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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 🙁

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.

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

With all the bits and pieces working and at the end of last night. Tonight is geared toward the goal of the AO consistency, training, and reliability. As one can see from the picture from the start of the night it does not look promising.

Training Training Training

Amali had a classroom of future AO extraordinaire such as her. When you have to juggle CHAI, CACAO, MILK, INDI and every other software package. Being an AO operator is more of a lion tamer than anything else. In real time you have to be wrangling many different parts to make the AO system work. I am impressed and I think she is teaching a hopeful and bright future for AO and MAPS.

Thank you Amali for all your hard work and know how. Your expertise and know how is next to none.

And you know it is going to be good when you have laser dog poodle in the mix.

Hard work Pays off

This is starting to look like an AO system and we are starting to get to a point where we are no longer wondering how the parts work together, but rather how do we make them better. Congrats to all those that have worked on this system in the past, current, and for our future selves.

FK5-0074 star (-0.63 K mag), K-band image, closed loop with 50 modes, 73 degrees altitude (1.04 Airmass)

In the Spirt of Christmas I had Chatgpt put a poem together. Thank you AI

The 10 Days of AO Christmas

On the first day of Christmas, the AO team gave to me:
A single ASM guiding flawlessly.

On the second day of Christmas, the AO team gave to me:
Two WFS tracking,
And a single ASM guiding flawlessly.

On the third day of Christmas, the AO team gave to me:
Three MIRAC/BLINCs imaging,
Two WFS tracking,
And a single ASM guiding flawlessly.

On the fourth day of Christmas, the AO team gave to me:
Four CACAO scripts running,
Three MIRAC/BLINCs imaging,
Two WFS tracking,
And a single ASM guiding flawlessly.

On the fifth day of Christmas, the AO team gave to me:
FIVE TOP BOXES aligned!
Four CACAO scripts running,
Three MIRAC/BLINCs imaging,
Two WFS tracking,
And a single ASM guiding flawlessly.

On the sixth day of Christmas, the AO team gave to me:
Six RC3s pointing,
FIVE TOP BOXES aligned!
Four CACAO scripts running,
Three MIRAC/BLINCs imaging,
Two WFS tracking,
And a single ASM guiding flawlessly.

On the seventh day of Christmas, the AO team gave to me:
Seven Chai teas steeping,
Six RC3s pointing,
FIVE TOP BOXES aligned!
Four CACAO scripts running,
Three MIRAC/BLINCs imaging,
Two WFS tracking,
And a single ASM guiding flawlessly.

On the eighth day of Christmas, the AO team gave to me:
Eight milks for Chai tea,
Seven Chai teas steeping,
Six RC3s pointing,
FIVE TOP BOXES aligned!
Four CACAO scripts running,
Three MIRAC/BLINCs imaging,
Two WFS tracking,
And a single ASM guiding flawlessly.

On the ninth day of Christmas, the AO team gave to me:
Nine photons dancing,
Eight milks for Chai tea,
Seven Chai teas steeping,
Six RC3s pointing,
FIVE TOP BOXES aligned!
Four CACAO scripts running,
Three MIRAC/BLINCs imaging,
Two WFS tracking,
And a single ASM guiding flawlessly.

On the tenth day of Christmas, the AO team gave to me:
Ten lasers glowing,
Nine photons dancing,
Eight milks for Chai tea,
Seven Chai teas steeping,
Six RC3s pointing,
FIVE TOP BOXES aligned!
Four CACAO scripts running,
Three MIRAC/BLINCs imaging,
Two WFS tracking,
And a single ASM guiding flawlessly.

Song of the Day

In the spirit of the Holidays “Christmas Moon” · Emmy The Great · Tim Wheeler

‘Twas the night before running AO, when all through the telescope
The wind was violently stirring, we had lost all our hope;
The MAPS team decided that the night would finish
In hopes that tomorrow the gales would diminish;
There are 52 more lines in this old-time poem
So I will write the remainder of this blog in the way that we know ’em

༄ ⋆⁺₊❅.⁺˚⋆｡°✩₊･:*༄:｡

As soon as I stepped outside, I could tell tonight was the night we would be able to start running AO. The sky was clear, and the roaring winds of last night were gone.
It was silent… too silent. I couldn’t help but feel as if something else would soon stir up our night.

We all arrived at the telescope and set everything up just like any other night: Bianca and I filled BLINC and uncovered the science cameras, Amali booted up the ASM and prepared to start up CACAO/AO, Ben, our telescope operator, moved us to our first target, and Krishna and Jorge confirmed the absence of the target viewed from MIRAC.

Wait. What? Where’s the star!? Krishna and Jorge scramble around their work station trying to understand what is going on. Everything was fine yesterday! Why can’t we see our target tonight?? After two days of alignment, they are confused as to why this is happening.
Minutes pass by. *scramble scramble*
No star. *clickity clack*
Still no star. *brrrrrr… pop, pop!*
Popcorn is done!

In the heat of the moment, Krishna an ASU grad student (who is also looking to buy a car – check previous blog) fuels themselves with popcorn, hoping the sustenance will give them comfort in troubling times as well as the power to solve the issue. Everyone else joins in, munching on popcorn, as a call is made to MIRAC P.I. Jarron. The unnamed grad student’s popcorn munching intensifies. Right as Manny and the MIRAC team are about to head up to the chamber to delve into the instrument, a beautiful, amoeba-like blob appears on the MIRAC viewer. A star! During the stress-eating frenzy, we moved to a new target, made various telescope movements, fixed coma between the primary and secondary, and adjusted voltages on the MIRAC chopper. The combination of those actions allowed us to see our target on MIRAC as we desired.

While we waited for Amali to get CACAO running, a few of us decided we wanted a break from staring at the sky on a screen so that we could instead stare at the sky with our own eyes. Conveniently, the Geminid meteor shower was happening tonight, and we were in the perfect place to view it. To my surprise, the meteors looked significantly brighter and closer to us than when viewing from Tucson. I stood out there for 20 minutes, attempting to get a picture of a shooting star for the blog (I am always thinking of you). I had hoped to capture a picture of a shooting star coming out from Orion and heading towards the telescope dome, as if Orion himself was shooting it. It got cold, and my arms were sore from holding my phone up in the sky, so I gave up and went inside. I shall leave you with a sky cam image instead.

We go back inside to continue working, still feeling the energizing effects of the popcorn that fueled us. Throughout the wee hours of the night, Amali works towards closing the loop on 50 modes. As expected, she is able to successfully do this, thus confirming we are back on track to continue where we left off in August! (For those of you who didn’t know, pushing the ASM to 100 modes during the August run resulted in the loss of 24 magnets. To keep things short, software issues lead to magnet detaching issues.) Four months of hard work pays off! Despite the seeing going between 1.5 and 2.2 arcsecs, Amali continues working. We even verified that CHAI responds appropriately to overheating actuators by going into ESTOP – we have learned this is a crucial part to not losing 24 magnets. Meanwhile, Krishna spends the entire last half of the night coding away, developing a script to find centroids of hot pixels. That popcorn really does work. Thank you, Manny!

The song of the night is “Popcorn” by The Muppets.