Blog

It’s the fourteenth sixteenth blog post for this run, but it’s my first ever post for the MagAO blog. I’m Joseph Long, a just-finished-first-year graduate student in astronomy working with Dr. (Astr.?) Jared Males. I’m helping out as an AO operator for part of this run, though it may be more accurate to say everyone else is helping me learn to operate MagAO.

Tonight is a bit of a change from the last few nights: Clio has gone on a vacation to the storage building and a new instrument has been installed. Brian McLeod and the rest of the Giant Magellan Telescope co-phasing prototype instrument team are all here, and we’re quickly running out of chairs. The instrument they bolted on today is designed to demonstrate the ability to phase the Giant Magellan Telescope’s primary mirror segments by treating the 6.5 m Regular Magellan Telescope’s single primary as if it were segmented. (“It had better be in phase!” — Jared) Dedicated readers may recall Derek Kopon’s post from December 2015, which explains some of the motivation and techniques for this project.

MagAO grew up with VisAO and is good friends with Clio, but is less well-acquainted with the phasing prototype. This means a lot of playing around with stage offsets and rotator angles to get light into the instrument. After fifteen or twenty minutes of manually commanding stage positions in 0.2 mm increments, one’s mind starts wandering to new user-interface paradigms that don’t involve punching in absolute stage positions every few seconds. (Fortunately, Laird and Jared have a workaround: get the graduate student to do it.)

This whole experience brings back memories of KAPAO and Pomona College, but I have to say Las Campanas has the superior facilities. I’m speaking, of course, about the lodging and food.

I’m not sure I ate anything but fistfuls of chocolate-covered espresso beans while on Table Mountain as an undergraduate, so I feel very well taken care of here at Las Campanas.

As someone who grew up in a big city, I can sometimes forget what the night sky is supposed to look like. (Except for the occasional citywide blackout, I remember the night sky as a comforting dark orange.) The view of the Milky Way before moonrise here is spectacular. Of course, I spend most of my night looking at this kind of thing:

The night sky is hard to photograph (just ask the Clio and VisAO PIs), so instead I’ll leave you with a photo of the Magellan Clay telescope greeting the sunrise.

Because blog posts have rules, I have a thematically appropriate song by Spoon: “I Turn My Camera On”…

…and a cover, by Rock Kills Kid…

Ahhhhh. It’s nice to finally not have clouds to fight with. We also have been getting some of that patented LCO 0.5″ seeing.

This is what we’ve been dealing with:

We finally got to see the Southern Sky in all its glory:

Hedwig visits every couple of nights:

Tonight was Clio’s last night of the run.

You might hear this song played by the Los Alamos Big Band on special occasions:

Bing Crosby died on my birthday. My Mom blames me.

Thanks to our many resourceful observers posting over the last several days, I have accumulated photos to share. This is an LCO lifestyle post.

Song of the day, just cuz I like it:


[Song/Image description: Derniere Danse by Indila]

[Song/Image description: Cover of Derniere Danse by Hristina]

Update: Now that we are in the US, apparently the first version isn’t available here, so here is the other version:

Amelia Bayo, Pedro Poblete, and I here, your friendly observers from Chile! Unfortunately the weather hadn’t improved since the last night at the beginning.

We had the telescope closed with very thick clouds (we couldn’t even see the moon for most of the time) until about 3:30 am when the sky rapidly cleared up. We did manage to get some data for a few hours upon opening following up the astrometry on some binary stars. As we were trying to get as much data as possible during our short night, at the end of the night we were racing to beat the rising sun to close the AO loop on and observe our bright astrometric calibrator to be able to measure the position of our binaries accurately. We were able get some good data and detections for the time we got, though!

Hedwig the owl also made an appearance on the all-sky camera at the end of the night.

Now I’ve left to cross a few mountains to La Silla for hopefully some clear nights. Good luck to the rest of the MagAO observers and thanks a ton to the team!

 

Here’s for our beating the sun to finish and a better forecast for the next few nights:

(Fun fact: Carl Sagan originally wanted the song on the Golden Record aboard the Voyager probes, but it was decided against due to possible copyright issues even though the Beatles were for it.)

I was/am excited to be back at LCO to observe with MagAO! I’m came with U. Michigan graduate student Matthew De Furio who is here at Magellan for the first time. When we arrived two nights ago the clouds were rolling in, but last night’s clear sky gave us some hope for our packed observing schedule. Unfortunately when I woke up for our night the clouds were back at it again.

What a difference a day makes!

But at least I got to see & photograph some new animals this trip. A very small, but formidable owl (lechuza? búho? mochuelo?), and some cool, relaxed burros.

 

One goal of this trip was to test kernel phase interferometry (see Martinache 2010) on both Clio and VisAO data, to see if we can use MagAO to image binaries below traditional diffraction limit. We made the best of the clouds and observed what we could, so now I’ve got plenty of data to work through when I get back and see how things turned out.

 

This is an awesome cover of both the English and original Spanish versions: