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Thanks to our many resourceful observers posting over the last several days, I have accumulated photos to share. This is an LCO lifestyle post.

Song of the day, just cuz I like it:


[Song/Image description: Derniere Danse by Indila]

[Song/Image description: Cover of Derniere Danse by Hristina]

Update: Now that we are in the US, apparently the first version isn’t available here, so here is the other version:

Amelia Bayo, Pedro Poblete, and I here, your friendly observers from Chile! Unfortunately the weather hadn’t improved since the last night at the beginning.

We had the telescope closed with very thick clouds (we couldn’t even see the moon for most of the time) until about 3:30 am when the sky rapidly cleared up. We did manage to get some data for a few hours upon opening following up the astrometry on some binary stars. As we were trying to get as much data as possible during our short night, at the end of the night we were racing to beat the rising sun to close the AO loop on and observe our bright astrometric calibrator to be able to measure the position of our binaries accurately. We were able get some good data and detections for the time we got, though!

Hedwig the owl also made an appearance on the all-sky camera at the end of the night.

Now I’ve left to cross a few mountains to La Silla for hopefully some clear nights. Good luck to the rest of the MagAO observers and thanks a ton to the team!

 

Here’s for our beating the sun to finish and a better forecast for the next few nights:

(Fun fact: Carl Sagan originally wanted the song on the Golden Record aboard the Voyager probes, but it was decided against due to possible copyright issues even though the Beatles were for it.)

I was/am excited to be back at LCO to observe with MagAO! I’m came with U. Michigan graduate student Matthew De Furio who is here at Magellan for the first time. When we arrived two nights ago the clouds were rolling in, but last night’s clear sky gave us some hope for our packed observing schedule. Unfortunately when I woke up for our night the clouds were back at it again.

What a difference a day makes!

But at least I got to see & photograph some new animals this trip. A very small, but formidable owl (lechuza? búho? mochuelo?), and some cool, relaxed burros.

 

One goal of this trip was to test kernel phase interferometry (see Martinache 2010) on both Clio and VisAO data, to see if we can use MagAO to image binaries below traditional diffraction limit. We made the best of the clouds and observed what we could, so now I’ve got plenty of data to work through when I get back and see how things turned out.

 

This is an awesome cover of both the English and original Spanish versions:

 

I don’t have much to say, so I figured I would title this “The Universe” as that covers anything I might be tempted to say. Actually, we were discussing Arthur C Clarke tonight, and Katie found this good quote from him, “I sometimes think that the universe is a machine designed for the perpetual astonishment of astronomers.” I hope I continue to be astonished. As I said in this interview for the DTM website — it’s a shame to lose a sense of curiosity.

Tonight is my last night, so it’s goodbye to LCO for at least a few months. Good luck to the rest of the MagAO users!

Here are some photos from dawn and sunset:

The Universe makes us feel small, so that’s a link, perhaps tenuous to this song by one of my favorite singers, Suzanne Vega, called “Small Blue Thing.”

I hope someone strumming in her home studio counts as a cover:

Last night was my first night, and after I bragged about bringing the clear skies with me, the clouds rolled in. Nevertheless, we got some good data, if “good” can be defined as finding out a star is binary when I was hoping it would not be.

Note: It is possible to take 73 full frame coadds or cube images with Clio. Yes, 73. That’s tonight’s magic number, in case you’re entering the lottery.

This week has been exciting for the astronomical community, with the 2nd Gaia data release. We now know the distances to 1.3 billion stars, and some at fantastic precision. One of my favorite disk-hosting stars, HD 141569, was in the catalog of the Hipparcos mission with a parallax of 10.10 +/- 0.83 mas (that’s about 99 pc +/- 9 pc or 323 +/- 30 light years). The new parallax is 9.04 +/- 0.04 mas — yes, you read that correctly, a factor of more than 20 improvement in our knowledge of the distance (now 110.6 +/- 0.5 pc). There’s so much to do with the data for studying associations of young stars; it’s going to be a lot of fun.

Can I find a star that is 73 pc away you ask? Why, of course. There’s HD 89252 (actually 73.4 +/- 0.3 pc).

The fun here at Magellan is in studying individual stars’ environments in great detail, when the clouds stay away. I want to turn from clouds to science.

I also want to educate Katie on 80s New Wave Pop:

And, yes, I read the rules, so here’s the cover.