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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.

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.

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!

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!

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.

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.

While I was outside of the telescope dome trying to change our luck, Logan, Joseph, and Avalon were inside watching it open up!

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!

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.

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.

05:16: Light down the pipe

Hey, time to start our night!

5:53: Loop is closed with 1000 modes

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.

And saw a lot of burros

Alas we could not pet.

We also took copious mirror selfies as is required.

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.

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.

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!