Blog – Page 9 – Extreme Wavefront Control Lab

MAPS Aug. 2024B Night 4: 100 Modes and Tornadoes

Hello! My name is Lauren. Similarly to Bianca (introduced in the last blog post), I am research staff for CAAO, and the second padawan under the great Amali Vaz. This is my sixth MAPS observing run, and I have been given the duty of making my first blog post! Since we are currently clouded over, I will mostly be filling you in on the non-AO happenings of tonight…

As soon as I was awoken from my slumber by the sound of thunder, I knew the day that we had all been dreading (just for astronomical reasons) had arrived. Once we got to the summit, I decided to enjoy the cloudy weather and see what the great outdoors had to offer today. Out of the corner of my eyes, I saw two little blobs hopping around. Coatis!

This coati and I had a staredown for a minute or so.

The second coati quite literally huffed at me and ran away. I was a little offended that the wild animal did not sense my calm, animal-loving spirit.

Besides rain and hail, there were other interesting meteorological happenings in the area today. First, a tornado warning was issued early this evening in southern Pima County. Just a couple hours later, another tornado warning occurred in Dragoon, AZ. This led to the important conversation of where we should go for shelter in the case that a tornado rudely passes through the MMT.

Pop quiz:

If a tornado warning occurs in the MMT area, what should you do?

a) Seek shelter at the top of the dome b) Seek shelter in an area away from windows and external walls c) Rotate the building at the same speed and in the opposite direction of the tornado in order to counteract the tornado (Yoav’s idea)

Artist interpretation of Yoav’s idea. MMT image courtesy of Frank Taylor

One good thing about cloudy nights is that we can always work on software. Thanks to Andrew and Orlando, we can now control filter wheel positions through INDI, which can also be selected in the INDI GUI.

In addition, Amali and Jared set up the wavefront sensor simulation with CACAO! They successfully closed the loop with 50 modes.

Alas! The sky has cleared and now we can do some AO. Amali gets to CACAOing, working on taking 100-mode response matrices, while closing the loop on 50 modes. While doing so, we noticed a nice core and parts of Airy rings on the MIRAC PSF. The honorable target was FK5 0857, eta Pegasi.

Midway through this, a minuscule cloud perfectly obscured our target.

However, all good things must come to an end. There are storms developing nearby, and we close for the rest of the night.

The song of the night is “You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)” in honor of the rotating MMT building.

MAPS Aug. 2024B Night 3: Temperamental Temperatures

Howdy! I’m Bianca; formally I am research staff for CAAO, but you may have heard of me as one of the padawans under the tutelage of AO Jedi Knight Amali Vaz.

This is my 5th MAPS observing run and my first blog post! Last night was the most action-packed night I’ve yet to experience, so let’s start at the beginning.

This night we were joined by Jared Males and first-year grad student, Parker.
6 pm found us preparing for the night’s activities. The clouds got the opening time memo a few hours later, but they couldn’t stop us from being productive!

Andrew bestowed upon us Version 2.0.5 of mapspyindi2, which fixes crashing GUIs and optimizes setting the state of the ASM.

Amali and Lauren (my fellow padawan) began latency measurements round 2 electric boogaloo with new tuning parameters, courtesy of Jess.

Jared gave Parker the grand tour of the MMT and the run-down on MAPS.

Yoav hit a snowbank with the MIRAC detector: it was significantly below the recommended operating temperature due to the previous night’s efforts to cool the detector followed by a day without the heater on. Yoav led Lauren and I in detector-warming efforts for ~ 3 hours, estimating it would take 2+ days to reach our necessary temperature unless we could raise the power being sent to the heater by ~100%. Proving his multi-faceted savvy, Yoav introduced those of us less versed in memes to our word of the day- Cowabummer.

I’ll let this meme demonstrate it’s proper usage:

Original image from the 2015 DC Comic Batman/Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #4. Dialogue adapted and meme posted to Facebook in 2020 by user Raven Perez. Referenced by Yoav Rotman, which inspired yours truly to further adapt the meme last night.

Jarron saved the science day by instructing us to bypass the PID loop and send “UNLIMITED POWER!!!” (well, 100% but I’ve heard it both ways) to the heater.

Can you blame me? Of course I’m taking the low hanging fruit

Once the detector reached the optimal temperature, Yoav came in with the assist for Mara, a fellow ASU grad student, by taking data she needs for her thesis. Later, a closed-loop 50-mode K-band MIRAC PSF was also attained!

MIRAC PSF in the K band with AO loop closed!

MIRAC-BLINC temperature crisis resolved and the clouds having sufficiently departed, we switched gears to alignment and pinned down the order in which to move the 2 periscopes and move the telescope to have the star simultaneously in focus on the acquisition camera, entirely visible on the pupil imager with nominal vignetting, and centered on the pyramid. After the previous runs’ hard work and inevitable frustration that alignment was never quite right, the successful alignment was a small but significant accomplishment.

Pre-alignment pupil left, aligned pupil right: bye-bye vignette!

CACAO time! We set to collecting as many 50-mode response matrices as possible but temperature issues now decided to make the ASM its new target: and boy did she feel the heat. We alternated between taking 2 response matrices, followed by cooling the ASM for ~10 minutes until the sun commanded we cease.

The song of the night is ACDC’s “You Shook Me All Night Long”, because that’s exactly what we did to the ASM.

MAPS Aug. 2024B Night 2: Unstable

Tonight we first took a bunch of ASM latency measurements with different tuning parameters for Jess — took about 3 hours to get 5 iterations, may do more tomorrow night. (Well, this was after being closed for clouds for the first couple hours of the night, same as last night.)

Then we moved on to CACAO calibrating and testing. Amali tried closing the loop using the response matrices from last night. The 20 modes one worked OK, but the 50 modes one was quite unstable even at medium modes (10 and up). So then we tried median combining them and looking at them here. In the following plots we have 5 iterations of the 50-modes response matrix, and the 6th frame is the median. Tip looks OK, tilt looks OK, and focus looks OK. But they also have odd higher-order signals that AREN’T averaging out. Like the bright white or black volcano. However, these 50 modes were taken with the 20 modes loop closed, and what if that was introducing some noise? So now we are trying going back to the 20 modes response matrix and doing more iterations to average those. For the 20 modes response we are closing the loop on tip/tilt at 0.30 gain and on focus at 0.15 gain. We’ll just keep doing these until sunrise, then average them and try them tomorrow night.

Oh and Yoav had to run up the hill away from a bear as he was coming up to the dome from the Bowl tonight.

The song of the night is “Stressed Out” (Acoustic version) by Twenty One Pilots:

MAPS Aug. 2024B Night 1: We’re back!

Last night was the first night after the summer shutdown and despite the forecast we were open for most of the night! We’re using MIRAC as the PSF viewer and found the first star pretty fast!

We aligned the pupil, tested the rotational centering, tried the -300mm and -250mm lenses in front of the VisWFS and decided to go with the -250mm lens. Then we took mlats and then many iterations of CACAO testing. Rebooting RC3 and taking care of some of the over zealous logging seemed to help with issues of the CCID-75 seeming to pause or hang. The low is around 60deg F and the ASM sometimes gets close to overheating, so we take a short break and allow it to cool down. The night ended with a hot ASM at the first twilight.

The song of the night is “Peaches” by The Presidents of the United States of America:

MagAO-X Maintenance 2024-1 Day 2: In-N-Out

Caught the 0830 transport down this morning. Irony of ironies, this may have been the most stunningly clear blue Chile-wide sky I’ve ever seen. Caveat: I’m usually coming off a weeks-long night-schedule average 4 or 5 hrs of sleep, so not usually awake for any of this trip.

It wasn't even windy m-fers — Not a cloud in the sky at sunrise, but a few on the ground.

see those little guys up there? — Last view of the telescopes (until next time)

si ve dos, si ve uno — First view of the ocean. About here is where your skin breathes again.

Still haven't found Guyacan at home — The forms must be observed. Even after such a short stay, this is the stuff.

the view is better from those big windows in the Casino Enjoy. — The La Serena / Coquimbo shoreline. Should have gone to the beach.

0 to 20,000 ft in one shot — The Andes look very imposing when you can see them.

or LSST. — Challenge: find Vera C. Rubin!

more colorful than usual — The SCL succulent wall looked gorgeous with all the sunlight.

Song of the day.