Blog – Page 74 – Extreme Wavefront Control Lab

MagAO-X 2019B Unpacking Day -1: Almost There

Well we made it through customs, and are on a truck. We expect delivery of MagAO-X to LCO around 2 pm local time tomorrow afternoon.

Otherwise, it was all MagAO-C all the time.

spy cam — I learned about the dome camera today. You can see Katie and Alex at the lower right, they’re working on Clio’s cables.

no snuggles — A cuddly looking vizcacha. They are almost tame this year.

never the same again — If the drive goes smoothly tomorrow (which given recent luck, keep your fingers crossed), this is the last sunset at LCO without MagAO-X (for a while).

If you’ve ever been to an NBA game, you’ll recognize this song. If MagAO-X arrives safely, I plan to make Laird, Kyle, and Alex perform this dance to celebrate.

MagAO-C 2019B Day 2: Prep day

Yesterday was cooldown day; today was prep day; tomorrow will be the big day/night.
Tomorrow we will be busy from 7am with removing MIKE, the MIKE guider, and the f/11, and installing the NAS, Clio, and the ASM.
To prep today, we continued to test the Clio motors and code, and then we moved Clio from the Aux to the platform to start pumping on the inner dewar in order to solidify it:

You can't see Juan well but he's there to Laird's left; you can only see the top of his head — Some of the team bring Clio up on the lift. [Image description: Point of view is from looking down an open lift shaft from above. The Clio instrument and its electronics rack are raised from the ground to the Nasmyth platform level.]

Including this cute little burrito — A herd of burros were milling about as I walked to lunch. [Image description: An adult and a juvenile burro stand in profile but look at the camera. They are brown with white undersides. Behind them are some roads, and off in the distance are at least 2 telescope domes on ridges. There is also a low-lying bodega. Finally, a light brown valley, some distant purple mountains, and the blue sky round out the scene.]

Or maybe this is Grumpy's great-great-grandchild — I think Vizzy is a fan of the blog. Because I haven’t seen a viz make this pose in several years, but yesterday I link to this image and all of a sudden Vizzy is making the same pose today! [Image description: A Tame Vizcacha on the Clean Room sits up on its haunches with its little paws in front like a classic Monte Python bunny rabbit.]

The song of the day is the MagAO-C Classic “Boom Clap” cover by Lennon & Maisy:

MagAO-X 2019B Unpacking Day -2 (-1?): Santiago!

MagAO-X arrived in Santiago yesterday! There’s even a chance that it gets to LCO tomorrow. My plan has been to call “Day 0” the day it actually arrives, so maybe we have to reset the blog counter.

Alex v2 and Kyle arrive today. Other than Jared and Laird worrying about it, no MagAO-X work was done today.

So here’s another sunset panorama.

from outside the rail — This one is from the back deck of the lodge.

The goats are a new thing for us. We always see them on the drive, but only lower down. They poop everywhere.

The last several days of being unable to get any information about where our precious cargo was has been pretty maddening. It’s 2019 … almost 2020! One expects to not go 5 days without a status update. Not to put too fine a point on it, but I knew that it had officially arrived from our friends here hours before they updated their system.

The song of the day is Gaga’s Telephone. The blog standards committee won’t let me post the official one, so hopefully this works for you.

MagAO-C 2019B Day 1: “The empanadas have been taken care of”

Today was Day 1 of the 2019B MagAO-Classic run. Emily and I cooled Clio all day, while Amali and Laird cleaned optics, and Jared moved motors. Amali, Emily, and I are also working on porting the Clio user manual to a new site, after the zero server died. Finally, I fired up the Clio computers, clio1 and clio2, to check how they are working…

Chilly — Emily did a great job getting Clio from 280 to 77 K today while taking excellent notes and working to port the user manual to a new site. [Image description: Emily is wearing safety glasses and blue gloves, and is holding a metal hose that connects to a black cylindrical dewar. The hose goes into the dewar, and there is boiling nitrogen steam coming out of the dewar in a little smoke plume.]

Today we learned that Clio missed us very much while we were gone. The last time we were here was May 2018. Then I buttoned up Clio and left it in the small room in the Aux. I left the new “clio2” computer plugged in so that we could trouble-shoot some of the new software from Arizona. We did a bit of that, then left it alone for about a year. When I tried to turn it on and check it out today, I couldn’t even ping it or log in remotely. Special thanks to Gabriel Prieto who came over and trouble-shot the ethernet connections, monitors, and finally booted up clio2 in safe mode to discover that poor clio2 had written 30 GB of logs while we were gone. Every day Clio was looking for the AO server, not finding it online, and writing an error. Perhaps every Hertz it was doing this.
So I contacted our software engineer and learned how to stop the process writing those logs (note to future self: touch /tmp/noindi), and Amali verified which logs we could safely delete (since the new clio2 computer is on the same set-up as the LBTI computers), and Gabriel checked and deleted them by size. And we realized that every day, Clio has been here reaching out, saying, “Hey, I’m lonely, is there an AO system around here that can talk to me? No? Ok I’m going to blog about it in my system logs.”
“Dear diary, today the AO system wouldn’t talk to me.”
“Dear diary, today the AO system wouldn’t talk to me.”
“Dear diary, today the AO system wouldn’t talk to me.”

hope it's ok — We moved the ASM from the clean room up to the Aux today. Emily and Amali pushed while Felix and Muriel pulled and Juan supervised. [Image description: Inside a warehouse-y looking large room with lots of metal panels and instruments, 2 people are pulling a cart directly towards the camera, while 2 other people are on the other side pushing it. The cart is metal and hold a round adaptive secondary mirror wrapped in green plastic to keep it clean.]

Laird took this video the other day of a Wild Vizcacha hopping about on the hill side near the Magellan telescopes:

[Video description: A rabbit-looking animal with a squirrel-looking tail hops like a kangaroo over some large sharp grey boulders.]

Missed you Vizzy(s)! — And besides the Wild Vizcacha Laird saw, here are two clean room Vizzies. Can you find both? [Image description: A stone-masonry exterior with wood paneling and a tile roof. A vizcacha sits on one of the wooden beams. Another Viz is there too but a little more hidden…]

cabra y cabro — There were goats by the Clay at Sunset! [Image description: A somewhat blurry photo of the support posts for the telescope with a small herd of brown goats lit up by the setting sun, with the Andean valley in the background, and mostly clear skies.]

Today was Empanada Sunday and it was delicious! Jared asked me to help him stash some empanadas for later. Don’t worry, Jared, “The empanadas have been taken care of”.
This is a reference to a Classic blog story. See the set-up here regarding a theft of food in the ASB kitchen. And see the reference here: “The problem has been dealt with”.

The song of the day is a classic Lady Gaga song: Bad Romance