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Before dinner today, Jared, Laird, Alycia, and I visited the GMT site (thanks Dave!). I had been looking at GMT’s two weather towers in the distance from the LCO lodge since I arrived last week, so I’m glad the tour request went through. The site is still under construction, and it’s pretty much filled with rocks, construction equipment, two towers, and trailers.

As you readers may already know, “las campanas” translates to “the bells” in English. The reason for this is because the rocks here have a particular structure such that they make a bell-like sound when struck with a regular rock. The GMT site has many of these rocks present, even with the site cleared out. They did keep one rock for visitors to play with!

Giddy with glee, Alycia, Laird, and I went on complete exploration mode to find una campana de piedra. We managed to find small ones to keep. When we were leaving the main site, we stopped on the side for more exploring. Laird… well, Laird went all out and hauled a large stone.

Upon arrival back to LCO, Laird unloaded his new pet rock. He claims he’ll keep it by Jared’s hotel door and bang it in the mornings to wake Jared up. It makes me wonder if that’s a better sound to wake up to than the extremely noisy burros. Alycia claims that her campana de piedra will bless her with a night of excellent seeing.

I’ve been learning a lot these past 3 nights driving the AO. Katie, Laird, and Jared have been super patient with teaching and helping me through the whole task, even when I forget sequences and do the wrong thing. Shoutout to Alycia for her patience while I fumble around trying to reclose the loop and dealing with a ripped shell. However! Tonight looks super promising with clear skies, low wind, and seeing at one point dipped down to 0.6″!

Tonight has been going so well that I managed to get an awesome PSF on VisAO while driving the AO! (Michael, if you see this, can this get me an A in OPTI 528? kthx)

The winds were pretty insane yesterday that I was pretty amazed at how the ASM stayed in place. The idea alone for structural engineering astounds me. I have been listening to a lot of Broadway tunes while I have been working on the Fresnel propagation analysis for MagAO-X. So, after the howling winds of yesterday, this was the song that came to mind for me:

There wasn’t a quote yesterday, so I’ll include it now:
Jared: You can even choose the jewelry!

Today’s Quote:
Laird: The way these rocks work is like magic!
Dave: Yes but with science!

EDIT: Look who came back for a visit!

Another long night of high winds, high seeing, and generally no good for astronomy conditions.

Jennifer Lumbres is here learning how to run the AO system. Tonight she got to experience her first earthquake as AO operator.

I think this should count for quite a bit in the Adaptive Optics course she’s taking this semester (someone forward this to Michael).

The most exciting thing to happen tonight, alas, was the return of our friend the owl. You can see her or him silhouetted nicely here against that white background known as clouds. Note the red and blue dots representing where the telescopes are pointing are straight up overhead — that’s because both domes are closed with both telescopes at rest.

We were wondering tonight about the attraction of the all sky camera to the owl. Does it reflect some light so it looks like the eye of a small edible critter? Is the owl vain and looking at its reflection? Is the camera just conveniently located on the ridge where there are plentiful mice about? Is one of the staff baiting the camera to keep us entertained? In this era of fake news, my own son accused me of making up the Magellanic Horned Owl, because it seemed too much of a coincidence to him that I’d be sitting at Magellan and seeing the Bubo Magellanicus.

In other wildlife news, today I saw a herd of (loud) burros, one small vizcacha, and a lot of (loud) birds. I had a lovely walk this afternoon when the sun was out, the birds were tweeting, and I was still optimistic the clouds would clear. There seems to be an exceptional amount of greenery and flowers around, as you can see below. During a public outreach event a couple years ago I made a joke about how green plants were bad for astronomy, meaning of course, that plants need water and open domes don’t. OK, so it wasn’t funny and apparently also went over the head of at least one member of my audience who the asked why the stars cared about the plants.

“And there’s something bout the Southland in the springtime.” This wasn’t the South-land that the Indigo Girls had in mind (Texas this is not, and I’m happy to be a Yankee – but not for baseball!), but it does appear to be spring time.

This sequence from the all-sky camera is a blog post in and of itself:

It’s been a cloudy couple of nights at Las Campanas.

We’ve watched cloud banks as we walk to the telescope:

Clouds stream overhead as we open the the dome:

Clouds fill the all-sky cam once our targets are up:

monitored the clouds from space:

saw clouds over the Magellan telescopes from the “Hotel”:and noted clouds as we walk to breakfast in the minutes before dawn:

 

Nevertheless, we’ve gotten on sky and collected data. Past bloggers have likened the MagAO team to a F1 pit crew. The racing doesn’t happen  in our little mountain runabouts:

or on the mountain roads:

But at the Clio controls, where Katie reminded me it takes an aggressive-just-get out-there-and-start-saving-frames attitude, while you check the exposure times and nodding angles, to come out of a blustery and far-from-photometric Las Campanas night with some data. To strain the auto racing analogy, perhaps this also reflects the an improvisational MagAO “straight out of scratch” street racing attitude. With that we’ll leave you with a song: