Home of MagAO and MagAO-X.
It was a 3-Sagan day:
We’ve had lots of good food this week:
And tonight at dinner Hector asked us why we hadn’t asked for empanadas in our night-lunch forms — well, we had forgotten it was Sunday! He sent up plenty of empanadas anyway — he takes good care of us! And Alexis made potato chips — what a treat!
We’re doing OK:
The clouds stayed away tonight, and we settled in to our normal habits — it’s been over a year since we did that! As usual when left to ourselves, we spent 4+ hours on one target and let the Sun open the loop.
Our friends were out enjoying the warm summer weather today.
It was cloudy and windy and foggy, so we stayed in the control room waiting for the clouds to go away. Laird felt bored at the beginning of the night, but he immediately realized the adaptive secondary mirror was in danger. The ASM is very delicate, and even a single raindrop can potentially destroy it. So, we need to build a giant umbrella.
The umbrella is just a big plastic sheet about the size of the HST primary mirror to cover the back of the ASM.
So the ASM was saved and we were happy. Time to have some girl scout cookies!
Although we built an umbrella, I hope we will never listen to the rhythm of the falling rain here at LCO.
I was told I should follow the rules for the song. The twisters in yesterday’s song remind me of this song from Jay Chou:
Like the groundhog, 2 vizcachas decided to appear today — I guess that means we have 6 more weeks of summer (? since we’re in the southern hemisphere). Actually, it meant that we had a nice welcome to our first night on the telescope in 2017.
We started with some guider engineering, then went on to VisAO engineering. (Clio isn’t mounted yet, but I’m monitoring its temperatures and bias voltage, etc.)
It’s like deja vu all over again… Trapezium! An oft-repeated target.
Alexis is a chef who joined the LCO staff in the past year. He is the one who has been carving the wonderful salad animals. Today he made this amazing ship!
The twisters in yesterday’s song of the day made me think of this song from the Twister soundtrack:
MagAO is all ready to go on the telescope. ASM is in the dome, NAS is packed up, and Clio is cold (enough). Here are a couple of standard day before pics.
A new feature at LCO is a crosswalk at the occasionally busy saddle intersection. Such things usually occur for a reason. I suspect that Alycia was involved . . .
We had our first Gary Galileo Guanaco visit of the run.
And we watched a nice sunset.
I recommend playing the song of the day on the loudest sound system you have access too.