Category: MagAO-C

2016B Day 4: Tipping 2000 Hz

After the secondary was installed yesterday, we ended up going to bed with a bad fiber running to the secondary. So the first order of business was to fix that this morning. All Done.

Katie pulls the ASM cover before installation yesterday.
Laird and Pato installing the calibration return optic (CRO)
Runa and Marco installed the interferometer we will use to calibrate the ASM.
Meanwhile, Enrico installed our new tip-tilt stage, which can go 2000 Hz.
A wild vizcacha came out to watch the sunset.
This is what we watched. No flash.

Take it away Otis:

2016B Day 3: Sleepy, Dummy, Bashful, Happy, Grumpy

Today the telescope became ours! The previous instrument was removed (Pisco) as well as the f/11 secondary mirror. Then we installed our adaptive secondary mirror and our “dummy Nas” which goes in place of the usual Nas to hold the interferometer for testing the ASM.

Here the dummy Nas is being installed onto the usual Nas spot.
The MagAO-2k PI is sleepy

It was a beautiful summer day and a lot of animals were out in force.

Enrico took this great photo of the burros

Can you spot the animals?

Song of the day:

2016B Day 2: The Arrival

Our friends from Italy started arriving today. We welcomed Alfio, Enrico, Runa, Mario, and Marco, who are all here to help us with our upgrades and re-calibration. Much work was done!

The ASM was moved to the top — a big moment again.
Enrico, Alfio, Mario and Laird discuss.
Our friend the friendly Guanaco was running away from us as we walked down to dinner

2016B Day1: Big Pete

My oldest brother Peter gave me this awesome bright flashlight as a gift. When at home in New Mexico we use it to look for coyotes in the canyon. Here at LCO it’s good for vizcacha hunting. It’s also so bright that it’s good for measuring the pyramid wavefront sensor CCD gains at 2000 Hertz. We decided to call it “Big Pete”. Jared attached it to a tripod, shone it through a diffusing screen to make more uniform illumination, and took CCD39 gain measurements all afternoon today:

Jared is using Big Pete to measure the CCD39 gains at 2 kHz.

And we saw some good wildlife already!

!Mira! Un guanaco!

The song of the day is by Janelle Monae, whose music was introduced to me by brother Peter: