight.” We at MagAO-X would like it to be known that, this time, it was no fault of our own.
Meteor over Magellan Clay by Professor Laird Close. 48.02 second exposure, 1/1s shutter speed. After integration ended, the tripod fell over.
05:16: Light down the pipe
Hey, time to start our night!
5:53: Loop is closed with 1000 modes
eps Sag
06:58: Sunrise
08:06: Going to bed
Song of the Day
I’ve been waiting a while to use this one on a blog post. Vaguely Depeche Mode-y, but contemporary. Song of the day is “Dot in the Sky” by Drab Majesty.
As Avalon so illuminated in yesterday’s post, she and I are the last group members to arrive and bubble at LCO. Today was the last full day of our bubble. Tomorrow is the big day: moving MagAO-X to the telescope and finally going on sky! Tomorrow morning we will get our brains poked, then get the ok to join the team in moving heavy things followed by staying up all night doing what we’re all here for. Can’t wait. I love observing, and it’s been so long.
I have been spending my bubble working on target lists for the run. I wrote a script to grab bright stars for getting the AO system up and running. And there are many folks who have targets they plan to hit with MagAO-X, both on our team (like Laird and I), and our collaborators from other institutions. The telescope control system (TCS) requires a very specific catalog set up to take our targets, so I’ve been working on getting mine and everyone else’s targets into the right format. You’d think that wouldn’t take too long but here we are. So my bubble has been quite full despite not joining the rest of the team yet.
As far as goings-on to report for the day, Avalon and I took a walk out to the other telescopes on site.
The 100″ Irenee du Pont telescopeThe 40″ Henrietta Swope telescope
We also took copious mirror selfies as is required.
Mirror con cacaMirror con crack
It was a pretty good walk with much uphill to get the blood pumping.
We returned just in time for the briefing on tomorrow’s MagAO-X moving evolution (that’s Navy-speak for “event”, or “a thing you will be doing”).
In other news prep for tomorrow went right along in the clean room. Jared shared some pics of folx in the clean room doing clean room things, and someone’s head is inside MagAO-X. I don’t know any more information that that dear readers, because I am bubbled.
I suppose I could ask, but eh *shrug*.
Avalon discovered today that the XWCL daily-post-on-observing-runs blog tradition goes back to 2012, making this our 10th anniversary! Whoooo. So the song of the day is 10 Years, by Daði Freyr (Daði & Gagnamagnið). If you’re not familiar with this Icelandic group, you owe it to yourself to watch this one.
