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When you’re on an observing run, the word “spider” comes up fairly often–usually people are talking about the support structures of the secondary mirror. Tonight, “spider” had a different meaning because THERE WAS A HUGE FREAKING SPIDER IN THE BUILDING. Here is a picture showing just how big this thing was:

By the way, can you guess which of the three walls is the floor or ceiling? You get bonus points if you said the top part with all the holes in it is the ceiling. So this thing was hanging out near the ceiling right outside the bathroom. I went downstairs around midnight, saw the spider, and immediately turned around. Everyone is afraid to use the lone bathroom in the building now. People are scared. There’s talk of rationing our food because we may not be able to leave.

Why not get rid of the spider, you ask? Gently nudge it away and outside? No, it’s big and scary, and hairy. Also, have you seen the movie Arachnophobia? You don’t mess with spiders this big. Oh, and as I write this, about 4 hours after we discovered the spider, it is still sitting there. Brooding. Plotting. Biding its time.

Up in the safety of the control room, I continued to make observations for my programs. Laird has been my AO operator, and this means we often get into ridiculous conversations. For example, yesterday we calculated how fast Santa Claus would have to travel to visit every household in the USA in one night (about the speed of an asteroid, apparently). I have also been berated with Laird’s usual statements like “I’ve never had a grad student/postdoc who thought you could just clean a refractive lens to get rid of ghosts.” I was also reminded what a “hi-archial” system is.

Despite the high humidity, observations are happening and good data are being taken (except when you accidentally set up VisAO to take 6000 darks during an exposure, and by you, I mean me).

I am going to once again bend the youtube song rules by linking to the trailer for “Arachnophobia.” A terrific movie that will make you afraid of spiders if you weren’t before, and if you were already, you’ll be even more terrified and fear even the tiniest ones for life. So yea, definitely see this if you haven’t.

 

 

Las Campanas is my favorite place to watch sunsets. Unfortunately, we only have one star to watch rise and set each day–look how lonely it is.

While we’re observing we are forced to fortunate enough to get to watch the sunset and sunrise before turning in for the day.

If we lived on another planet, we might not have to stay up all hours of the night to see both sunrise and sunset. If we had multiple stars in our sky, sunrise/sunset might happen simultaneously, as it does on HD131399Ab for part of the planet’s year (which lasts about 550 Earth-years). This video shows what it might look like if we had three stars in our sky (which would make astronomy very difficult, by the way).

In fact, the nearest exoplanet to Earth is also in a triple star system. If humanity ever manages to travel to and overcome the challenges to life on Proxima Cen b, our descendants may well get to enjoy such an experience.

But alas, we are exoplanet imaging scientists, and Proxima b orbits too close to its star (and is too cold/not massive enough) for us to be able to image it. Thus, we’re sticking with HD131399.

This is the first time that we’ve looked at this planet since we found it, and we’re really excited to learn more about its exotic orbit between its stars, and also more about its atmosphere thanks to MagAO’s infrared wavelength coverage. As you can tell, the planet is very faint compared to the stars, and the image requires special processing to pull out the faint signal from the planet. Since I stayed up all night taking the data, you’ll have to check astro-ph in the near future to see the new MagAO image of the planet. To avoid ostracization, I’ll refrain from posting the SPHERE image of the planet on the MagAO blog.

The rest of the night we spent looking at dusty disks around young stars. As giant planets form they open gaps in their disks, providing a means of targeting systems that likely have planets that can be imaged. MagAO is unique in that it can sense the light of very young planets in the midst of their formation (see, e.g. the MagAO image of LkCa 15). Tonight we tried one of my favorite disks, HD100453, which hosts a gap approximately the size of Uranus’s orbit around the Sun.

Keeping with the theme of multiple suns, HD100453 also has a second sun, orbiting just outside of the above image and driving the spiral arms in the outer disk. This is one of the final disks that MagAO is exploring for planets as the team completes their legacy Giant Accreting Planets Survey (GAPlanetS).

The data are in and we’ll be working on them steadily over the next few weeks to bring you the results! Since we can’t have multiple sunsets on Earth, I’ll leave you with a galaxy-rise of a hundred billion stars as consolation (above the other Magellan telescope).

And finally, the song of the day (back to the emo-electro fireflies theme – I doubt that Jared will find this less annoying than Owl City):

Tonight is my first calm night driving the AO system in 5 nights. It is great that everything in MagAO/VisAO/Clio is working well together again. Katie is getting great data and Kevin Wagner has joined us at Clay.

I was having such an easy time running the AO that I was “volunteered” into writing tonight’s blog post.

Last night’s very rare high humidity night (60-80% humidity all night) was so well sensed by our capacitive sensors on the ASM that I was reminded how capacitors really are barometers. Then I got to thinking that the ASM has many unsung talents in weather prediction.

When I was a young lad I was always interested in science and part of that was a love of weather. My grandfather Jack Close who was a bit of contrarian realized this and purchased a “weather predicting donkey” for his home. I was very excited to meet this clever donkey. I was a bit less impressed when I finally got to meet it. We went outside and he pointed to a round piece of wood with donkey painted on it with a little tail made of wool stapled on to the wood for a tail. Below you can see a picture of a similar weather predicting donkey:

Now that I’m all grown up I’m pleased to present my very own weather predicting ASM. And, since long time readers of the blog know how Katie and Jared love rules: here are the rules of how the weather predicting ASM works (this could actually replace sections in our operating manual):

So here are the rules of how the weather predicting ASM should be always used:
ASM state = weather: Action
______________________________________________________________________
ASM dry = Nice Night: keep observing
ASM can’t set = humid night: Close dome and warm up the ASM –it is cold and damp
ASM wet = Rain: stop observing!, and repeat what we did for the last 10 months to repair liquid in the gap
ASM frozen = Cold: Call LBT for advice
ASM’s tip-tilt loop goes crazy but stays locked = small earthquake: remain calm and ride it out (see Clio’s earthquake images above!)
ASM’s tip-tilt loop opens = big earthquake: HIT THE BIG RED EARTHQUAKE BUTTON (then, do as the day crew do, and run out of building)
ASM’s tip-tilt loop good on one side and bad on other = low airmass: blame ADCs for a while, then replace Tip-Tilt mirror
ASM’s Shell blows off: Tornado: OMG I hope MagAO-X gets built soon…

I think Papa Jack Close would approve…

A nice song that I like about fireflies

As Alex described yesterday, we had to make a major mid-run repair to our system. One of the most important components of our Pyramid wavefront sensor failed on Alycia’s 2nd to last night. So we had to light the bat signal, and, as usual, our Italian collaborators and the LCO crew answered the call. First, Runa connected early on his Sunday morning to discuss piezoelectric actuator failure modes, and then Roberto, Mario, and Alfio stayed up late into Sunday evening in Italy to help us troubleshoot and confirm that our tip-tilt mirror (TTM) was broken. Then, the LCO crew helped us crane off Clio and the NAS first thing Monday morning. Meanwhile, we consulted with Enrico about how to do the change out without ruining our optical alignment, and once we had enough lasers bouncing off enough things, we swapped out the TTM with our spare as fast as we could, getting it done just in time for the crew to crane the NAS and Clio back onto the telescope just before dinner and in time for us to get it all re-connected in time for sunset. After a few software fixes under the guidance of Alfio, we closed the loop, Katie stepped on the gas and away we went.

Laird likes to say that our AO system is a fine Italian sports car (as compared to all those minivans out there), and Enrico compared our TTM change to a Formula One pit stop. So I thought I’d illustrate it. First, this picture identifies the roles various people played in our little drama:

And here it is, somewhat sped up from actual speed on the mountain:

Here’s a pic of some laser alignment spots.

Thanks to everybody who helped us pull this off: our collaborators in Italy, our amazing LCO crew-mates, and our patient observers.

Quote of the run: “What!!!! How do these things work at all?!?!” — Laird Close, investigating capacitive sensor theory.

It does turn out that Viscachas are mostly useless at times like this, but they are always there to say hi on our way up to the summit.

Tonight’s sunset behind a working AO telescope.