Blog – Page 8 – Extreme Wavefront Control Lab

MAPS Feb. 2025 Night 3: “Clear Skies”

Hello! I’m Alyssa, and I am new to this blog. I am a visiting grad student from the University of Michigan that joined the MAPS team on this 6-night run. This will be my second observing run ever!

The MAPS team headed up to the summit tonight! The skies looked more promising than previous nights.

We had some clouds here and there with periods of high winds. But that quickly died down from up to 35 mph down to 0 mph over a span of a few hours. When aligning the pupil for MIRAC5 and co-aligning with the AO WFS, we have initially found that the source position was barely on the field of view of the detector. Since there is a new dichroic lens in the optical system, Manny and I went up to adjust the actuators near the dichroic to see if we could center the source as much as possible. Luckily, this had solved the issue to a good degree, and after getting through the cloudy and windy moments in the night, we were fortunate enough to start taking some science data tonight with some targets.

With some progress tonight, I want to take a moment for some notable quotes given out from none other than Krishna:

“What is the name of the dog in Scooby-Doo?”

“Is the loop looping?”

“Also, Manny, you look like a Rapper.”
Krishna

Manny and Krishna strike a pose as your local MMT rappers — Manny and Krishna pose as your local MMT rappers

Song of the night featuring one of my favorite bands:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhWWlFme0dU

MAPS Feb. 2025A Night 2: The Fog

As much as I hate to report it, the MAPS crew is once again trapped in a cloud. For a few days now, the forecast has consistently predicted high cloud coverage for all of tonight. To be sure, we performed our own professional survey of the sky at sunset. Yep, those clouds look cloudy, and it seems like they want to stick around with us.

We decided it was best to make ourselves cozy in the dorm common building while waiting for any break in the clouds. Bianca and I took this time to practice AO/CACAO set up . ݁₊ ⊹ remotely. ݁˖ ⊹ ݁. We have ran through this process four times between the two of us so far this run without making any dire mistakes. Amali has trained us well! Additionally, we properly troubleshooted an issue with the visible wavefront sensor camera, which was reporting a frame rate of ~2000 instead of the expected 500.

Unfortunately, there is not a fireplace here. Instead, we turned on all of the “cozy” lights (minus the lamp that had exposed wires in place of prongs on its plug) and a space heater. For some ambient noise, we turned on the tv to the H&I channel. This was not by choice, but the remote wasn’t working. Walker, Texas Ranger (5.7 stars on imdb), featuring Chuck Norris, was playing. I think the cheesy acting and ’90s aesthetic of the show really helped set the vibes for the night.

Our cozy setup. Note the 94% humidity reading.

I made a few trips outside throughout the night. The fog that engulfed Mt. Hopkins was quite dense, and I could not see further than five feet in front of me. Around 2 AM, we declared the night to be unobservable.

The song of the night is “Clouds” by One Direction, which is featured on their best album (in my professional opinion): FOUR.

Bonus song because it is February 14th:

Sorry No news

System is ready, but Weather is here.

Last night we started the night with clouds above and over 30 mph winds. We got the system ready for on sky time and then waited for the wind to die down. Hopefully it will all clear out and we will start doing some AO’ing soon.

Let’s Get Down to Rigging…

…to defeat…chronic back pain. Or something like that. Yesterday, the MagAO-X team partook in rigging and crane safety training (or craining for short).

“Why do we need a blog post about rigging? I just don’t get it!” ~ Anonymous MagAO-X Team Member

Fair point, anonymous group member. However, plenty of excitement occurs during crainings.

I have included a list of famous crane operators below:

Tony Ullakko (former world champion crane operator)
Katie Kelleher (top 100 women in construction and owner of katiecranes.com)
Tom Gordon (former crane operator at 1 World Trade Center)
Jared Males

Our craining day began with Maggie modeling the iconic Sketcher’s work boot.

We then embarked on a drive up to Mt. Hopkins where a few of us had an in-depth discussion on life, interpersonal relationships, and the critically acclaimed film Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising.

I forgot to take a picture depicting the conversations in question, so here’s an image of the observatory sign that I took.

I saw the sign. And it opened up my eyes, and I am happy now.

Our craining got off to an exhilarating start. Below, Katie and Eden can be seen reacting to a sling failure compilation.

Wire we watching this? Because safety is no accident.

Our craining also featured a GMT cameo and a thorough sling inspection.

Wire sling cores or ELT pupils? You decide!

Following our craining, we got an MMT(our) of the facilities!

Finally, we engaged in some hands-on rigging training…

…and inspected the adaptive secondary mirror.

Thus concludes the first ever MagAO-X craining session!

Song of the Day:

Men Without Hats-Safety Dance

MAPS Dec. 2024B Night 5: The big W problem

Usually you would think, the big W problem for an observing run would be Wind. And usually you would correct… but not this time. When we went to sleep today morning, we were prepared for facing clouds at night but not Water shortage. There was no water at the bowl…would be a statement a thirsty dog would say (maybe, idk I don’t speak dog yet). But thankfully, after a brief 4 hours, we got water running. So, we started our climb to the summit, in our cars. For Jorge, however, it was indeed a climb because he chose to walk to the summit.

When someone mentioned yesterday that we might want to increase the AO modes to 100 for this run, I personally thought it would take some time (to dot every t’s and cross every i’s). But Amali had it working in ~20 mins! So, just for fun, Jorge and I started looking at bright exoplanet hosts. The plan was to observe a planet hosting faint-ish star (Vmag>5). But we stumbled on something better. Not only was it a faint star (Vmag = 8.14), but also the only exoplanet system (WASP-33) to have its high-resolution observations taken with ARIES back in 2016 A.D. But wait, there is more, the planet (WASP-33 b) would soon be in an orbital phase where it would “emit” radiation before going behind WASP-33. So, we thought we would try to hit two stones with one bird — close the loop with 100 modes on a faint target, and capture WASP-33 b’s planetary emission.

The first task was a success! We were able to close loop with 100 modes on the faintest target so far! But regarding the second task, MIRAC grew impatient during the course of today’s adventure and began heating up so most of the images we took of WASP-33 were overwhelmed with noise 🙁

It might not be the best looking PSF there is, but it was still a great news!

Manny quickly figured out what must be heating up (or not cooling down?) MIRAC — one of the cryo lines was not tight. After this fix, we decided to let MIRAC cool down for a while before we restart taking data. By that time, WASP-33 b had already been eclipsed behind the star so we switched to a slightly fainter target for the rest of the run. The rest of the night was just about maintaining the loop, observing the star at multiple altitudes in multiple bands. This night had all things W-centered — Water, WASP-33, Wemperature of the detector.

According to Jarron, only a 0.5K change would worsen MIRAC performance … and we were hitting a difference of 7K .

P.S. Shoutout to Jorge for helping me out with the text, both our brains were at 50% capacity by the end of the night so we needed to team up.

Song of the Day