Blog

We haven’t seen a cloud yet on this run, but that doesn’t mean we’re sitting pretty. MagAO-X is highly optimized for highly optimal conditions, and these ain’t that. Don’t take it from me, take it from the conditions plot:

After a promising start, everything went to heck. I’d love to tell you about the stuff we observed, but the results are embargoed. (By poor seeing, mostly.)

We did use the ultra-secret ghost-busted g band filter (seen previously here). It’s been a huge hit, and Jay’s already shared early reductions of the HR 4796A debris disk in 500-ish nm light (see Parker’s post).

People love the g’ band filter, Jared. All the science on this run came from that little filter on a stick!

Prof. Laird Close, Ph.D.

In other news, we got a special delivery today: Dr. Logan Pearce, and her student Emi Reith from the University of Michigan. Here they are aboard the Plane Train™:

Here they are, 13 hours later, after entering Chile:

Meanwhile, back on the plain trane, trouble’s a-comin’:

That’s right, we’re expecting a shipment of Josh, Katie, and Eden in the near future. When, exactly? Well, there’s the unprecedented global situation, the vagaries of air travel, possible tariffs on Josh… This is a very complicated case. You know, a lotta ins, a lotta outs, a lotta what-have-yous. And, uh, a lotta strands to keep in my head, man.

Movie of the Night

Today’s movie quote was from The Big Lebowski. Alas, it’s the only quote from there I could come up with without excessive swearing. This is what happens when you when you find a stranger in the Alps!

Song of the Day

Life is like spaghetti
It’s hard until you make it
No stresso, no stresso
It’s gonna be espresso!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MS_Fczs_98

Finally, some authentic Italian Estonian culture for our friend Elena Tonucci.

Noteworthy Utterances of the Moment

“Laird, do you have an opinion on—”
Laird: “The answer is almost certainly yes”

“What is the point of burros, anyway? Like a bunch of little trucks left to roam the landscape”

“You can eat almost everything”
“Well, some things you can only eat once“

“What would be the easiest way to add that?”
“Get someone else to do it.”

“Maybe we could get Jared to blog?”
Jared: “Probably not.”

After very little sleep, I decided to wake up and treat myself with a scenic run around the mountain at noon. This was admittedly more of an excuse to go see some telescopes up close and personal.

After my makeshift tour of the exterior of some of LCO’s beautiful telescopes, I returned to find out Alycia was kind enough to take the time to set-up and bring a group of us on tours inside of both the Henrietta Swope telescope (1 meter) and the Irénée du Pont Telescope (2.5 meter). The Swope telescope is especially interesting because it was the very first telescope built at LCO back in 1971. It was also the one of the first, if not the first, telescope named after a woman. Henrietta made great contributions to work on variable stars and was a trailblazer for women in the field. The du Pont telescope is also one of the older telescopes at LCO, built in 1977.

Here is a look at the interior of the Swope and du Pont telescopes.

The night went smoothly, and Jay/Alycia were able to get some quality disk data shown below. We are also getting closer to correlating the accelerometer data with the wavefront sensor data. At this stage, the best approach is simple “you just begin. You do the math. You solve one problem… and you solve the next one… and then the next. And if you solve enough problems, you get to come home. All right, questions?”

Unfortunately, at the end of the night we had to say adiós to our new friend, María Eugenia, who is headed back to the Netherlands. Safe travels home and thank you for joining us on this run!

We are also looking forward to the next wave of people arriving the next day or two, and hope their travel goes better than our 50-hour ordeal!

Two skittish Burros were very hesitant greeting me on the way up the mountain.

After a long, hard, struggle to try to remember a recent/favorite movie of mine, it wasn’t till I remembered a conversation I had with Laird about UA’s Biosphere2 project/experiment that reminded me of one of my favorite movies, The Martian.

Song of the Day

First off, a special congratulations to Parker for being offered the NSF GRF award! That’s awesome. And it means that the panel that reviewed his application is just as excited about drilling holes in the Magellan-Clay telescope to mount the accelerometers as we are. It sounds a little jarring, but it’s for the Greater Good, we promise…!

The night started off as usual, with some daytime engineering followed by an excellent dinner. I didn’t take a picture, but I’m kicking myself for realizing afterwards that tonight’s dinner contained all of the components to make a California burrito. Namely, the chefs prepared a burrito-like thing (basically a beef rolled taco) and had fries and guac and such at the salad bar. Dang, talk about a missed opportunity.

This evening also offered many sightings of the family of culpeos that has taken residence in front of the lodge as the sun set in the background. Behold:

As the sun set, preparations for tonight’s observations began quickly and efficiently. For mine and Alycia’s observations tonight, we made use of a spare g’-band filter to take some data on a very special debris disk. The biggest MagAO-X fans will remember that we already have a g’-band filter installed and available in the instrument, so why is a second one necessary?…

It turns out, a longstanding problem surrounding the old g’ setup was a case of disappearing flux. Namely, there was something within the instrument that was severely affecting the throughput of green light unbeknownst to the observers who used this filter in the past. Well, we can thank Jared for spending the pesos necessary to get a green laser and do a proper test in the lab to determine the cause of the missing green light.

After some exploration with the laser we were able to determine that it was a beamsplitter in the instrument that was attenuating green light. So, our quick solution to this problem is to just bypass this beamsplitter and manually place a separate g’ filter in front of one of our science cameras. Thanks to Laird to coming up with this quick fix so that we could execute MagAO-X’s best observations at 527 nm! “The target audience will hate love it.” “Who’s the target audience??” “People with eyes…!”

Meanwhile, I thought I’d highlight a really cool picture taken by our new Leiden-based collaborator (and Master’s student to Sebastiaan) Eugenia Maria. Great shot!

We’ll end tonight with a fun challenge. Parker claims there are 5 vizzies in this photo, can you find them all?

The quotes in this post are from the move Argo which I watched on one of the long plane rides recently (thanks to Katie for the suggestion). It’s a historical flick about how CIA operatives were able to rescue US embassy hostages in Iran by masquerading as Canadian filmmakers. Would recommend!

Song of the Day

Please enjoy the 527 nanometer hill zone:

The best way to start this blog is being thankful for the paths that lead me to Tucson, UofA, XWCL, MagAO-X and professor Laird Close. I had an great experience as a visiting postdoc in this academic and cultural very rich enviroment. Of course, none of this would be possible without the generous support of professor Claudia Mendes de Oliveira, PI of the Brazilian participation of the GMT consortium (https://www.gmt.iag.usp.br/en) and one of the founders of the Steiner Institute (https://instituto-steiner.org.br/), actual home of many talent engineers which are in a joint effort to contribute to the GMT instruments and push foreward the astronomical instrumentation in our country. A special mention to my colleague and new friend Rodrigo Pereira, who also take a part in this adventure.

My naïve ambition of contributing with such group of talent people, composing the XWCL, started acknowlodging that much efford and study would be necessary to keep it up with the group fast pace. Every story has a begining, and mine started studing the works of Warren Foster and Maggie Kautz, which were from the onset very kind and generous to me. While I live, I will never forget.

Slowly, the MagAO-X instrument concepts stated to grow up in my mind, all that fog that you face when fall in a new subject was becoming less and less obscure, up to the point I could see some light from beyond. In the mean time, during this prossess, I could contribute with some engineering in the reflective Lyot manufacuting, adjust and fixation mount. It is indeed exciting to realize that some of your ideas are part of a such complex instrument.

However, the cherry of the cake is about to come. There was this one time Laird calls me in his office to discuss his vision for a new module for increasing the MagAO-X capabilities. Simple, inexpensive and powerful! Just with the addition of a few elements, the MagAO-X would be able to perform polarimetric mesurements using AO correction. Such measurements are nowadays only possible in a few other instruments in top notch telescope. Laird asked me to assist him with the implementation of this project, and then, with a polarized beam splitter cube, a quarter-wave plate, and a linear and rotational translation stages, the polarimeter saga has begun.

With comercial off the shell and a few home made part, we came out with the right concept to install a rotation HWP in front of the instrument interface, fundamental characteristic to remove the maximum of induced instrument polarization using the Differential Polarimetric Imaging technique. From the mechanical project to the prototype lots of discutions and attempts have being made. In the end, we have got satisfied with the result. The main challenge were to mitigate whatever could possibly go wrong, because the instrument were located far away on the Clay Telescope, in the Cerro de Las Campanas, and if something does not fit, it could jepardize the whole project. Lesson learned, do not fully trust on your CAD model, you must try as hard as possible to antecipate preventive ajustments!

In the end, we did our best and took our chances. The day to commission the polarimeter was approaching.

The implementation and alignment of the polarized beam splitter cube was a pain for Laird and Sebastiaan, though no task is too difficult for those guys. Recognize, they are good! The artificial star spot were centered in both cameras.

OK, time to install the polarimeter support on the instrument interface, but not before some adjustments…it is a dirty job too.

In the meanwhile, I could practice photography (new hobby) and enjoy the company of wonderful colleagues.

Inrespective of the unfavourable seeing conditions of our commissioning night, we successfully have implement the brand new MagAO-X polarimeter mode. Certainly, a step foreward on the upcoming marvelous astronomical experiment to come from the minds of these talent astronomers of the XWCL.

Along with this last result, I can come back home, carrying all accumulated experience developed to share with my peers, and with the feeling of mission accomplished.

Song of the Day

This song is an ode to intergalactic astronomer, who in their search for exo-planets found a curious signal, using their alien coronagraphs, nearby a typical G2 star.

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.