Blog

Today was an exciting day for the whole team: MagAO is mounted, poised, and ready to go!

The adsec is back, has been flattened, and is lookin’ good (after extensive reconstructive surgery).
The pyramid wavefront sensor has been updated (and is swankier than ever).
And finally, MagAO is bolted to the Clay telescope, and is ready to show us what its got!

But we didn’t do this alone. Our fuzzy friend Greg/Gary/Galileo Guanaco appears to be quite interested in the goings-on at the telescope. We caught him peeking at us in the control room this afternoon. According to Dr. Katie Morzinski, he has adopted us as his herd. Or he’s just a creeper. You can decide.

Greg/Gary/Galileo Guanaco didn’t prove to be TOO much help. He offered absolutely no assistance this evening, and we were forced to proceed without him. We soldiered on and brought MagAO up from the deep to be happily reunited with the telescope.

Once MagAO was back on the nasmyth, it took some expert maneuvering by some very talented people to get this 1800 lb beauty mounted back on the telescope.

And after some fancy footwork, MagAO was reunited with its beloved telescope.

There were some final inspections by Dr. Laird Close, PI….

And some tricksy things to be dealt with, like the ‘anaconda’ – the snake-like coil carrying all of MagAO’s communication cables, power, and plumbing that wraps around the instrument very much like its namesake….

But in the end, it was all worth it. In the immortal words of Dr. Jared Males: “We’re back, baby!”

And now for your song of the day:

Commissioning is a long and windy road, not unlike Odysseus’ journey in the Odyssey. The MagAO team has traveled half way around the world, and have had our share of battling monsters (like our deformable mirror!), and treasure hunts (to spot that elusive green flash!). We are so close to the end of our journey, only two more days and we should be on sky!

Speaking of mythical creatures…. Professor Laird Close caught this awesome shot of a viscacha mid hop.

As you can imagine things are getting busier than ever as we ramp up to go on sky. Here is a video of Dr. Katie Morzinski preparing the CLIO infrared camera for the telescope! She is filling the dewar with liquid nitrogen to cool it 55K! Watching her made us wish we had the stuff to make Dip N Dots…

The wavefront sensor dynamic duo finally achieved a pupil separation of 40 pixels!

The rest of the AO team has been hard at work getting the deformable secondary up and running! But I don’t have any pictures sorry guys.

Gary Galileo the Guanaco working hard directing observatory traffic

After a long day the MagAO team takes a moment to admire the sunset…

… And take an obligatory selfie of course!

Song of the day is both space and Odyssey themed!
Out Hud 2005: A Face Odyssey

Happy to report Simone and Armando arrived safely today.

Were we all on edge today? Nah – not really.

As scientists and engineers, do we all have a hip and edgy sense of fashion? Well obviously.

But more than that, edges seemed to show up everywhere today.

Inside the observatory:

You see the outer edge of the pupil in this interferometric image of the adaptive secondary mirror? Yeah – well you couldn’t yesterday! This beautiful, fringe-filled, full image of the ASM is courtesy of the intrepid mirror-whispers Runa, Marco, and Fernando.

Outside the observatory:

This guanaco likes to live life on the edge. He’s been swinging by this week frequently to show off for the astro-paparazzi who, without fail, come bounding outside at even the faintest cry of “GUANACO!!!”

Watching the edge of the horizon for the green flash. Do you see it?? We didn’t either. Still a gorgeous sunset though.

And now for your song of the day:

Another busy day on Cerro Manqui.

Clio came up to start getting ready. Katie will begin drawing a vacuum and start the cool down process tomorrow.

Most of today was spent shaking out our new 2000 Hz capability. As of tonight, thanks to Mario and Alfio, we have successfully closed the loop (with 0 gain) at 2000 Hz! It’s on.

To do the zero-gain closed-loop testing we had to string a temporary network fiber between buildings, since sine parts of MagAO are not yet on the telescope. This necessitated some improvised safety management (fibers are delicate).

Vizzy spent the day doing Vizcacha things.

Kelsey saw a Guanaco up close and took these great pics.