Tonight was our last night on-sky with MagAO-Classic in 2019B. It was my telescope night, and Amali ran AO after Emily went to bed around midnight. Tomorrow’s the big day for removing MagAO-C from the telescope, so we always do these staggered bedtimes. It’s nice to have Amali and Emily here to help with removal.
Emily, Amali, Jared, and Katie enjoying the last catwalk sunset of MagAO-C 2019B. [Image description: 4 AOistas smile in the soft light of sunset.]
Alberto stayed an extra night with the rest of his turno, so this is the first time we’ve had him as our TO for the entire run. Thanks Alberto, you are a superlative telescope operator! Here are Alberto, Amali, and myself enjoying a quiet night of photon-gathering.
Katie, Alberto, and Amali in the Clay control room. [Image description: A Clio/VisAO operator, a telescope operator, and an AO operator sit in chairs and examine electronic screens, in a control room filled with screens.]It was a 2-vizcacha day at the clean room this afternoon! Here is a close-up of Vizzy 1 in a cute pose. [Image description: A vizcacha sits up on its hindquarters, on a rafter beam, with its fuzzy tail hanging down. Its ears are back and its paws are held out in front of it.]
Well I forgot to take many pictures today, and I forgot to motivate someone else to write the blog.
We got lots of work done today. Laird and Alex tested the alignment laser system. Kyle perfected a big part of our offloading system (where we send commands to the telescope from when our AO system needs help), and I got some closed-loop testing done. We also all worked on some conference abstracts that are due, and NSF proposals got some attention too.
Here’s a picture of a clean room viscacha:
I think she/he was heading over to the library ledge for sunset.
Amali’s blog post about the saga of the Alpaca was another creative expository piece that tonight we had a ceremony to award her the 2019B MagAO-C blog award:
Jared gives the citation and Amali graciously accepts the award [Image description: Amali and Jared stand on the Clay catwalk with the setting sun behind them. Amali is holding a metal item.]Here is the blog award close-up. [Image description: The metal item turns out to be a failed hard drive from the adsec supervisor computer, the very computer that Alpaca was impersonating in IP address. Writing on the harddrive in black sharpie in Jared’s handwriting says “adsecsup / Failed, replaced / 11/15/15”. The harddrive has been decorated with the 2019B Mission Patch sticker, and labeled “MagAO 2019B Blog Award / Awarded to Amali Vaz / 2019/11/11 [not shown]”.]
Tomorrow there will be a general strike throughout much of Chile. The turno (shift changeover) that was supposed to happen will be postponed until Wednesday. That means those who hoped to go home tomorrow must stay 1 more day. We wish our colleagues all the best — they are all extremely professional and we truly appreciate working with them here.
The MagAO-C and MagAO-X teams and observer: Emily, Katie, Laird, Kyle, Jared, Amali, Joseph, Alex (v. 2.0), and Blake. [Image description: A group of AOistas stand on the Clay catwalk in front of the setting sun]. Photo by Alberto Pasten.Blake didn’t get to do his targets to the North because of the wind. Also, the seeing got pretty non-LCO-ish at the end of the night, with a couple spikes above 1.5”. [Image description: Screen grab of the LCO weather plot showing seeing, temperature, wind, and pressure vs. time.]Moon set at dawn. [Image description: Foreground: A ridge with telescopes. Background: Purple mountains majesty. Sky: Band of Venus, orange of dawn, and Full moon setting.]
The song of the day is Michael Franti & Spearhead – Say Hey I Love You — a classic from MagAO 2015B:
This morning, Laird and Alex rotated the K-mirror to a more optimal position and re-aligned the rest of the optical train. I switched out a board in an ALPAO driver to one that lets us power the NCPC (non-common-path-corrector) DM remotely, which saves us many hypothetical trips to and from the Nasmyth platform. Jared did…well, a lot of everything.
Alignment specialists, aligning.
The innards of an ALPAO driver
One tool that has proven useful in the alignment process is an “F”- and “X”-shaped pattern on the 2K deformable mirror (previously featured here), which we can view in high resolution on our LOWFS (low-order wavefront sensing) camera.
After Alex and Laird were happy with the alignment, I drove out (most of?) the remaining system aberrations with the “eye doctor” script, which attempts to find the combination of Zernike modes on the deformable mirrors that maximizes our Strehl.
Alignment F-Test on the 2-Kilo DM, as imaged on the pupil viewer
Instrument PSFs on the pyramid tip (left) and science camera #1 (right), post alignment and eye doctor. We have airy disks!
Reinforcements in the form of Joseph Long arrived this afternoon, although fumigation delayed his luggage in Santiago and left him (temporarily, we hope) dispossessed of his worldly goods (and a few supplies for MagAO-X). The MagAO-C team joined us after dinner for a tour of MagAO-X.
The united MagAO-C and MagAO-X teams walk up to the halfway house after dinner.
The tour.
After the tour completed and the crowds dispersed, Alex and Laird reinstalled the panels, shielding the instrument from prying eyes (and unwanted particles—of both the massive and massless variety). Jared installed the blower (the large white tube entering the instrument table from the left) to supply the optics with a soothing breeze.
After spying a guanaco in the far distance earlier in the week, I finally encountered two up close yesterday. They were surprisingly…pungent.
A guanaco who may be Gary. Yes, I recorded vertically.The guanacos survey their domain.
As always, we stopped to watch the sunset.
Another beautiful LCO sunset, another disappointing lack of green flashes
For the song of the day, I present “Stairway to the Stars” by the Queen of Jazz herself, Ella Fitzgerald.
Tonight was finally the promised night of relaxed AO operation after multiple nights of troubleshooting. It is much more to an AO operators delight to only need to open and close the loop for new targets with the occasional MatLab pop up forcing a reset on the tip tilt. Alberto, our telescope operator, was able to tell us his operational comedies of the past and share pictures of his lovely family. Later today is the Mercury transit! Tonight is also my first blog post so an introduction to the outside world is due.
I’m Emily Mailhot, a new AO operator for not only MagAO-C but also LBTI and eventually MMT Maps, both in Arizona. My equally new counterpart, Jared Carlson, and I have been learning the ins and outs of adaptive secondary operations, concepts, and frustrations – and are excited to do so.
This trip to LCO has created numerous “first experiences” for me personally. First time leaving the United States, first time on a B787-8, first time seeing the southern sky, first time experiencing sub-arcsecond seeing (both AO operationally and visually), the list goes on. Considering this, a life at LCO post from brand new eyes seemed appropriate.
Food at LCO
When I was informed that our meals would be served on site I was both relieved and skeptical. At LBTI we are responsible for feeding ourselves through the night, vending machines on the 5th floor of Steward Observatory get a lot of traffic. But would this provided food be delightful or would I need to start preparing for numerous high school band-camp cafeteria flashbacks? I am happy to announce that the food is absolutely superb. From the empanadas to the night lunches to the cookie filled dome kitchens – you have to try very hard to go hungry. Meals are at set times, 730 breakfast, 1230 lunch, and 1830 dinner, but for most of the run breakfast and lunch is sleep for the observers. Instead we fill out night lunch forms which are located in the main kitchen for observers to fill out by 1600 each day. It’s a checklist of various sandwich combinations or your can write “plato de cena” if you’d prefer a plate of that evenings dinner. It is the telescope operators job to collect all the night lunches after dinner and bring them to the telescope.
For those at home wondering what we are eating here’s a selection:
Empanadas are only served on Sunday for lunch so you better get your fill while you can. They come in two forms, carne or con queso, both equally delicious. This particular Sunday there was also veggie and seafood soup.
The kitchen below the Clay Telescope control room.
The life sustaining cookie cabinet.
The “claimed” MagAO table.
Delicious soup.
Avocado at every breakfast.
Colorful dinners.
The TO’s night lunch basket.
Classy night lunch sandwich.
Clearly more than enough food to go around.
Wildlife at LCO
The wildlife here at the summit is diverse. This blog has many posts about the endearing vizzy’s, but the burros, horses, and guanacos are just as abundant. Today on a run around the grounds I encountered both guanacos and horses running along the ridge below the road. They seemed to be chasing each other in what resembled a wild wild west setting. It was so magnificent to capture that I stopped the video clip too soon and I instead watched in awe.
On another run earlier in the week, towards the du Pont Telescope, I encountered a large herd of burros controlling the road. One was particularly annoyed that I was trying to pass and gave me a stiff snort.
A herd of burros serving a strong stare-down.
Of course, this wouldn’t be complete without a vizzy. This sunrise viscacha (a Chilean cocktail?!) watched us sleepy observers wander back down the summit, only to be met by this eight legged, fanged creature. He was small but mighty, creeping up toward my hand each time I tried to open my door. Not usually being afraid of spiders, a small fear for them was gained after the long dance it took to be allowed into my home, room 5.
A sunrise vizzy.
It took a while to get into my room this morning.
The fox on the other hand kept distance and the goats clumsily climbed to the summit with us.
A fox waiting for lunchtime.
Goats on a guardrail.
The goats followed us all the way to the Clay Telescope dome where inside the control room us tired observers tried to troubleshoot through our engineering night after a long install day.
Goats under Clay.
Wild control room, feat. Amali, Laird, and Katie
Work at LCO
Of course the animals only provide us entertainment between times of work – like our extremely long install day and engineering night (see Day 3!). Here’s a glimpse of the Clay control room, AO work station, and some pre-science pupils.
An image of the control room before sunset. The back left station is for science camera, Clio. To its right is the telescope operators station. Left front is the VisAO station and finally next to it is the adaptive operators station. During troubleshooting events this room can be full of people, standing room only.The AO station! GUI’s upon GUI’s upon GUI’s.
The pupils before dark, secondary baffles visible.
The pupils watch the dome open!
Beauty at LCO
LCO is nestled in the most beautiful landscape, best described through photographs.
The first sunset of the trip from the porch of the “hotel” dining room.Taken from behind the Summit near sunset. This was the first clear night since we had arrived.The peak for the future Giant Magellan Telescope taken from the telescope operators housing. Clay dome open for science.Clay still at the zenith, the ASM backlit by the sky.Baade and Clay awaiting a night of science.A picture of the open dome from the nasmyth platform, taken during the night of the misbehaving baysides.
And my favorite photograph of all, taken after dinner on our long day transitioning into our long night.
The stairway to the stars.
Keeping with classic song theme, here’s Led Zeppelin performing Stairway to Heaven.
