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Yesterday Logan and I arrived here to LCO just after sunset to a group of familiar and friendly faces. The lengthy travel day (well, 27 hour day if you came from Tucson like me) was as enjoyable as one could argue for, especially considering the potential hiccups that can come with international travel in Covid times! That is not to say that our PI and several members of the team went anywhere short of great lengths to prepare us all properly and give Logan and I handy tips as we were the third and final group to arrive.

As Logan and I are the last to bubble within our XWCL group for 2022A, we have spent the day mostly in our rooms working on creating a list of photometric reference targets for when we are on sky. To be more accurate – my involvement was mostly Logan teaching me about handy packages in python & online data bases that would have made my early undergrad ASTR courses at Steward a lot less painful, but that isn’t the point of learning astronomical coordinate systems is it!

Our first arrivers (Jared, Joseph, and Sebastiaan) got to experience their 4th covid test of the trip today, all of these being the brain-tickling kind.

We are all subject to weekly testing here at LCO, but feels like a small price to pay for the experiences that come with it. As you may have read in Justin’s blog from Day 8, I am a member of the LCO first-timers club. As this is my first time at any active-research telescope, I feel incredibly fortunate to be on this trip with a group of incredibly intelligent and hard-working people! I saw the milky way (via the naked eye) for the very first time last night, and Logan was able to point out the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds to me. What an experience! I am eager to burst this bubble (by following protocol of course) and embark on what I know will be a very exciting and special learning experience.

Here is the song of the day – Starlight by Muse. This is inspired by it both being one of my favorites and that it seems rather fitting. I hope you enjoyed my first shot at blogging!

This picture is to show you that some work happened today:

The following images are just filler:

The big MagAO-X news is that Logan and Avalon arrived today! All three of our teams have successfully made it to LCO with no problems at SCL. If you squint down in the valley you can see the dust trail of their van, which we noticed while eating dinner outside.

Now for the big news of the day. I have a new friend!!!!!!! On my way for a run, I strolled out of room just as one of the burros came through two of the dorms and started down the path ahead of me.

Once I started to catch up, he turned around. I think maybe he realized I was between him and his family, but he also didn’t mind much. In fact, he put his head down, relaxed his ears, and took a couple of steps towards me: which the farm kid in me recognized as classic horse for “hi, it’s ok to pet me”. I did not misinterpret:

Though the body language is the same, unlike the horses I know, burros do not appear to like their ears scritched. But face, nose, and chin are fine.

I then heard a clip clop behind me and realized it wasn’t just us:

You’ll recognize our friend the lovely Backup Burrito. She realized it was me and kept on trucking lest I put her back to work.

About 20 minutes later I passed them when I was running back up the hill from the bodega. The adults just looked at me briefly and kept going. But Backup Burrito stopped and acted like she was trying to work up the courage to smell my hand. But not yet.

I was mistaken, but now I’m not: Sebastiaan, Avalon and I are the only team members on this run who haven’t been to Las Campanas Observatory (LCO) before. However, perhaps situation this extends to at least some of the avid blog readers, so I’d like to share what some of my experience has been like thus far.

Before that, I’d like to list a couple of additional tips to Joseph’s travel steps on the way to LCO, and then out of the bubble.

Bonus step:

Our last two comrades, Logan and Avalon, are due to arrive tomorrow, and when they are on the driving portion of the trip from La Serena to LCO they may be asked to stop and fill out the daily health check form in the first guard post building they encounter. That was something new to Laird and me as Joseph and company were only asked to do so once at LCO. It may behoove Logan and Avalon to preemptively fill out the form ahead of time while at the La Serena airport (if you can connect to WiFi, which I couldn’t) with something that looks like this:

• passport ID#
• place of work (mountain)
• any of the following symptoms (no symptoms)
• community exhibition (none of the above)

Now as far as the bubble procedure goes, you’re more or less relegated to your room and the ample outdoor spaces appropriately distanced from everyone – except maybe your bubble cohort(s). When it is your time, i.e. the morning of the 4th day you’ve been at LCO, you will be beckoned to the paramedic on the mountain who resides in the bodega (image featured below).

More precisely you walk to the portable building next to a warehouse and behind the ambulance (also featured below) where you’ll receive a rapid antigen test. Five minutes later you should theoretically have a negative test result and you’ll be free to move about the mountain facilities with a mask on.

As this was the case for Laird and me, we went back to our rooms for a short spell, and then reunited with the rest of the MagAO-X team at lunch time.

Now since it was and remains irrefutably true that the answer to Laird’s blog post from yesterday is yes, I had time to explore LCO today. (At least the pupil vignetting is no longer an issue, but what’s a few optical hardware re-positionings amongst friends? Nothing, right? Okay, so not nothing… we’re definitely going to realign the position of the science camera beam-splitter and possibly the LOWFS camera position tomorrow, but we’re practically done after that…) Here are my results:

I went for a run, and I found some lively road blocks.

If I’m not mistaken, I made my way to the site of the 40″ and 100″ telescopes where I found another surprise.

A Guanaco! Unfortunately I could only get within about 80 feet of it before it started to move away from me, so apologies for the poor image quality.

And finally after dinner while walking with Jared back to the cleanroom where MagAO-X currently resides, we snapped a few pictures of a culpeo. Jared definitely captured the best culpeo still, so kudos to him for lending it out for the blog.

I think that’s all of the animals I’m likely to see minus the airborne ones, so not bad for one day. And for anyone wondering about the viscachas, I was actually with Laird when he snagged that viscacha duo photo – it counts!

I’ve lived in Tucson for a while now, so I’m definitely used to some spaced out housing outside of city limits, but scenes like this are completely foreign to me:

In other words, we’re not in the suburbs anymore (Arcade Fire, The Suburbs).

So for the last 48 hours Justin Knight and I have been busy working hard at the optical alignment of MagAO-X. On Saturday, after 30 hours of travelling we arrived at LCO, and had a great dinner (delivered to our door here at LCO as we are in the bubble for the next 3 days). Then right after dinner we inserted the upper periscope mirror and aligned the upper optical table of MagAO-X to the lower table. This then allowed the rest of the team (led by Jared) to cable and optically test the Tweeter connections (with the PyWFS camera) on Sunday.

After some much needed sleep we checked all the optical beam paths on Sunday afternoon. We also set up the PEPS II floating table control system — which is cool since it allows the whole MagAO-X to float on a cushion of air — eliminating vibrations from the lab floor. That allows for really excellent stable images (no burring due to floor vibrations shaking optics).

The optics were well aligned with our bright laser (or at least we thought so). But… later that night we looked with our default white light laser and found that there was slight “clipping” of one beam in one place somewhere in the 7.5 meter optical train. But it wasn’t obvious where it was on Sunday night (and we were tired since it was midnight).

But by Monday morning (instead of working on my telescope proposal that was due at noon today) I realized where exactly the “clipping” was likely coming from. Indeed Justin and found this and fixed it (see photo below).

The beam was a few mm to far to the right and was just slightly clipping one of the mounts of the PyWFS optical train (there are 42 optical surfaces in MagAO-X’s science optical train –it can be exciting tracking just one slight optical clipping down!). But one way another we knew we’d find it eventually.

Anyways MagAO-X is realigned with lots of room for the beam to move around without any similar clipping (see photo above). To test this Jared rotated the K-mirror so that we simulated the Magellan telescope to move from vertical pointing to just 30 degrees above the horizon (K-mirror rotated from -55 to -25 deg) . Even though the beam sweeps through a large volume in this full simulation of observing conditions –no other “beam clipping” were observed. So the optical alignment looks like it is ready to go on sky. Now MagAO-X is dust proof with all its panels on. Sebastiaan was able to very quickly make a nearly perfectly flat wavefront. So like MagAO-X is making “outer space-quality” images–at least in the lab (see photo below).

But perhaps the most import data I took so far this run (so far) is seeing two vizzys just hanging out at the clean room

Still lots of work to do, but the optical alignment phase is mostly over until we align to the telescope on Saturday!

So here is my song of the day. One way or another we where going to align MagAO-X’s twin optical beams into parallel lines…

My day started with a classic LCO breakfast.

After that we ran up the hill and cabled our 2040 actuator MEMS DM. We got it on the first try! We are getting better at this procedure.

After that, we turned the cleanroom over to our Bubbled comrades. Laird and Justin put in a loooong day of aligning the optics. We sat up in the library and watched. It’s sort of like a medical procedure drama.

We found this book in the library, which we might need if any REAL problems come up.

After taking the above photo and circling around Justin, I started down the path to begin my walk up. Then I noticed a sliver of moon hanging over the valley. Then the following ensued:

Joseph got an up close and personal Vizcacha interaction.

The reference to bananas in the slack convo is to this blog post from the MagAO-Classic Age of Legends. We have a long history of shenanigans with the cleanroom vizcacha family.

The post-sunset show was extravagant tonight.

Changing up the sound tonight for the song of the day. I think this is the best of the “new” Metallica, as good as the old classics.