Blog – Page 78 – Extreme Wavefront Control Lab

MagAO-X 2019B Unpacking Day 0: The Arrival

MagAO-X is now at Las Campanas Observatory! The truck finally made it up the hill at about 3 pm, and we got all of our boxes safely off.

if you have to point out your detection it's low S/N — The truck appears!

blue is our wavelength preference — This is an “air ride” truck. Look at all of our stuff!

soon — MagAO-X with ultimate destination in view.

should have done a before and after grey count — The big box coming off — I was pretty nervous during this step…

Things are pretty busy, with MagAO-C and now MagAO-X unpacking. There are lots more cool pictures, but not enough time to post them.

vizzy with a view — I spotted a viscacha hanging out on the ASB upper level.

I am bound by the blog rules to give you Brass Monkey, by The Beastie Boys.

MagAO-C 2019B Day 3: Closed loop Trapezium

Today was the super long day through night. Up at 7am for a quick breakfast, then hurried to the top for a day full of instrument removal and installation, then a full night of on-sky engineering tests. The crew removed MIKE, the MIKE guider, and the f/11. The crew plus the MagAO instrument team (including some Classico and some eXtreme) installed the Nas, the ASM, and Clio. I didn’t take many pictures, but I’m sure those will be coming once the new kids on the block start blogging. The live-view camera of the inside of the Clay dome was cool (see Jared’s MagAO-X post). Here’s what it looks like right now (while we’re still on-sky:)

Can't even see the LEDs! — Live view of the interior of the Clay dome while observing. [Image description: It is a black rectangle. A black rectangle with a border and official-looking timestamp that implies it could have come from a webcam.]

Then there was much cabling and testing of cooling, signals, connections, and functionality. This went on past sunset. Then through the night we further tested on-sky capabilities such as the guider, offsets, angles, volcanoes, scripting, focus, and modes.

This was my iPhone's attempt at a panorama. I didn't seem to pan that much to me. — A beautiful Clay sunset. [Image description: A horizon lit up with light blue and yellow. The yellow/orange sun is setting behind some low clouds/fog in the distance. In the foreground are some vehicles and gravel.]

Laird discovered one of these stars in the 90s, Theta 1 Ori B 4. He said, 'In high-contrast AO pretty much everyone has discovered a star.' Probably true. — We ironed out a few AO, telescope, and Clio bugs, and then were able to test some modes and do some engineering. Here we have closed the loop on Trapezium B. [Image description: A log-scale image of stars in the Trapezium cluster around Theta 1 Ori B. Negative star images are from where the sky was subtracted off.]

Turno changed over today too. Had another nice round of hellos with colleagues I haven’t seen in 18 months. It’s good to see everyone again!

The song of the day is a classical classic, Pachelbel’s Canon by the Canadian Brass. I really like their descant arrangement.

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.