Blog

Well, folks, it’s been a few days but the content you crave is here. That’s right: viscacha photos! Just scroll past all this boring stuff.

Today was a sort of sneak preview of install day. MagAO-X exists as two separate and arguably equally important halves, the electronics rack and the optical table. We eventually need both halves on the platform. However, they must be sundered in two for transport, as they are connected only by a delicate umbilical of electronic cables.

We have started staging the main part of the instrument at the summit in the auxiliary building, which saves a fair bit of time on our install day. This means cables are coming off the day before.

As always, the most delicate part of the operation is the disconnection of the hand-soldered ribbon cables that carry commands to our MEMS deformable mirrors. Eden, Parker, and Katie carried out this fiddly task (along with removing many other, less fiddly, cables).

Once the cables were disconnected and secured, MagAO-X had to be wrapped for transport. I always think it looks like a foil-wrapped burrito.

The burrito had to be lifted off its legs, which we did with the help of the staff here at LCO (and a big honking crane).

The legs are a little adaptive acoustics system of their own, which can remove vibrations transmitted from the ground before they mess up our images. The legs get a separate ride, while the main part of MagAO-X rides up to the telescope on its little cart. Which is in turn on a truck.

I cannot be sure, but I believe the above image was the result of Katie Twitchell imagining a world in which the active leveling system was able to keep the orientation of MagAO-X constant despite going uphill.

Alas, the electronics rack is now lonely. It stays in the cleanroom overnight to be available for last-minute software work before we move it to the summit for installation on the platform.

Fortunately, I was there to keep it company.

Literary Interlude

I have chosen the option to embed a quotation rather than lyrics from the Song of the Day (as per blog rules for 2024B). Many of us spent good chunks of this day in the library at Las Campanas trying to finish other related work in the lulls between major operations.

This quote from “The Library of Babel” seems relevant to exoplanet direct detection in general:

Visiblemente, nadie espera descubrir nada.

A la desaforada esperanza, sucedió, como es natural, una depresión excesiva.

For the obligate Anglophones:

Obviously, nobody expects to discover anything.

Naturally, this inordinate hope was followed by a profound depression.

Jorge Luis Borges is one of the quintessential magical realist writers, and “The Library of Babel” is one of my favorite short stories about … libraries, (in)finity, combinatorics, information theory, and perhaps cosmology? You should go read it (or en Español, si quieras).

Viscachas

The viscachas have been harder to spot this run, but we got a bumper crop today courtesy Laird and Parker, with five confirmed viscacha sightings.

Song of the Day

Today’s song of the day is unrelated.

So far, Laird and Sebastiaan have been doing an excellent job directing the in-person crew and we’ve made great progress towards the many tasks that needed to be done before the start of the big move on Wednesday.

Here, we see a lot of the team watching and learning during Tuesday morning’s initial alignment procedures as we prepare to install all the fancy new Lyot and focal plane masks brought down from Tucson.

The first optomechanical task of the day was to install the special masks for the new self-coherent camera. Check out the pinhole on the very upper edge of the mask when held up to Eden’s computer screen! That little pinhole, we’ve since learned, is the key for fancy new speckle-nulling strategies, like Coherent Differential Imaging. Sebastiaan’s and Parker’s faces says it all

… and after a bit of alignment work from the team, the mask is aligned!

Here is the result: there are fringes on the camsci images indicating that light from the pinhole is interfering with the light that transmits through the Lyot stop. Neat! If I were a quasistatic speckle I’d sure be sweating right now.

We broke for lunch and afterwards, it was time to finish up other miscellaneous tasks such as some interior cable organization, reconfiguring the power pathways for the Zaber stages, and squashing some LED lights inside the instrument.

We were initially just assigned the Suzuki for Clay observers “Lil Red” for our daily needs but we quickly realized that our transportation needs weren’t being met. After an email or two, we got permission to use one of the Suzuki Jimnys a.k.a. one of the super cool, white Jurassic Park-looking cars. Score!

One of the smaller tasks of the day was installing a small cable tray inside MagAO-X to help tidy up some of the pico motor cabling we had installed last month during the engineering run. These plastic trays required some slight modifications, which required a trip to the machine shop in the ASB. It’s not often any of us find our way in here, so it was cool to see…!

We had some time after dinner to enjoy the fading of the evening sunlight. some of us drove, some walked, and one of us ran.

From the Rocky Theme Song. We were attempting to do some vizzy spotting on the north slope of the telescope summit with P. Johnson who suddenly looked like he saw a ghost after looking at his phone. We asked what was wrong since this caught all of our attention and he, with a slight mumble of “Jared wants me…!”, ran off into the setting sun. So, when you’re checking out the telescope summit and you get a Slack message from Jared saying it’s time to Zoom, you best start zooming son.

“
Trying hard now
It’s so hard now
Trying hard now

Getting strong now
Won’t be long now
Getting strong now

Gonna fly now
Flying high now
Gonna fly, fly, fly…
“

These summer sunsets are great. Hasta mañana.

Song of the Day

We’re off! The Tucson MagAO-X crew (notably sans PI) set out for our 2024B run at pretty much the crack of dawn on Sunday. Delta Airlines must have heard through the grapevine about Jay and Jared’s intercontinental sprint from last time and opted to intervene—when we booked these flights, the only option from TUS-ATL was taking off bright and early at 7:10 AM. We all found each other at our departure gate (we congre-gate-d? that one’s for you, Josh), redistributed the snack load, and boarded the plane without a hitch.

Given that I don’t normally wake up at 5 AM, I was asleep pretty much the second I found my seat. I woke up about an hour later convinced that we must at least be somewhere over Texas, but when I pulled up the window screen I was dismayed to discover we hadn’t moved an inch; perhaps the lack of jet-engine noise and air turbulence was the reason I’d slept so well. From what I gathered from the captain’s announcement (in which I heard an airline pilot say the phrase “this is really embarrassing” for the first time), there had been a minor computer malfunction. Maintenance had been called in to deactivate the broken computer so the backup could be used, but instead they disabled both the broken and the working computer. Oops. This resulted in our sitting on the tarmac for about 2 1/2 hours, de-planing, and then re-boarding before leaving sometime around 10:30 AM. If any of us had wished for a later flight, our wish was certainly granted.

Despite the maintenance difficulties, we arrived at ATL with ample time to grab a smoothie, stretch our legs, and get some homework done. I guess a 6-hour layover really does make you delay-proof.

We boarded our second flight with no issue. However, as a fun little treat and test of our patience, the captain again came over the PA system to let us know that maintenance needed to fix something up before we could take off. Thankfully, this time it only resulted in about 10 minutes of delay, and a (not) short nine hours later we arrived in Santiago!

We learned a few lessons in the Santiago airport, the chief being that the line to re-check bags with LATAM is fast if you have Delta Status, but if you don’t have status you can skip the long “regular people” line by being declared a “problem” by the airport staff. Not naming names. 

An obligatory Starbucks run and a short flight later, we made it to La Serena, traded some Doctor Pepper Zero (a USA special) for some Nespresso at El Pino, and headed up to see our favorite telescopes. At LCO we met up with Sebastiaan and Elena, ate a group dinner, and—of course—watched the sun set.

Welcome back, everyone.

In honor of our journey, the song of the day is Traveling On by the Decemberists:

Hey there, here is Elena from Leiden. I am new to MagAO-X but jumped right in to write this first blog post of the run. But what do I know? This is my first observation run, first time in Chile, first time many things. I don’t even work in Arizona, what is this mess?! Well, as an outsider, I want to document my experience of fitting into the team with a quick tutorial on how to speed up the process, as a reference for newcomers of the future. You will thank me later. There are only two important points to remember. Careful, the second is utterly complex!

1. Write your first blog post. You are not really part of the team until you write your first blog post. Don’t be shy – you know, that chaotic energy you hold inside after 30+ hours of travel? Let it out and write your masterpiece.
2. Stick the MagAO-X sticker on your laptop.

Do you think point 2 is easy? Then you haven’t done it extreme.

Wear shoe protection. That’s not enough, you need to use that… thingie… yes, that thing against electrostatic shocks, you don’t want to get hurt! Close the strap around your foot and the thread goes inside your sock. Good. If you have voluminous hair, tie them before you wear the hair net. You don’t want hairs stuck under the sticker. Also wear a coat, face mask, and gloves. No fingerprints allowed!!! Here you go. Now you can carefully apply the sticker on your laptop and… Welcome to the MagAO-X team.

And now, let me briefly explain the magical journey Sebastiaan and I went through to travel from the old continent, and specifically the land of tulips and sea level, to sunny, caliente, mountainous Chile. The journey actually started off great, if we don’t count the fact that I forgot the charger for my camera at home, and Sebastiaan, having forgotten of the existence of the Sun after 5 months in the Netherlands, didn’t pack his sunglasses.

This is not even nearly as dramatic as finding your way through Madrid’s airport. Fortunately, Sebastiaan already holds a PhD or we would still be stuck there. Here you have practical pictures displaying the madness of this airport:

It was faster to fly from Amsterdam to Madrid.

From Madrid to Santiago? Both our heroes slept through the entire flight so we have no recollection of this part of history.

After stopping at Pollo Stop for a nice chicken wrap – that they had to make twice, as they had put cheese in the Sebastiaan’s “sin queso” wrap – we got on our last flight. This was so short it didn’t even feel like flying. I must say tho, I would have preferred another 10 hours of travel by plane rather than the last 2 hours of drive. Fellow car-sick people will understand me. Those were the 2 worst hours of the journey out of a total of 32.

Song of the day? Heard it on the radio in the car driving up the mountains as I was trying to keep Pollo Stop safe where it was supposed to remain: Inside my body. It’s I will survive but in Spanish. A nice tune to celebrate getting to LCO safe and sound.

People have told me I have now the power to decide rules for the next blog posts. Since it is late, I am tired, I love singing, and I depleted all my imagination to write this blog post, I will stick to: Every blog post needs to contain at least two sentences that are lyrics from songs. Put them between “” and write at the end the songs where they come from. I said two but the more you manage to use, the more pleased we will all be.

Since I am generous, I will give you an alternative. Instead of two lyrics, you can use one quote from a South American writer or poet that links to the events of the day. Sorry, I know this is difficult, but this is my only chance to show off my literary culture. Here my sist Isabel is explaining perfectly how tired you can get when traveling to LCO with an excellent simile.

“I was so drained I felt as if I were staring through a telescope at the light of a star dead for a million years.”

Isabel Allende, The Stories of Eva Luna