Blog

We are happy to report the successful and uneventful homecomings of the first half of our observing crew. Uneventful in that none was stranded in a city they didn’t mean to be in. Successful in that they ended in the warm embraces of various roommate species.

For the half of us who remain, the weather has been treating us. Poorly. Has us saying “”If What I Think Is Happening, Is Happening, It Better Not Be.”

So we did not have an alfCen kind of night. We had a “give it your best shot” engineering kind of night. Which stretched until we had to switch to our observer’s time. You’re welcome for the good seeing Gabrielle, Jialin ordered it just for you.

Our engineering is humming merrily along. Sebastiaan and Josh started the night with dark hole digging. Matthijs LOWFS’ed. Katie successfully wrangled dispersed speckles. Jared’s gain optimization is a huge hit. I’m enjoying my donuts. We’re as happy as we can be with seeing at an all time high.

Speaking of happy… a quick ode to the vegetarian cooking of our Chef’s this turno. Thank you for the beautiful meat free meals! For those of us up at lunch Sunday there was even a vegan empanada, eaten too quickly for the camera to catch. We have been absolutely spoiled.

The quote of today was inspired by the main characters of the Lodge, our very own fantastic foxes, our charming culpeos.

Keep an eye out for a sweet message from our TO Ivonne, who agreed to do a little blog on her last day. Thank you Ivonne!

Song of the Day

Yeah the song and the quote is gonna be from the same movie. It’s a good movie.

I have an unfortunate secret to reveal: we have been operating MagAO-X in 2024B mode this whole time.

When the team first arrived, a wizened mystic emerged from the Room Behind the Kitchens and croaked out a prophecy:

Hasta que enstiques el instrumento tendras visión astronómica de baja calidad.

Unfortunately, nobody in the advance guard understood Spanish. Indeed, it was only in the post-mortem retrospective of this operational anomaly that the prophecy was even mentioned.

With the aid of hypnosis-based memory retrieval techniques and a team of Spanish-to-English translators, we were able to decipher the above as:

Until you ensticken the instrument, you will have poor quality seeing

This is a curse most dire to wish upon an astronomer, as it means their starlight will go every which way (instead of down into the pixels where it belongs). Fortunately, the mystic provided the remedy as well: ensticken the instrument.

The ritual had been delayed out of deference to our patch designer, Dr. Logan Pearce of the University of Michigan, who was not present for our first on-sky nights. Indeed, it was only performed today, on her—and my—last night on the mountain.

At sunset, we ascended to the East platform and watched Logan ensticken.

The results speak for themselves:

Yesterday, we were bumping up against the high-wind-shutdown speed limit until sunrise. We were looking at the wind speed graph saying “wow, that escalated quickly!” Today, the atmosphere has been much better-behaved.

We used the time to revisit some old favorites for Alycia and Sebastiaan. Alycia has already left, so Logan was pinch-hitting this evening. To image debris disks, reference star data is more useful than getting more sky rotation. Unfortunately, getting contemporaneous reference star data is impossible with an extreme AO instrument: you can’t lock on two stars at once.

This means a lot of switching back and forth to collect data on both the target and reference (i.e. star-hopping). Loud cheering erupted from the control room when they got the target-switching overhead under two minutes. This means our operators are top notch, naturally, but also that Alycia chose really good reference stars.

The latter part of the night was devoted to VIS-Xing. By dispersing the light in each spaxel (spectral pixel), VIS-X enables spectral differential imaging with many samples in wavelength space. On the other hand, when we perform SDI with MagAO-X’s main science cameras, we have only two different wavelengths to work with. Looking forward to seeing what Sebastiaan pulls out of this dataset! (PDS 70 d? …e?)

This afternoon, telescope operator Jorge Araya kindly showed us the Baade 6.5-meter telescope mirror. (“It’s a lot like the other one.” — Jorge)

I’ve seen it before, but somehow this never gets old.

I’m headed out this afternoon for another fun day or two of sitting in airports and airplanes as I head back to New York. The science continues without me, with seven more whole nights of MagAO-X-ing to go. I’m sure I’ll be kept in the loop, though—by daily blog posts, if nothing else. ¡Hasta pronto!

Frivolity interlude

The P.I.’s imagination was recently captured by the idea of walk-up music for AO operators. After I added Maggie-O-X to the instrument, it gained the ability to speak on command. It’s a small jump from that to playing arbitrary audio clips.

As of today, when the operator and observer are selected in the MagAO-X web interface, the appropriate walk-up song will play in the control room.

(Note 1: while the clips approved for control room use are G-rated, the full songs are not necessarily “Song of the Day” material. Note 2: Some songs were chosen, others assigned.)

• Jared Males — Ænema by Tool
• Laird Close — All Star by Smashmouth
• Logan Pearce — Skibidi by Little Big (no relation)
• Elena Tonucci — Pesca la tua Carta Sakura from the Italian dub of Cardcaptor Sakura
• Sebastiaan Haffert — Voodoo Mon Amour by Diablo Swing Orchestra
• Katie Twitchell — Careless Whisper by George Michael
• Eden McEwen — Planetarium by Slothrust
• Josh Liberman — Lip Gloss by Lil Mama
• Joseph Long — Seven Nation Army by The White Stripes

In an effort to motivate deeper understanding of the instrument software, the P.I. has declared that future walk-up song additions must be done and deployed by the party concerned. Godspeed, git users.

Song of the Day

Honestly, this was already Day of the Songs, but what’s one more between friends?

Like our new friend Emi mentioned in her blog post, there were a lot of us on the mountain yesterday. Josh, Eden and I rolled up to LCO that morning after a smooth trip from Tucson, and Matthijs joined us later that afternoon. As fun as it was to have (nearly) the whole crew down here at once, the arrival of reinforcements meant Parker, Jay, and Alycia all headed down into La Serena this morning. We wish them better luck in their journey home than they had on the way here.

Before I talk about tonight, I would be remiss if I didn’t shout out the alignment work that Laird and I did yesterday afternoon. With only the power of a ball driver, a suction cup, and a pair of tweezers, we managed to correct the mis-clocking of one of our Lyot coronagraph masks. If you think you have steady hands, try holding them both at arm’s length on-and-off for two hours while navigating a minefield of extremely sensitive optics that stand in your way. This was a task not for the faint of heart—or the large of hands.

We had a beautiful albeit chilly sunset to kick off our night. Logan and Emi went vizzy-spotting, because it is simply impossible to have too many viscacha photos.

Tonight we took a lot of data in MagAO-X’s Hα mode, which is a mode of operation that we use when we’re looking at young systems undergoing active planet formation. The first half of the night was dedicated to our collaborators at Michigan, and we spent the second half observing some targets from our very own Laird Close and Jialin Li. Because Jialin joined on Zoom, we were blessed with a reluctant guest appearance from Jujube:

Conditions were decent, so science went on pretty much uninterrupted for the entire night. At the end of the night the wind started to pick up, but we didn’t let that stop us from taking data until it started to get light outside.

In other news, we’ve been making some critical advancements, pushing the boundaries of extreme AO beyond what has ever been seen before. No, I’m not referring to automatic gain optimization, or coronagraphic low-order wavefront sensing, or even electric field conjugation for quasi-static speckle nulling. Instead, I’m referring to Maggie-OX: our trusty computerized voice that, among other things, now contains a variety of . . . walk-up songs? Picture this: you’re about to sit down at the AO station in the control room. You’ve got a long night ahead of you, battling r₀ and τ₀ and all the other nuances that come with extreme AO operation. You’re a little stressed, and more than a little tired. Then, suddenly, in the distance, you hear it: the little speaker at the control station playing your specifically-designated hype music. People are clapping, cheering even. You’re sauntering up to the computer in slow motion. Fireworks explode in the background. It’s a scene straight from a movie. You were born for this.

Okay, maybe it’s not that dramatic. But it is fun to have a theme song, and laughter makes the nights go faster. It’s the little things.

Song of the Day: