Maggie, Joseph, Alex, Kyle, Laird, and Jared arrived at LCO today to prepare MagAO-X for our first time on-sky. We missed thanksgiving with our non-LCO families, but the chefs made us turkey so we got a good holiday meal (thanks guys!).
We’ve already started MagAO-X back up and are making a bunch of last minute tweaks to get it ready.
Our cleanroom friend couldn’t quite believe were are back so soon!
MagAO-X 2019B Blog Rules:
There will be at least one blog post each day
The blog post of the day will have a song of the day
The song of the day is The Thanksgiving Song by Adam Sandler
It’s an old MagAO tradition to takeselfies for our moms in the mirror that gets you around the bend at the summit. Long story, but it’s also tradition for it to be poop covered unless Alan is here.
Hi Mom!The Andes watching the sunset behind me.
Tonight’s song is “I miss the misery” by Halestorm. Since the casual reader of this blog hasn’t signed up for Lizzy Hale with the power on, here’s a “subdued” version of it:
As Joseph reported yesterday, we couldn’t find any sign of our viscacha friends and we suspected it was due to the high winds and colder temperatures. Today I was able to gather more evidence. A correlation is seen between the local density of viscachas and the wind speed at their location. The following plot illustrates:
A viscacha was present at the cleanroom when I arrived shortly after breakfast. Upon my departure for lunch, no viscachas were found. (times are UTC)
We establish a working threshold of 20 mph for vischacha absence. The nature of this transition is unknown.
The vischacha hoping for a calm day. The direction of causality between vischacha absence and high winds has yet to be established. Further study is needed.
It wasn’t all science today. We also fixed some calibration issues with our new setup in the LCO cleanroom. This took some remote help from our real-time software guru.
Olivier Guyon waves to his grad students at Arizona.
MagAO-Classic has landed in TUS. This is the last MagAO-C 2019B post.
Here we are at the baggage claim in Tucson. We all made it and so did our bags! [Image description: Katie, Amali, Emily, and Laird are all smiling at the camera, we look happy to be reunited with Tucson and our luggage.]
And I am currently surrounded by cats, who are much better snugglers than vizcachas.
Lynx and Ginger the MagAO Cats. Classic.
Spot the vizcacha.
Spot the vizcacha. [Image description a brown bunny-looking thing hidden on a brown hillside with some brown rocks and brown grasses and brown scraggly bushes in the reddish glow of sunset on my last night.]
On the day we left I checked that everything was safely stowed.
Clio and the NAS safely stored in the Aux. [Image description: A round black metal circle covers the NAS with its electronic boxes sticking out above like Mickey Mouse ears. Clio sits on its cart, with its electronics rack beside. Very important MagAO tools are also stored here.]
Amali said goodbye to her rock garden.
Amali with the rocks. [Image description: Amali is crouched down to put the finishing touches on an orderly arrangement of ~inch-sized rocks varying in color from black to orangey-red, next to the sidewalk by her room.]
We headed down the hill at 8:30am Chile time and got home to Tucson around 11am MST for a total of about 31 hours travel time.
Roadside shrine [Image description: A tiny house with a saint inside, and a cross and 2 Chilean flags outside. Along the road, with desert-y-looking brown/dry landscape and some hills in the background.]
The flowers were blooming at El Pino and the new dorms for our mid-day rest were really very lovely and extremely comfortable:
We saw Tyson in LSC and heard he had a nice stay at Hotel Enjoy. He was on the same SCL-DFW flight and was nice enough to get me into the club in SCL and Laird in DFW. It was nice seeing you Tyson, hope you made it home safely too!
Overall this was a good run, I think Emily did a great job learning MagAO and Amali did great working with her and refreshing her memory on the LBTI compare/contrast differences.
Jared, Amali, and Emily work to set up for the last night in the Clay control room. (Amali is there, you can find her.) [Image description: Clay control room, with walls of monitors, and AOistas sitting at desks and computers, working away.]Jared giving Amali and Emily a tour of MagAO-X. [Image description: Everyone is wearing clean-room coats and hairnets; Jared is also wearing a face and beard mask. Jared is pointing at the back of the optics doll house while Amali and Emily look on.]Good bye Clay and LCO, you did a great job! [Image description: The Izuzu that takes the ASM down the hill to the clean room is parked at the Clay telescope awaiting its cargo.]
The song of the day: Taylor Swift’s Perfect Fight Song by Andy Wu Musicland featuring Pink, Ellie Goulding, and Rachel Platten:
