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With all the bits and pieces working and at the end of last night. Tonight is geared toward the goal of the AO consistency, training, and reliability. As one can see from the picture from the start of the night it does not look promising.

Training Training Training

Amali had a classroom of future AO extraordinaire such as her. When you have to juggle CHAI, CACAO, MILK, INDI and every other software package. Being an AO operator is more of a lion tamer than anything else. In real time you have to be wrangling many different parts to make the AO system work. I am impressed and I think she is teaching a hopeful and bright future for AO and MAPS.

Thank you Amali for all your hard work and know how. Your expertise and know how is next to none.

And you know it is going to be good when you have laser dog poodle in the mix.

Hard work Pays off

This is starting to look like an AO system and we are starting to get to a point where we are no longer wondering how the parts work together, but rather how do we make them better. Congrats to all those that have worked on this system in the past, current, and for our future selves.

FK5-0074 star (-0.63 K mag), K-band image, closed loop with 50 modes, 73 degrees altitude (1.04 Airmass)

In the Spirt of Christmas I had Chatgpt put a poem together. Thank you AI

The 10 Days of AO Christmas

On the first day of Christmas, the AO team gave to me:
A single ASM guiding flawlessly.

On the second day of Christmas, the AO team gave to me:
Two WFS tracking,
And a single ASM guiding flawlessly.

On the third day of Christmas, the AO team gave to me:
Three MIRAC/BLINCs imaging,
Two WFS tracking,
And a single ASM guiding flawlessly.

On the fourth day of Christmas, the AO team gave to me:
Four CACAO scripts running,
Three MIRAC/BLINCs imaging,
Two WFS tracking,
And a single ASM guiding flawlessly.

On the fifth day of Christmas, the AO team gave to me:
FIVE TOP BOXES aligned!
Four CACAO scripts running,
Three MIRAC/BLINCs imaging,
Two WFS tracking,
And a single ASM guiding flawlessly.

On the sixth day of Christmas, the AO team gave to me:
Six RC3s pointing,
FIVE TOP BOXES aligned!
Four CACAO scripts running,
Three MIRAC/BLINCs imaging,
Two WFS tracking,
And a single ASM guiding flawlessly.

On the seventh day of Christmas, the AO team gave to me:
Seven Chai teas steeping,
Six RC3s pointing,
FIVE TOP BOXES aligned!
Four CACAO scripts running,
Three MIRAC/BLINCs imaging,
Two WFS tracking,
And a single ASM guiding flawlessly.

On the eighth day of Christmas, the AO team gave to me:
Eight milks for Chai tea,
Seven Chai teas steeping,
Six RC3s pointing,
FIVE TOP BOXES aligned!
Four CACAO scripts running,
Three MIRAC/BLINCs imaging,
Two WFS tracking,
And a single ASM guiding flawlessly.

On the ninth day of Christmas, the AO team gave to me:
Nine photons dancing,
Eight milks for Chai tea,
Seven Chai teas steeping,
Six RC3s pointing,
FIVE TOP BOXES aligned!
Four CACAO scripts running,
Three MIRAC/BLINCs imaging,
Two WFS tracking,
And a single ASM guiding flawlessly.

On the tenth day of Christmas, the AO team gave to me:
Ten lasers glowing,
Nine photons dancing,
Eight milks for Chai tea,
Seven Chai teas steeping,
Six RC3s pointing,
FIVE TOP BOXES aligned!
Four CACAO scripts running,
Three MIRAC/BLINCs imaging,
Two WFS tracking,
And a single ASM guiding flawlessly.

Song of the Day

In the spirit of the Holidays “Christmas Moon” · Emmy The Great · Tim Wheeler

‘Twas the night before running AO, when all through the telescope
The wind was violently stirring, we had lost all our hope;
The MAPS team decided that the night would finish
In hopes that tomorrow the gales would diminish;
There are 52 more lines in this old-time poem
So I will write the remainder of this blog in the way that we know ’em

༄ ⋆⁺₊❅.⁺˚⋆｡°✩₊･:*༄:｡

As soon as I stepped outside, I could tell tonight was the night we would be able to start running AO. The sky was clear, and the roaring winds of last night were gone.
It was silent… too silent. I couldn’t help but feel as if something else would soon stir up our night.

While we waited for Amali to get CACAO running, a few of us decided we wanted a break from staring at the sky on a screen so that we could instead stare at the sky with our own eyes. Conveniently, the Geminid meteor shower was happening tonight, and we were in the perfect place to view it. To my surprise, the meteors looked significantly brighter and closer to us than when viewing from Tucson. I stood out there for 20 minutes, attempting to get a picture of a shooting star for the blog (I am always thinking of you). I had hoped to capture a picture of a shooting star coming out from Orion and heading towards the telescope dome, as if Orion himself was shooting it. It got cold, and my arms were sore from holding my phone up in the sky, so I gave up and went inside. I shall leave you with a sky cam image instead.

We go back inside to continue working, still feeling the energizing effects of the popcorn that fueled us. Throughout the wee hours of the night, Amali works towards closing the loop on 50 modes. As expected, she is able to successfully do this, thus confirming we are back on track to continue where we left off in August! (For those of you who didn’t know, pushing the ASM to 100 modes during the August run resulted in the loss of 24 magnets. To keep things short, software issues lead to magnet detaching issues.) Four months of hard work pays off! Despite the seeing going between 1.5 and 2.2 arcsecs, Amali continues working. We even verified that CHAI responds appropriately to overheating actuators by going into ESTOP – we have learned this is a crucial part to not losing 24 magnets. Meanwhile, Krishna spends the entire last half of the night coding away, developing a script to find centroids of hot pixels. That popcorn really does work. Thank you, Manny!

The song of the night is “Popcorn” by The Muppets.

Hello! I am a former MagAO-Xer cutting her teeth in the adaptive secondary world as a new member of the MAPS team. Last night, as winds hurdled through the dome, and I was crouched under the MIRAC mid-IR imager attached to the MAPS topbox (aka WFS unit), trying to see what knobs my fellow optical engineers were turning, I realized how privileged I have been in my observing experience. In contrast to MAPS, MagAO-X is fed by a tertiary mirror and mounted on a nasmyth platform next to its telescope. You are somewhat shielded from winds and there is far, FAR less crouching to adjust a filter wheel or a beamsplitter. Also, you know, the private chef thing at LCO.

Despite these brief moments of discomfort, I am growing to greatly enjoy my new MAPS team! One of my favorite moments of the night was an attempt to rotate the pupil stop wheel. One of our optical engineers, Oli, was laying under the instrument fiddling with a knob that didn’t seem to be turning much of anything. We were getting live feedback from our technical manager, Manny, via radio. I asked Oli, “Do you think it’s broken?” Oli mused, “I don’t know, I am just sort of wiggling it.” Then, via radio, Manny exclaims “Stop! That’s it!”. If that doesn’t sum up the experience of optical alignment, nothing does.

We started the night by trying to get light onto the MIRAC detector. This involved reinstalling a dichroic in the topbox to feed our WFS and see if our source was centered on the dichroic, as light passes through it to feed BLINC which feeds MIRAC. This whole process involved a variety of sources which included some very bright stars, the moon, and everyone’s favorite giant planet – Jupiter!

Next, we tried to center the rotation of MIRAC – ie determine whether or not it is being fed by on or off-axis beam. If the star moves in an arc across the detector, it is being fed by an off-axis beam which we can correct with the ASM’s tilt. If the star stays stationary during the rotation, MIRAC is being fed by an on-axis beam and we are golden.

Our next step of the night was to align the dichroic to the WFS so we could actually begin playing with the ASM and start working through Amali’s extensive wish list of technical tests. Unfortunately, we got clouded out and had to close. That didn’t stop the team from using our brain power though. Visiting observers from ASU, Krishna and Jorge, entertained us with geographical quizzes where we got to guess the capitals of each state and the locations of states within India. Guess which one we were better at!

Here are some other cool shots I took throughout the night:

Blog Rules

As the initial blogger of the run, that means I get to set some ground rules. I’ll keep it simple. Song of the Day required, and you must included a pretty shot of the mountains around you so we can be sure everyone is appreciating the beauty of this place.

Song of the Day

Messing with BLINC, which includes a set of relay optics to feed MIRAC, kept making me think of that line “play that Blink-182 song that we beat to death in Tucson, okay”.