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It’s great to be back at LCO after a 15 month drought from observing here. That’s the longest I’ve gone without being here since 2009! All the same great people are still here, and it’s a pleasure to be back working with the staff and MagAO team. If you’re wondering about the title of the post, it’s from a new sign in the Clay Telescope kitchen that seems to have to do with making sure not to steal the dishes. Maybe it reads less like an edict from a communist authoritarian government in Spanish (“Colaboremos con el orden y trabajo”).

Tonight started with a unimpressive, as in barely noticeable, penumbral Lunar eclipse, but a nevertheless beautiful Moon-rise. The Moon is an astronomical object that my little thermal IR camera can detect for sure. On the other hand, Jared and I are considering writing our own FLIR control software for observing alpha Cen.

This afternoon I did Google Hangouts with both of my sons’ science classes. I think there was only one question asked by both sets of kids, and it was how much it cost to build Magellan. The best question I got was, “What is the most surprising thing you’ve ever found at the telescope?” I love the question, but I didn’t have the heart to explain how many hours of data reduction go into discoveries after leaving the telescope. Unfortunately, the slow internet connection we’ve had here meant they didn’t get to fully appreciate the video show that Mauricio put on as he slewed the telescope for them.

Speaking of Mauricio, here’s a cool (pun intended) picture of him washing the Clay primary with CO2 yesterday, in the IR, of course.

I saw two vizcachas at the ASB this afternoon and four vizcachas out behind the telescope tonight. You want to see IR photos of a vizcacha, you say? Why, of course you do.

The internet is not letting me post pictures or YouTube videos. So here are some lyrics for Rock Lobster by the B-52s:
Here comes a stingray
There goes a manta-ray
In walked a jelly fish
There goes a dog-fish
Chased by a cat-fish
In flew a sea robin
Watch out for that piranha
There goes a narwhal
Here comes a bikini whale!

Oooh, wait, some bits are getting through finally…

Alycia arrived yesterday and today was her first night. She brought a 10-micron camera to do some thermal imaging, including these pictures of me:

Tonight went smoothly other than a brief power outage which meant Mauricio had to go turn the compressor back on. He also brought us some cake from Chef Andres!
From last night which was not so smooth, here is a picture of Jared and Laird going up on the scissor lift to replace the failed DSP board in the ASM:

Seeing last night just after recovering from the failed DSP:

Tonight was Ya-Lin’s last night. We’ve enjoyed having his help, his great vizzy photos, and his … interesting … song choice. Kind of like this one:

It has been a busy day. We were searching for planets hidden in young disks but suddenly got attacked by another DSP board failure. Luckily we quickly fixed the problem and closed the loop at an amazing 0.35 arcsecond seeing. Wonderful night.

Let’s relax and see some viscachas.

 

 

I find this song quite interesting:

Astronomy happened. Stars were involved.

Hi all you MagAO fans, last night we had some excitement (which as long time readers of the blog know — that means something broke). After a fairly routine night we had just settled into a nice rhythm at around 3AM. Then the telescope rotator decided to stop rotating — which wasn’t a big deal, but then the AO database got a bit confused since it thought we were rotating (but we were not) and odd things started to happen. To clear all this we went to zenith (always a good idea to troubleshoot) and then the ASM started acting very odd. It was fairly clear (after a while) that there were 8 sensors that were well out of range and the shell would not SET or even have it program loaded without going to its panic state (yes that is a thing). This was new for us and totally unrelated to the AO problem we were actually trying to fix. So it was a bit disappointing to try and fix one problem and 3 others pop up…

As you can see above there are a group of bad actuators that are red in color — that means they are jumping around and fooling the ASM mirror into thinking it has a piece of dust trapped under those actuators. So the ASM will not run in that condition. This was new for us and we called in ASM expert Marco Xompero from Arcetri and we located that there was a problem likely with the cable or DSP (like a computer) in ASM crate 4 board 9. We had just spent the last 10 months repairing the ASM so Jared and I had a pretty good idea of where DSP board 9 in crate 4 was.

So all we needed to do was wait until the next day and tip the telescope over to 2 degrees above the horizon and position a scissor lift under the ASM and start taking the ASM apart. In the above image you can see Jared doing surgery on the ASM. In the end we found it was not the cable but indeed there was something wrong with the DSP board.

Above you can see our bad DSP board. Once we replaced it with a spare today all was good and the AO was working again… Ya-lin was the AO operator tonight and things went very smoothly.

All and all it was a good fix, and Jared could get back to taking visible images (see below)