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MagAO 2018A Day 1: Surprise mystery guest

Our surprise mystery guest arrived — it’s Phil Hinz, the PI of Clio, who has handed it off to us for these many years. He came down here this time, for the first time since 2012 or 2013, because we got a new computer and are running new software and we have a lot of installing and testing and debugging to do. He and Clio had a very touching reunion — and then we got to work on debugging:

Our surprise mystery visitor is Phil Hinz who came to see his long-lost instrument Clio.
[Image description: A collage. Top: Phil gives Clio a warm hug (literally). The black cylinder is the dewar and it’s full of 77-Kelvin liquid nitrogen, thanks to a successful feeding day yesterday, I mean cooling day. Bottom: Phil leans over to look up some code on his laptop which is balanced on a step ladder, and my laptop is on the background on a tool chest with Paul on Skype, and the Clio electronics rack is open and on top of it is the new Clio computer, with quite the rat’s nest of cables coming out the back.]

Phil is very happy to have finally arrived — he had to stay the night in Santiago because his original flight was cancelled due to the LATAM strike, and the Sky flight Laird managed to get on yesterday was sold out when Phil tried. Laird’s new grad student Andrew Sevrinsky also arrived today on another Sky flight.

In the morning, we brought the Adaptive Secondary Mirror (ASM) from the cleanroom to the telescope. The ASM is the thing we move at a frequency of 2000 Hertz and at 585 locations on the back of the mirror, to counteract the effect of blurring from the atmosphere so that we get sharp images. We store it wrapped in plastic in the clean room so that we don’t get any dust in its 50-micron gap, and we store it on its side so that if there’s an earthquake hopefully the magnets will hold it. But for all that nice safe storage down there, then we always have to put it on the back of a truck and drive it up the hill.

Laird and the Izuzu driver make a caravan of 1, transporting the ASM from the cleanroom to the telescope.
[Image description: Another collage. It’s a sequence of 4 pictures of the truck carrying the ASM up the mountain. Laird is walking alongside the truck (because we ask the driver to go about 5 mph). The sun is shining and it’s a beautiful place with the valley and the distant mountains. In the last picture the telescope domes are there.]

In the afternoon we installed the NAS (the housing that holds our wavefront sensor and our visible-light science camera “VisAO”) attached to the Nasmyth port of the Clay telescope. This was the first time we’ve installed it when there’s still another night of science to go — tonight is a MegaCam night. But our NAS doesn’t get in the way of MegaCam, and we had a full crew today, and tomorrow it will take a lot longer than normal to get our stuff installed, because it takes a long time to remove MegaCam and the f/5 and the f/11 — so it was great we managed to get the NAS installed today! Thanks to Juan, Felix, Miriel, Juanito, Victor, and the rest of the hard-working day crew!

Jared, Felix, and Juan install the NAS.
[Image description: There is a large blue circle that is the side of the telescope. Attached to it is a black circle with 4 boxes standing up off it at 2:00, 5:00, 7:00, and 11:00 — those are the electronics cabinets. Jared is standing to the left side apparently tightening something or maybe checking some cables. Felix is standing on the step ladder wrangling the crane cables. Jaun is standing off to the right operating the crane. A beam of light is going across the image, from some bright spotlights that are not in the picture.]

And now Laird and Jared have gone to bed, but Phil and I are working in the Aux, with software engineer Paul Grenz on Skype, working on getting the new Clio code to work on the new computer. We’re starting the switch over to a night schedule.

I guess today is Day 1 because Laird and Phil are here. Or maybe because it was Laird’s first full day. And finally, we saw some great wildlife today!

I saw this guanaco on my way down to dinner.
[Image description: A photo with a guanaco standing in profile except looking at the photographer in the center, some desert and mountains in the background, and some scrubby brush and a guard rail in the foreground. The guanaco has a long neck, stand-up ears, a short curled-over tail, and some nice fuzzy legs. It is colored a mix of browns.]
Laird saw this wild vizzy on his way down to dinner.
[Image description: A vizcacha on the rocks. It looks sort of like a large rabbit, but it has a black stripe on its back, and its tail is very long and bushy like a squirrel. If you could see it hop, it is also reminiscent of a kangaroo. The rocks are big boulders, very angular, probably metamorphic.]

Song of the day:

[Song/Image description: “Shaman’s Call” by R. Carlos Nakai]


[Song/Image description: Flute cover of “Shaman’s Call”]

MagAO 2018A Day 0: Cool Clio Code

Well I’m here. My trip ended up being 27 hours and it was great to get here and sleep and wake up to a delicious telescope breakfast:

Strong tea, dos juevos fritos, oatmeal, fresh squeezed strawberry juice, and 2 major astronomical telescopes closed up to sleep for the day.
[Image description: Photo of 2 telescope domes on the top of the mountain, with a breakfast chair and some half-drinken tea and juice in the foreground]

I found this fine literature in the desk drawer in my room, left from a previous inhabitant:

Literature in my room (not left by me).
[Image description: The fine literature includes The Economist, Physics Today, and an ApJ paper by the author]

Today we worked hard on cooling and code. Clio code, AO code, DigiPort code. The mountain internet was down for about 4 hours. Laird arrived safely and the mystery guest got stranded in Santiago and will be here hopefully tomorrow.

Code and Clio cooldown day
[Image description: A collage of Jared working on AO code, Paul Skyping with Katie on Clio code, Jared and Laird by the NAS, and Katie with Clio]

I did manage to get Clio down to almost 77 K in one day! Clio drank his liquid nitrogen very well today.

The blue line is the outer dewar that I started filling first, at 10am. The red line is the inner dewar, that I started filling after lunch, when the outer dewar got below 150 K.
[Image description: A line plot with a red and a blue curve, showing the temperature dropping. The x axis is time in minutes and the y axis is temperature in Kelvin. Both dewars start flat at the ambient temperature, around 295 K. The curves drop exponentially, but the outer dewar drops at a faster rate than the inner dewar. There is a point of inflection in the inner dewar curve, at the point where the outer dewar got below 150 K. This is where I started filling the inner dewar too; before that it was only cooling passively. Both curves asymptote to around the temperature of liquid nitrogen, 77 K.]

And here’s the Clio cooldown plot in “XKCD” style. You don’t even have to import anything, it’s already included in matplotlib, it’s just one extra line: “plt.xkcd()”.
[Image description: The same line plot as above, only I decided to put the x-axis in hours, and I used the “XKCD” style in MatPlotLib so that it looks like my plot was hand-drawn by Randall Munroe]

And we saw a herd of 5 guanacos running along the hillside as we were heading back up after lunch:

Herd of guanacos
[Image description: Guanacos on a hillside in Chile. They are kind of like llamas. They are pretty far away in the picture.]

Today’s song:

[Song/image description: “Come” by Jain]


[Song/image description: cover of “Come” by Esteban and Laura]

MagAO 2018A Day -1: Strike On The Way In

LATAM airline employees are striking. Luckily it didn’t affect my flight, but Katie had to take a different one (that wasn’t why she was late to dinner, that was an unrelated bus problem). Laird is now on a completely different airline, probably will get lost at sea. And our surprise mystery guest is completely hosed. So you’ll have to wait to find out who that is after he finishes the hike from Santiago.

This morning’s sunrise.
This is Patchy.

Song of the Day:

A better version:

MagAO 2018A Blog Rules

Hello MagAO fans! We’re back with the 2018A run. My trip started out with a swim workout in honor of the flag of Chile:

Master’s swimming gave me a great send-off workout this morning.
[Image description: Collage: An 8-lane, 25-yard “short course” competition swimming pool with a swimmer and coach getting ready to start the workout. Below it, a swim coach standing by her workout, which is written on a white board, and the white board is standing up against a deck chair.]

Chilean Flag Workout. I got off to a good start with the blue sky with white star for unity, and swam hard in the white snow of Andes, but I only made it partway through the red bloodshed for freedom before the hour was up and it was time to get going to the airport. It was a great swim and I learned about Chile’s flag!
[Image description: A close-up of the white board with the workout on it. The workout has 3 phases, first a pre-set with fins, then the first part of the main set is a ladder on fairly fast intervals, then the body of the main set is a sequence of 50s and 100s on varying intervals. The 3 phases of the workout are drawn as the 3 main colors in the flag of Chile. And the meaning of the Chilean flag colors are written in between the sets.]

Chilean flag research and workout development and presentation by Coach Janna at Ventana Master’s Swimming 🙂

A lovely day for a swim and then a 27-hour journey from Tucson to LCO.
[Image description: Another view of the competition pool, with the starting blocks in the foreground and the Catalina mountains in the background. A swimmer is swimming, the coach is engaging with the camera, and another swimmer is resting.]

Now the MagAO team is in various stages of travel. Time for the blog rules for 2018A.

  1. There must be a post every day
  2. Each daily post must include a song of the day
  3. As well as the original song of the day, a cover version must be posted



[Song/Image description: The Chilean national anthem, with lyrics in Spanish and English written on the screen, and the Chilean flag in the background]



[Song/Image description: A pianist covers the Chilean national anthem]

Congratulations Dr. Wu — MagAO’s newest Ph.D.!

MagAO’s own Ya-Lin Wu defended his Ph.D. dissertation and is now Dr. Wu! Congrats Ya-Lin!

Dr. Wu and his happy advisor.

Ya-Lin has used MagAO to study planet formation in many ways, most recently combining VisAO data with ALMA data to study circum-planetary disks. Check out all of his papers on our Publications page.

Ya-Lin is now on his way to the University of Texas at Austin as a 51 Peg b fellow. Way to go.