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.
There must be a post every day
Each daily post must include a song of the day
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]
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.
UA’s fall semester is done and the campus is nice and quiet. This means… time for an LBTI run!
I’m posting from the LBTI AO remote room in Steward Observatory. I’m helping out with driving the first shift AO for 3 nights. LBTI has two eyeballs (to use Amali’s terminology), so it requires 1 AO operator per eyeball. Tonight, I’m on SX (left eyeball).
Yesterday was the first night of the run and we were closed out due to nasty humidity. The best value last night was 99.8%. There was rain over the weekend and the clouds didn’t clear out until today.
Tonight is the second night of the run and it’s been going pretty well (so far)! I’m pretty rusty with the AO, so Amali has been bringing me back to speed. Amali made a really awesome cheat sheet for AO operations, and it’s been extremely helpful. Data collecting began at 6:30 PM. It’s been a smooth run so far with seeing below 1″ and very few problems. Hopefully this sets the tone for the rest of the run.
Clear skies ready for tonight!
The best part of observing is in the snacking. We have some fringe cookies as a good luck charm for getting null fringes. We also have these really good star sandwich cookies, just like how LBTI works!
Holiday cookies are best cookies.
We also saw something strange on the all sky cam!
CIA UFO sighting?
Anyways, a Christmas post is not complete without showing MagAO-X’s festive cheer! We have Christmas stockings pinned up on the board in front of the MagAO-X PI’s office. Isn’t it super cute???
Next year, we’ll have a fireplace, too.
And of course, a quote for tonight:
Phil: What’s going to happen to the observation run when the fringe cookies are gone?
Good luck LBTI on the rest of your run! Have a very merry christmas, everyone! Until the next blog post. 🙂
Laird’s blog post yesterday was the last blog post, he said. But today was the day we departed LCO, so usually today is the last blog post. However, he also numbered it Day 15 but the previous day was Day 13. We’ll chalk that up to switching from a night schedule to a day schedule over the course of 6 hours (whereas I took a leisurely 30 hours to switch over… meaning I am still napping during the day, up during the night, and not really sure when the Sun is up or down). So anyway, here’s a blog post on our last day, but it is not the last blog post — that was Day 15. Got it?
Not the last sunset at the Owlery: Hedwig’s perch at the Owlery
Not the last “wildlife” sighting: Burros – and is that a horse?
Not the last hike: Katie, Jared, and Laird on the hike
Not the last copper mine: Vein of copper we saw on the hike
Not the last forest: Forest on the hike
Not the last trash heap: Start at the trash heap, hike down from there … next time we’ll find the petroglyphs
Not the last breakfast: Goodbye breakfast
Not the last Andes: The Andes in winter from a plane
Not the last LATAM club: Jared and Laird (and I) enjoy the LATAM club before our next flight
As is tradition I’m writing the last blog. This run has been a bit challenging due to mostly poor weather. For example, there were a few nights so cloudy that only photos we actually saved were of “Hedwig” the owl landing on our all-sky camera…. Hedwig is great but we really came to look at exoplanets! Anyways by the end of the run we did get some good datasets.
The run had a bit of a rough start with the loss of our main glycol (antifreeze) cooling pump.
This is the state of the old pump. The motor and the bearing were in bad shape and needed replacement.
The ASM puts out ~2KW of heat. All this heat needs to be removed by a liquid cooling system. So we had ASM cooling system in place that pumps about 11 liters/min of glycol through the ASM. But after more than 6 years of use the pump was starting to fail. Luckily LCO mechanical engineers Juan and Carlos realized this and I gave them the spare pump that I purchased 8 years ago (because eventually all pumps die). After a bit of engineering to make sure the pump pressure at the ASM was safe (we don’t want another leak inside the ASM), the happy final result was a new pump that works very well and keeps the ASM nice and cool.
Then on the first night on sky we had some issues with a bad capacitor (position) sensor (DSP 590) that was causing strange readings and leading to diagnostic “dumps” making the system hard to use. But, adding DSP 590 to the act_wo_pos array in the elec.txt file effectively added it to the list of “actuators that cannot read positions well”. Removing this sensor and replacing the pump allowed us to have a problem free run!
So it was great to see MagAO have such a strong run. The ASM, wave front sensor, VisAO camera, and the Clio camera all worked well for the whole run! The star of MagAO: the Adaptive Secondary Mirror (ASM). Throughout a cold, windy, cloudy run it worked extremely well.
This was something of a relief after our tough run in Feb 2017 where we had 2 electronic cards in the ASM fail and our second fast tip-tilt mirror literally “burned up”. So it seems, for now at east, we are back normal science operations.
As usual the run was a success due to the hard work of Katie running Clio (and teaching the new astronomers how to run it), and Jared keeping all the complex software running excellently. This run we also had help from UA graduate student Jhen Lumbres who was a great help running the AO system (giving me a real break). Also Kate came with an undergraduate Clare Leonard. Kate (and Clare) ran the VisAO camera while she was here giving Jared a break. Also TJ and Alycia are expert Clio observers and helped out by running Clio during their whole runs. Ewan Douglas came from MIT and we also had some new observers too from Chile — everyone was great to work with!
And of course a big thanks to the entire LCO staff who keep all of MagAO running well!
Felix (who has helped us put on and off MagAO many of the 20 times we’ve done it) and the NAS coming off the telescope and going down the elevator.
I should mention that due to all the snow and rain this winter it is beautiful here –greener than I have ever seen LCO!
Three guanacos and some donkeys enjoy the lush green spring we are having
Inspired by the lovely green springtime the MagAO team (Jared, Katie and I) headed out for a hike after the instrument was completely packed away. This was, in theory, a hike to see the petroglyphs in the valley carved long ago. But we didn’y really know where to go. And so it was unclear if we actually went down the right valley — but we did find a nice “bell rock” (these “special rocks” that ring like bells) outcropping that had trees (well just two trees but that is a lot here)!
Katie by the first real tree I’ve seen at LCO. This was near the rocks.
And then we looked more closely at the rocks
A petroglyph of something sitting on top of a rock? Looking at the stars?
And we saw a interesting shape carved into the rock. Below is zoom into the carved region.
A zoom into the object sitting at the top of the carving — a Vizzy?
Could this be a petroglyph of the ancient viscacha ?? Only the wise viscachas know for sure…
It is that time, time to go back, back to our “shack” of a lab and dream up new AO systems to build…
