Home of MagAO and MagAO-X.
Last Friday our shipping contractor (or at least our shipping contractor’s contractor) collected MagAO-X.
After it was loaded, Dr. Males said “I’m going home to not think about MagAO-X,” as is tradition.
MagAO-X now travels by ground to Miami, then by air to Santiago, then by ground again to the Las Campanas Observatory. I will follow its progress like last time.
Looks like we might actually be doing this … if World War 3 doesn’t break out first. Please enjoy this video of today’s activities from clips taken by me and Alex Hedglen.
Since rights-holders can be so mean about these things, no audio track is included. However, I recommend playing the song of the day at the same time to get the full effect.
There are also a few pictures to share.
Also works great with this one.
With cautious optimism, we are approaching the second ever MagAO-X ship date. It’s hard to believe that it has been 2.5 years since we last did this! The system has grown in complexity in the interim, gaining a spectrograph named VIS-X (P.I. Sebastiaan Haffert) as well as many new controllable degrees of freedom. (Always need more of those.)
We haven’t been sitting on our thumbs for the past two years. Our instrument has been moonlighting as a testbed for the phasing of the Giant Magellan Telescope, among other things. I’ll have to update our publications page in my copious free time.
Yesterday was the last day of lab operation of the instrument and the beginning of packing. I got some final tests of the computer system finished, the optics were covered for shipment, the glycol was purged from the cooling system, and we de-cabled the instrument from its electronics rack (which is traveling in its own crate).
In April of 2019, we were placing the 2040-actuator Boston Micromachines deformable mirror in MagAO-X for the first time, and Jared affectionately referred to the cables as “the octopus”. Well, the octopus has been firmly suctioned to the side of the electronics rack since we unpacked post-2019B, and it was time to detach it.
This delicate work involved many layers of protective equipment: masks, currently a requirement for existing in the world; bootie shoe covers, a requirement for entering the lab; hairnets and gowns, a requirement for entering the cleanroom tent; and electrostatic discharge protection, a requirement for handling the delicate MEMS deformable mirror cabling.
Our electronics rack has been growing new cables and hoses and equipment for 2.5 years without its doors and side panels in place. So, when we tried to put those on, we found they didn’t fit. Much like me after a period of pandemic isolation, its clothes didn’t fit right any more.
Rather than buying it a new outfit, we made some alterations. We sculpted the styrofoam insulation, adding pockets where needed. (Everyone loves clothes with pockets.)
This time, fortunately, the metal tape we used did not taste blood.
By this time next week, we may still need to hedge our predictions for the 2022A run… but we’ll know for certain whether MagAO-X itself is going to Chile!
Your song of the day is “Future Starts Slow” by The Kills.
The city of Tucson was made brighter today with the passing of Jhen’s PhD defense and a much-deserved level up. A huge round of applause for Dr. Lumbres!
Jhen’s talk was very comprehensive regarding her various projects she’s taken on during her time here at UArizona. If you’re like me, you learned a lot about the intricacies of Fresnel propagation and the problems that laser guide stars can solve. It was pretty surreal to me being that the last time I attended one of her talks was at the 2020 OpSci Winter School event when I was but a mere crouton in the world of optics and astronomy.
Moving forward, she’ll be relocating to sunny Los Angeles to work for Northrop-Grumman as an optical engineer and resident chocolatier early next year.
Salamat, Jhen! That’s a fancy Tagalog term that roughly translates to “may your hunts be fruitful and your arrows fly swift.” Or something like that. On second thought I think it just means thanks. We’ll miss you! (and your treats..!)
In the grand tradition of Things My Cat Hates, today I bring you Things My Dog Distrusts. My 3 year old lab Lani only cares about three things: throw the ball, spray with hose, chew on rawhides (swim in lake is a corollary to spray with hose, really just any water of any kind is a-ok). If you look up labrador retriever in the dictionary you see a pic of Lani.
However, as with all animals, she is not without her neuroses. Mainly, she is rather fearful. So here is a list of things my dog is quite afraid of.
Lani absolutely, positively, will not walk over a metal grating. Plants feet, stoic, if I try to pull her she pulls back harder. Metal floors are a HARD NO. The Loop near my house has some drainage ditches that pass underneath, so there is a metal grate covering the ditch. This renders the Loop non-navigable for us. If I succeed in getting her over the grate going out, we will not be able to go over it coming back. Trust me.
My favorite metal floor story is when we took a trip to Desert Pet, a local pet store. They have two rooms, one of which is slightly higher than the other, so you know what connects them… a metal ramp. We cannot enter the other room. She was so thrown off by the trauma of almost stepping on a metal floor that when we went to leave the store, she also refused to step on the slightly different colored tile near the door. I finally was able to leave the store by sliding the welcome mat over so she could step on that to get out the door.
Really any surprising or abnormal flooring is a mild trauma. One of our dog friends, the golden retriever Clover, loves to go down the slide on the playscape in the neighborhood (it is absurdly cute and wholesome). Lani cannot get to the slide because there is a lot of weird things to step on to get there. Way too scary.
My neighbor, Mike, is lovely retired gentleman who takes care of things for people around the neighborhood, including getting my mail and leaving it on my porch. The other day he left some newspapers on the patio and kept them in place with a rock. When we left to go do our nightly necessary, this was quite a surprise.
Apologies for the darkness of the video, it was nighttime and I was not prepared for how hilarious it was going to be.
Oh Mike. So vexing to a confused pupper. He waters my lawn, drops off my mail, and does all manner of things outside the window. The audacity. She often barks at people when she sees them on leash, then is quite calm and happy to see them once they meet. Not Mike. I’ve tried to introduce them, but she knows the man who regularly invades her yard and she is not going to be friendly no matter the circumstance. Poor Mike.
Nothing evokes more blind rage.
Anything that is not supposed to move, that then moves, is terrifying. Even if she sees me move it, or if she moves it herself. Unacceptable.
Here, the ball ended up behind the DVDs. She can’t get it herself, OBVIOUSLY, because that would make the DVDs move, and that’s too scary. So I have to get it. When I didn’t get the ball, she held vigil at the DVDs, staring, waiting for the ball to come out somehow. This went on for a while until I finally got the ball.
This story repeated yesterday with the ball under the kitchen shelving, and a few days ago with a chew toy under the dining chairs, and many many times going way back.
The “really just any water of any kind is a-ok” I said above was a bit of a lie. My dog wants to be blasted in the face by the water hose, swim to exhaustion in a lake, drink all the water out of my bathtub, but do NOT try to put her in the shower. Getting bathed in the shower, via detachable shower head, is a form of torture. What a strange dog.
Lani the Lab loves squeeky toys, OF COURSE. But one day Tootie Hedghog came home, because he was $3 at the HomeGoods (there was a half price sale).
Tootie Hedgehog makes a no stink tooting sound, a grunt. This was unexpected, and of course very scary.
For about an hour, we were quite scared of the tootz. But then, all was well, and Tootie Hedgehog was deemed not a threat. He lasted about 10 mins.
And as a sample of the tootz:
Rest in peace, Tootie Hedgehog. We hardly knew ye.
The song of the day is my #1 Top Song on Spotify Wrapped for 2021. It’s a cover of a Simon & Garfunkle song.
