Home of MagAO and MagAO-X.
I feel so much better after getting 8 hours of sleep in a bed! That red-eye is brutal. But now I’ve had a full day of good food after good sleep, Clio is chilling, and things are good. Today…
…I cooled Clio with Victor’s help:
…Jared and Laird worked on the NAS and Laird moved the ASM:
…Truly Nolen killed all the things:
…Jared plugged in the radios because now that we are here he has someone to talk to:
I’m really into this song:
Katie arrived safe and sound, just in time for dinner. During the day: more preparations, mostly working on our new toys. We installed the new field stop, but only after Laird drew all over it with a Sharpie.
Oscar helped us countersink some bolts, and Laird tested out the mount for our new camera.
I’ve been obsessing about read noise in our wavefront sensor camera. This isn’t a new thing, some of our most epic “sea stories” revolve around troubleshooting this camera. That was all solved a while ago, but now we are trying to get it running at 2000 Hz. So this song is about noise.
The fact that I can’t find a youtube entry of the album version of this song makes me feel “not fresh”.
Mark Phillips commented, upon seeing me at lunch, that us AOistas always look “so fresh when you get here.” That implies that he has seen me look “not fresh”. It’s fair.
Laird made it today, and Katie is in the air.
We’re hard at work getting ready. This time, we have also begun preparing for “MagAO-2K”. This is an NSF funded project which will improve performance of MagAO. You’ll be hearing lots more about it in the coming days, weeks, and months. For now, I’m working on getting our wavefront sensor camera tuned for running at 2000 frames per second. We’re also installing a new field stop stage for VisAO, and we have a new very high speed camera that we are going to use on this run to measure vibrations.
Here’s my first sunset picture of 2016A:
Today’s video is very astronomical, and even looks like it was filmed at a digital LCO. The coolest part, however, is the exploding GMT.
Yep, it’s that time again. If you’re thinking we just left, you’re right. We just barely had more time at home than we usually spend here.
The drive up:
Some work got done:
It’s my turn to set the rules. We’re going back to basics. The only requirement is that any Day X post must have a song of the day, no other rules.
“Without phasing, there’s no real reason to build the GMT.”
-Andrew Szentgyorgyi
The biggest optical/infrared telescope in world will be the Giant Magellan Telescope, which will be built on a nearby mountain peak within sight of the Clay and Baade telescopes at Las Campanas. The telescope will have 7 primary mirror segments and 7 adaptive secondary mirrors, similar to the Magellan AO system.
If we could build any optic we wanted for the primary of the GMT, we would probably build a monolithic 30 meter diameter (or larger) mirror made of a single piece of glass, with a thin face sheet and a honeycomb lightweight structure on back. However, at the moment, the largest mirrors in the world are built in the Steward Observatory Mirror lab under the bleachers of the football stadium at the University of Arizona and are limited to a diameter of 8.4 meters. Depending on who you ask, this 8.4 meter limit comes from either the distance between the columns underneath the stadium bleachers, or the size of an underpass on the highway leading from Tucson.
Because of this limit, the GMT is designed to take 7 of the largest mirrors that can be made and combine them to form one giant 25.5 meter primary. For this to be possible, the seven 8.4 meter segments must be “phased” to a fraction of a wavelength. That is to say, they must be aligned to each other so that they act as if they are one large continuous mirror.
To achieve the phasing of the GMT segments using off-axis natural guide stars, SAO and our collaborators at GMTO and Flat Wavefronts have designed a sensor that creates dispersed interference fringes using subapertures spanning the 12 segment boundaries. Phase shifts across the segment boundaries manifest themselves as tilts in the fringes.
To test this sensor technology, SAO has built a phasing prototype that simulates 6 of the GMT segment boundaries working in conjunction with the Magellan AO system. Our three nights at the end of the MagAO run turned out to be a success.
We obtained phasing data both on-axis and off-axis, with AO on and off, and at two different wavelength bands (I and J). This data, and data that we gather during another run possibly in February, will inform the design of the GMT phasing sensor, scheduled for first light in the next decade.
Lastly, a “song of the run:” Phazing, by Dirty South:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=031hzipvnTY