Blog

Well that sucked. We ended our run with a crap night, high winds, higher seeing, and jumping actuators. MagAO comes off in the morning, so that’s it.

The burros made me think of this.

Today was a bit rough, with high winds and heavy cloud cover. But… through the clouds… a beacon of light. Specifically a kick-a** high resolution AO-corrected PSF without the ever-present wind butterfly because… [drumroll] the MagAO adaptive secondary mirror is now officially deforming to correct for the atmosphere at 2000 times per second, twice as fast as before.

Check out the images below, which clearly show the improvement from running at 1kHz (left) to running at 2kHz (right). Despite poorer conditions, the 0.9 micron MagAO 2K image has a Strehl ratio of 50%!

Congratulations to everyone, but especially Jared, who is already moving on to thinking about the next big exciting MagAO upgrade now that this one is a success.

And in honor of Alfio leaving tonight … one of the few Italian songs that I know, and one that seems appropriate in light of his AO prowess… L’ombra del Gigante (the Shadow of the Giant).

 

Tonight Clio and VisAO were together again — except we didn’t do much together. Separately we tested the new VisAO SDI+ mode and did some basic set-up tests on Clio. And we got AO up to 1.6 kHz! Thanks to Arcetri here and there:

And the wind died down and we had as low as 0.35” seeing!

Vizcochito greeted me on my way up:

And there was a salad animal at dinner!

Tonight we inducted 6 more members into L’Ordine degli Astronomi al Limite di Diffrazione: we observed Mira A and B through the eyepiece. First on the list was Alfio who helped us come up with the name for L’Ordine.

Then we got back to work, testing and debugging our new modes, interaction matrices, and higher frequency.

This is my 303rd day spent at LCO. Most of our crew of AOistas have left, it’s down to just Laird, Alfio, Katie, and Jared, with the addition of Kate who joined us tonight.