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I’m not sure what the sky looked like at sunset because I slept straight from dawn to dusk — I think I got 11 hours. Wow I was exhausted from the past week of coding and observing! I was kinda late to the telescope, I really mean to be there before sunset. Luckily our observer Alycia Weinberger is an old Clio pro. She logged in and got everything up and running — except it wasn’t working. The buttons on the gui were unresponsive. They tried killclio runclio twice. And about 5-10 minutes before I got up there (as I was hurriedly attiring myself in observing gear and then seeking a car) I was sent some urgent questions by Jared and Alycia wondering what else to try.

So I tear into the control room and take a look… and … Ok… it turns out…

It was the mouse.

For the past week the Clio observing station has been my work station, so to make myself comfortable I had switched the mouse buttons from right-handed to left-handed. So they were opt-clicking when they thought they were clicking. And they blamed it on Clio being unresponsive!

Um… so yeah. Sorry everyone. And let’s let Clio off the hook on this one. (And I guess that means I’m now solidly on a night schedule, time to set the alarm.)

Here is Alycia with everything working:

Except for the clouds.

Quote of the day: “I can’t believe we’re working in this.” –Laird, seeing the clouds at sunrise, while the AO loop is still locked.

Ok clouds, let’s make way (Vuli Ndlela:)

[Song/Image description: Vulindlela by Brenda Fassie, which means “Make way” and is about her son getting married, according to the internet.]

[Song/Image description: Cover of Vulindlela by Flaccida]

Vul’indlela wemamgobhozi (Open the gates, Miss Gossip)
He unyana wam (My baby boy)
Helele uyashada namhlanje (Is getting married today)
Vul’indlela wela ma ngiyabuza (Open the gates please)
Msuba nomona (Don’t be jealous)
Unyana wami uthathile (My son has had a good catch)
Bengingazi ngiyombon’umakoti (I never thought I’d see a daughter in law)
Unyana wam eh ujongile this time (My son has been accepted (woman said yes))
Makgadi fele usenzo s’cede (Help us finish the ceremony (you are welcome))
Uzemshadweni ngiyashadisa namhlanje (Come to the wedding, I’m taking my son to the altar today)
Bebesithi unyana wam lisoka (People said my son is (someone who doesn’t get women))
Bebesithi angeke ashade vul’indlela (People said he would never get married but open the gates)

The all-sky Magellanic Horned Owl (Bubo Magellanicus) has made its first appearance of the run.

R.I.P. Dolores. This cover is a tribute to her (she was supposed to sing the song with them), and it absolutely rocks:

Whelp.

Obviously no astronomifying was done tonight. Team Clio got lots of work done. I took a GTL day (I only did 2 of the 3, you guess which).

Here’s a gorgeous song by Iron Maiden, with a fitting title. It’s an interesting story too.

Good metal is basically just classical music played angry.

Hi there, intrepid readers!  I’m Andrew, a first year grad student at Arizona who’s been working with Laird for the last few months.  I had to miss the 2017B run because the timing was way too close to the start of my first semester (quite stressful enough already what with moving across the country, thank-you-very-much!) but you should expect I’ll be a regular fixture at these things going forward.

Phil headed back to Tucson first thing this morning, totally exhausted off a full night of Clio troubleshooting.  The rest of us — finally getting adjusted to a night schedule — didn’t emerge until around dinnertime.  The sight that greeted us was not exactly ideal.

The forecast didn’t have any clouds in it days ago, but here we are on night two of a pretty crowded sky.  Who ordered this?! I was told it’s never cloudy here!  I’d like to speak to a manager!

Having said that, we started the night on a target very far to the south, and all the clouds were to the north, so we were able to get a very steady PSF on this target for several hours.  An absolutely gorgeous dataset – I didn’t have the presence of mind to grab a screencap, but believe me it was very gratifying for my first science night.  I got to take data with VisAO, and even got to babysit the AO loop for a little bit.  (All of this was on the old computers.  The new ones…well, let’s just say they’re having some teething pains still.)

And hey, look at that ASM go!

 

Katie and Paul were still hard at work trying to get Clio in fighting shape, and Katie insisted she needed photons, so we proceeded to look at Alpha Centauri again for a while.  After this engineering time we went to grab our second science target…and promptly got completely clouded out.  Long story short, there was much wailing and breaking of the AO loop for quite long time.  We ended up sitting on a bright star all night so Katie could test between gaps in the clouds, but essentially the entire second half of the night was a loss observationally.

That said, it won’t surprise you that this was the view when we left the dome a few minutes ago:

Laird and I had our eye on the Meteoblue forecast all night, and it seemed to have a pretty good handle on the cadence of the clouds.  Unfortunately, here’s what it’s predicting for tomorrow…

If this holds up, tomorrow might be a total bust for science observations.  Of course, we’re all hoping that doesn’t happen.  Tune in again, fearless viewer – same MagAO time, same MagAO channel – to find out!  (I will be very disappointed if I get completely clouded out on my last night of my first run…)

Wrapping up is easy, wacky cover songs are totally my thing.  Without further ado, my go-to example.  A classic…

…and one of my favorite bands making something entirely unexpected out of it…

Today was a long and exciting day for the team.

This afternoon we mounted Clio on the NAS (the telescope + MagAO) and Katie and Phil got Clio cold and working with its brand new computer.

Despite a cloudy start to the night we did open and Jared tested the new 64-bit computers for MagAO, there were a few surprises about how to set the shell with so many bits. Jared figured out the troubles and a work around. We then ran for the rest of the night just fine for MagAO. Marco and Alfio also helped remotely from Italy — thanks guys!

Phil and Katie also debugged much of the brand new Clio software with lots of remote help from Paul Grenz (in Tucson) all night long. Great progress was made.

We did make great diffraction-limited images of Alpha Cen with VisAO in SDI+ mode as well as on Clio. The AO seems to be running great again.

In the afternoon after Clio was mounted I had some time to photograph a wild vizzy bouncing along the rocks — they really can bounce!

Since it was full of dark clouds tonight, here is a song about thunder…

and again