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Today was a special day; barbecue day. The saddest thing about this was that we just had our 24hour installation and observation marathon. Which meant that I missed barbecue lunch TT_TT. However, I realized that I hadn’t send it my night lunch form yet and I requested a dinner plate. I was still on time! This was a happy little accident as Bob Ross would call it.

Jared told everyone that we had to be together in the telescope control room at 19:30. He was very strict about it. We all wondered what that was about, probably to take a group picture? One of the major upgrades during this run is the addition of a differential polarization imaging mode. We added a polarization beam splitter to our science camera beam splitter cubes. And we made a remarkable discovery. Our 50/50 science beam splitter created the g-band ghost we have been chasing for a couple of years now. We put a left-over g-band filter and a post together to create our new g-band imaging mode that we can use without the beam splitters!

Another special part about the night was that Chile changed from summer time to winter time. I think this was the first time I ever had this happen during an observing run. This was a lucky streak for me because Duo the owl is always out to hunt you if you haven’t done your daily exercises. It became midnight and I was about to lose my streak but at the strike of midnight the clock shifted back by an hour! I was saved! I could keep my streak. It was also weird that the clock here goes back an hour at midnight instead of 3AM. Chile actually had a lot of interesting things happening with switching daylight savings. You can read all about it on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Chile .

I also saw a great Vizzy hopping around the Aux building. They are really cute animals!! Are you not entertained? Well back to beginning of today’s story. I got my barbecue fix during the night. It was great. But back again. Jared had all of us together at 19:30 because there was a big announcement:

I am really happy that I was awarded this prize for my work on adaptive optics up to now. And, I also want to congratulate my fellow awardees Maaike van Kooten en Rebecca Jensen-Clem. There is still much to look forward to in AO over the next 2 decades. So, stay tuned!

I watched Gladiator II on my flight to Santiago and I really enjoyed it. Gladiator is also one of my favorite movies. You should be able to find a famous quote from the movie if you read the blog post closely. For now I will just drop in the song “Now we are free” from the Gladiator movie. So all in all, lot’s of special things today and this is it for now and see you next time.

I intended to write a beautiful entry in the blog someday but Joseph intercepted me emerging upstairs to the control room and decided that I could start writing at 3 am, in our shift of 24 hours on a row, so let me invite you to enjoy my tiredness. Hello everyone 🙂 You can María everything but these days especially me!

The morning went by slowly, as we lifted MagAO-X to the Nasmyth platform. Us, happy minions, were busy hooking screws onto the instrument, crawling around the platform floor, and running back and forth with the ultra elevator. Time froze, as we slowly realised that only a few of the many hours we still had to stay awake had actually passed. The polarimeter almost gave us a hard time, but in the end, it’s installed and working.

We started cabling around noon, right when they decided to rotate the telescope and lower the secondary mirror so Parker could put his accelerometer in place. I got to enjoy riding the platform once only the DM cabling was left though, and they let me move the elevator down (happy potato). As dinner time rolled in, us minions waited for the supervisors to give the okay—though the second we got the green light, we sprinted to the cars… just in case they changed their mind.

But all the hard work had its reward and we could start observing this same night. Let the first night of observations of the 2025A run begin!

I did some photography today, enjoy the Viscachas and the Milky Way 🙂

I keep discovering short stories about the observatory, but in my only two and a half days here I have already learned the basics of the singing rocks, the favourite spots of all our fauna and who are the crazy drivers I should avoid getting in the car with. I am still confused about who shall I talk to in Spanish though…

I haven’t watched any worth it movie lately tbh, but we have been talking about The Sword in the Stone, which reminded me of my other favourite Disney movie, Atlantis, and its most famous quote, only for those of you literate: “Ki-Ki-Kidamaschnaga”. While the rest figure it out, enjoy the song of the day (and night), which according to Joseph we can reclaim from the other MUSE – Starlight.

Before we shut MagAO-X down to prepare it for the summit, we had some last-minute tests to do. Over breakfast, Laird and Jared kept talking about “doing the green laser”, which I assumed was some kind of dance move and/or illicit drug. It turns out they actually wanted to send a green laser through the instrument to identify which optical surface was killing green light throughput, which is also cool, I guess.

This run will also involve commissioning a new polarimetry mode, thanks to our Brazilian colleagues. Here’s some colorful cubes inside our instrument, one of which splits polarized light.

As you know, MagAO-X is famous for its detailed procedures, always followed to the letter. Today’s procedure is called “Installing MagAO-X on the Telescope”, the title of which may fool you into thinking we installed MagAO-X on the telescope.

While we always follow our procedures to the letter, we also change them all the time. Today we enjoyed what in the biz is called a “process improvement”. By splitting the installation over two days (just like last time), we add a bit of slack into the schedule and prevent premature derangement of students and Ph.D.s alike.

Today we de-cabled, wrapped, and moved half of MagAO-X.

The Isuzu flat-bed truck featured in many of our procedure documents is, alas, no more. I think it’s been set free to roam the Pan-American highway for the rest of its days. Fortunately the new(-ish) Hyundai Mighty rose to the occasion.

That means we’ll start tomorrow with the optical table already staged at the summit. There’s still plenty left to do tomorrow (starting with section 6.3.6 of the handbook), but we’ll be better-rested and make fewer mistakes.

Not that we ever make those.

This means we had an evening “off”. (The final evening off for several weeks, for some of us.) We had to make the most of it.

Nature

The most unexpected wildlife of all was a spotting of Felis catus.

Billiards

A few of us were not ready to turn in after sunset, and went in search of other amusements.

Even when given no tasks, the physicists find a way to do physics… for fun.

How disgusting.

Blog Rules Compliance Certification

I only see movies because my friends drag me to them. One exception is airplanes, where I’m forced by circumstance to do nothing for an extended period. There’s also nobody around to incredulously yell “You’ve never seen Alien?!” which is a definite plus.

On the flight to Santiago, I watched Wicked (Part I). It sure was… something. Kind of an odd addition to Jon M. Chu’s directorial oeuvre; I’d rather have Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022) or Crazy Rich Asians (2018).

Anyway, where’s part two of that, Jon? We’re all waiting.

Song of the Day

Bet you thought it was going to be from Wicked, but no! It’s an anime opening theme.

Wait, where are you going? Come back!

It’s really good, I promise! It’s critically acclaimed!!

I frequently find myself running low on energy transiting Santiago’s airport, but the last two times I’ve been saved by Yoko Kanno’s soundtrack to the award-winning show Cowboy Bebop. 10/10.

The Leiden team is so back! It is now the Europeans’ turn to tell you about their magical journey to LCO. Throughout the full blog post, we will also play a little game: Find the differences!

We left Amsterdam without delay and got to Madrid 6 hours before our next flight. Plenty of time to waste and not check properly our next gate yeyyy! To pass the time, Eugenia and I went on a mission: Getting to the medical center of Madrid’s airport because she had to get an injection done. We left Sebastiaan working on a proposal due literally one hour later, and he barely realized we were gone, so we set sail for an incredible adventure. You might remember from the past run how intricated Madrid’s airport can be. If you don’t, I suggest to check it out here. After asking a bunch of people and mistaking our way a couple of times, we found the way to get to the medical center: We had to go through passport control machines, go to floor 0 (basically a basement), then come back up, go through passport control again but in the opposite direction (the policeman had to let us through manually) and then go through a security check (??) to be able to go back to the cafe’ where Sebastiaan was waiting for us. Pretty scary that the medical center of an airport is so inaccessible, right?? Well, and then people ask me why I hate Madrid’s airport. In my favorite movie ever, Donnie Darko, Gretchen asks Donnie “What if you could go back in time and take all those hours of pain and darkness and replace them with something better?”. Well, I know which hours of pain and darkness I want to replace in my life: All the hours spent in Madrid’s airport. With what? With a group of happy viscachas chilling in the sun.

Anyways, let’s bring in some fun: Find the differences between these two pictures of Sebastiaan before we left and when we came back (hover on the pic for the solution).

We then had a relaxing dinner, since there was so much time to go to the wrong gate afterwards. Let’s continue to play with another before-after spot the differences game.

We then proceeded to gate S16 and waited to board. Eugenia even gave us the idea to make an April’s fools joke to our fellow Leiden people saying we have lost our plane. Ah ah ah! So funny! We then tried to board the plane but our tickets didn’t work for some reason. That’s when the Iberia lady at the gate looked at us and said “You are flying with LATAM, gate S44, RUN“. Now, can someone please explain why two airlines that are partners have two flights to Santiago from a same airport at the SAME EXACT TIME (23:55)? In our defense, yes, we knew we were flying with LATAM and not Iberia, but they are partners and also our tickets were printed by Iberia so they had their logo on it. I am honestly surprised we were the only people who were deceived by this badly designed schedule. After running for our lives, we were the last people to board the flight. Pretty scary. So, this is the story of how we were about to loose a flight while chilling for 6 hours at the airport.

The journey proceeded smoothly and we got to Santiago surprisingly rested after a lot of sleep on the plane. Again, try to find the differences between our arrival in Santiago for the 2024B run (on the right) and this run (on the left):

A few hours later we got to La Serena safely together with Joseph and Jeb. Laird was right after us, coming up with the following car. Not tired enough from our long trip, we headed right away to the clean room to (successfully) install new PIAACMC and align new prisms for the Self-Coherent Camera. Laird was also working with Tiago and Rodrigo on the polarimeters.

Right after, we have witnessed not one but two (!!) incredible events: One of the best green flashes ever seen in history – which we have slightly captured in a picture as well – and three foxies together!

Finally, I want to leave you with this hyper-memeable picture that you didn’t know you needed. Simply replace “ribs” with something else. You can thank me later.

The song of the day is a song that a random dude on my last plane made me listen to with his headphones. I don’t know if he stalked me and so he knew my name or if it was just a funny coincidence… But the name of the song is Helena. Enjoy or be creeped out. Cheers! I am going to sleep.

Hey it’s ya boi, JK. No really, Jay here with the latest updates pertaining to the 2025A run. We experienced a very colorful and interesting journey getting here, as we saw in Parker’s previous post. That entire expedition had us pretty much saying to each other out loud, ““Where are you Going? So full of Hope? There is NO HOPE!”.

In my opinion, one of the more interesting aspects of our trip was our serendipitous run-in with a fellow astronomer– Dr. Susana Deustua. This run-in happened as we were waiting for our hotel vouchers on the early morning of March 31st. As we were commiserrating with the others in the line around us, she caught wind of the fact that our group of obvious Americans were trying to get to La Serena and put together the fact that we were also en route to an observatory. We ended up at the same hotels, and she ended up accompanying us all the way to the La Florida airport in La Serena before needing to part ways to visit many of the other observatories in the area. What’s crazy, but ultimately unsurprising, is that she knew a lot of my old colleagues at NAU and Lowell Observatory, as well as some faculty at UA and Carnegie; Astronomy is such a small world.

We facilitated the healing of our battle wounds incurred from the journey to LCO with a classic Babcock Breakfast combo.

So good! The red stuff is a viciously hot (but tasty) mixture of some kind of chili paste in a mason jar that I’ve never seen before, but allegedly floats around the dining room from time to time. I’ll definitely be looking for this stuff more often.

We continued the work day with many Carlos sightings. He has been just hanging out in the front yard of the lodge for the entire day, and seems a lot less skittish than usual.

Some improvements to the Observatory are being made. By the Magellan telescopes, they’ve started what appears to be a roadway to a new instrument storage facility. As well as a w i n d s o c c ….!

The most exciting quality of life upgrade that they’re implementing here is our very own grocery store and taste of home!!! Can’t wait!!!!!!!!!!!!

As it is Tuesday, we experienced all the hustle and bustle of the weekly tourneaux. Along with more Carlos sightings.

As for lab work, Parker has been hard at work with the calibrations associated with the new accelerometer project. It turns out that it’s the classic physics lab experiments that will hopefully make short work of this calibration phase. Back to basics! To construct the pendulum setup, Parker had to get creative and make use of materials on his person to get optimum results.

We ended the day greeting our Brazilian colleagues Tiago and Rodrigo. Welcome to LCO!

Today brought on a solid start to the run, with a lot of tedious but really important lab work completed. Tomorrow is another solid day of engineering and we’re hoping that Laird is able to arrive after being delayed to weather-related issues. We’re also wishing luck and safe travels to Joseph and the first of the Leiden crew (Sebastiaan and Elena).

To comply with this run’s new blog rule, the movie quote I used is from Mad Max: Furiosa, which was something I watched on the long plane ride.

Song of the Day

Song unrelated, but a cool music video from one of my faves, Kaki King.