Today was the super long day through night. Up at 7am for a quick breakfast, then hurried to the top for a day full of instrument removal and installation, then a full night of on-sky engineering tests. The crew removed MIKE, the MIKE guider, and the f/11. The crew plus the MagAO instrument team (including some Classico and some eXtreme) installed the Nas, the ASM, and Clio. I didn’t take many pictures, but I’m sure those will be coming once the new kids on the block start blogging. The live-view camera of the inside of the Clay dome was cool (see Jared’s MagAO-X post). Here’s what it looks like right now (while we’re still on-sky:)
Live view of the interior of the Clay dome while observing. [Image description: It is a black rectangle. A black rectangle with a border and official-looking timestamp that implies it could have come from a webcam.]
Then there was much cabling and testing of cooling, signals, connections, and functionality. This went on past sunset. Then through the night we further tested on-sky capabilities such as the guider, offsets, angles, volcanoes, scripting, focus, and modes.
A beautiful Clay sunset. [Image description: A horizon lit up with light blue and yellow. The yellow/orange sun is setting behind some low clouds/fog in the distance. In the foreground are some vehicles and gravel.]We ironed out a few AO, telescope, and Clio bugs, and then were able to test some modes and do some engineering. Here we have closed the loop on Trapezium B. [Image description: A log-scale image of stars in the Trapezium cluster around Theta 1 Ori B. Negative star images are from where the sky was subtracted off.]
Turno changed over today too. Had another nice round of hellos with colleagues I haven’t seen in 18 months. It’s good to see everyone again!
The song of the day is a classical classic, Pachelbel’s Canon by the Canadian Brass. I really like their descant arrangement.
Yesterday was cooldown day; today was prep day; tomorrow will be the big day/night. Tomorrow we will be busy from 7am with removing MIKE, the MIKE guider, and the f/11, and installing the NAS, Clio, and the ASM. To prep today, we continued to test the Clio motors and code, and then we moved Clio from the Aux to the platform to start pumping on the inner dewar in order to solidify it:
Some of the team bring Clio up on the lift. [Image description: Point of view is from looking down an open lift shaft from above. The Clio instrument and its electronics rack are raised from the ground to the Nasmyth platform level.]A herd of burros were milling about as I walked to lunch. [Image description: An adult and a juvenile burro stand in profile but look at the camera. They are brown with white undersides. Behind them are some roads, and off in the distance are at least 2 telescope domes on ridges. There is also a low-lying bodega. Finally, a light brown valley, some distant purple mountains, and the blue sky round out the scene.]I think Vizzy is a fan of the blog. Because I haven’t seen a viz make this pose in several years, but yesterday I link to this image and all of a sudden Vizzy is making the same pose today! [Image description: A Tame Vizcacha on the Clean Room sits up on its haunches with its little paws in front like a classic Monte Python bunny rabbit.]
The song of the day is the MagAO-C Classic “Boom Clap” cover by Lennon & Maisy:
Today was Day 1 of the 2019B MagAO-Classic run. Emily and I cooled Clio all day, while Amali and Laird cleaned optics, and Jared moved motors. Amali, Emily, and I are also working on porting the Clio user manual to a new site, after the zero server died. Finally, I fired up the Clio computers, clio1 and clio2, to check how they are working…
Emily did a great job getting Clio from 280 to 77 K today while taking excellent notes and working to port the user manual to a new site. [Image description: Emily is wearing safety glasses and blue gloves, and is holding a metal hose that connects to a black cylindrical dewar. The hose goes into the dewar, and there is boiling nitrogen steam coming out of the dewar in a little smoke plume.]
Today we learned that Clio missed us very much while we were gone. The last time we were here was May 2018. Then I buttoned up Clio and left it in the small room in the Aux. I left the new “clio2” computer plugged in so that we could trouble-shoot some of the new software from Arizona. We did a bit of that, then left it alone for about a year. When I tried to turn it on and check it out today, I couldn’t even ping it or log in remotely. Special thanks to Gabriel Prieto who came over and trouble-shot the ethernet connections, monitors, and finally booted up clio2 in safe mode to discover that poor clio2 had written 30 GB of logs while we were gone. Every day Clio was looking for the AO server, not finding it online, and writing an error. Perhaps every Hertz it was doing this. So I contacted our software engineer and learned how to stop the process writing those logs (note to future self: touch /tmp/noindi), and Amali verified which logs we could safely delete (since the new clio2 computer is on the same set-up as the LBTI computers), and Gabriel checked and deleted them by size. And we realized that every day, Clio has been here reaching out, saying, “Hey, I’m lonely, is there an AO system around here that can talk to me? No? Ok I’m going to blog about it in my system logs.” “Dear diary, today the AO system wouldn’t talk to me.” “Dear diary, today the AO system wouldn’t talk to me.” “Dear diary, today the AO system wouldn’t talk to me.”
We moved the ASM from the clean room up to the Aux today. Emily and Amali pushed while Felix and Muriel pulled and Juan supervised. [Image description: Inside a warehouse-y looking large room with lots of metal panels and instruments, 2 people are pulling a cart directly towards the camera, while 2 other people are on the other side pushing it. The cart is metal and hold a round adaptive secondary mirror wrapped in green plastic to keep it clean.]
Laird took this video the other day of a Wild Vizcacha hopping about on the hill side near the Magellan telescopes:
[Video description: A rabbit-looking animal with a squirrel-looking tail hops like a kangaroo over some large sharp grey boulders.]
And besides the Wild Vizcacha Laird saw, here are two clean room Vizzies. Can you find both? [Image description: A stone-masonry exterior with wood paneling and a tile roof. A vizcacha sits on one of the wooden beams. Another Viz is there too but a little more hidden…]There were goats by the Clay at Sunset! [Image description: A somewhat blurry photo of the support posts for the telescope with a small herd of brown goats lit up by the setting sun, with the Andean valley in the background, and mostly clear skies.]
Today was Empanada Sunday and it was delicious! Jared asked me to help him stash some empanadas for later. Don’t worry, Jared, “The empanadas have been taken care of”. This is a reference to a Classic blog story. See the set-up here regarding a theft of food in the ASB kitchen. And see the reference here: “The problem has been dealt with”.
The song of the day is a classic Lady Gaga song: Bad Romance
Dear Reader, we shall try to be clear. Magellan Adaptive Optics a.k.a. MagAO shall now be referred to as MagAO-Classic or MagAO-C. This is due to the introduction of MagAO-eXtreme or MagAO-X on the scene. We are here at the same time for 2 different runs:
MagAO-C 2019B Observing Run, and
MagAO-X 2019B Unpacking Run
Welcome.
I arrived today with Amali Vaz and Emily Mailhot. You may remember Amali from such hits as her Award-Winning Blog Post (the award). Emily and her counterpart Jared Carlson are the new Steward AO Observing Specialists and Emily is here to be trained on MagAO-C while Jared C. is observing at LBTI in Tucson.
We wish our Chilean colleagues all the best in their efforts to organize better living conditions in this beautiful country. I haven’t been here for about a year and a half and it is nice to be back. The trip went smoothly, due to the airport staff in TUS, DFW, SCL, and LSC as well as the LCO staff at El Pino who arranged smooth door-to-door transport. Things were quiet in SCL but planes were flying on time and taxis and traffic in La Serena were pretty typical.
How I was greeted in SCL. [Image description: Katie’s Starbucks coffee cup is in the foreground, and it says “Katy <3" in hand-written black Sharpie. Emily is out of focus in the background, and the mountains around Santiago are even more out of focus and even more in the background.]Jared getting a panorama of the sunset. [Image description: A back-lit scene of the orange sun setting in orange clouds with clouds and mountains on the distant horizon. Jared is seen in the foreground off to the side, in silhouette taking a picture with his phone.]
The MagAO-C 2019B Blog Rules:
There must be 1 MagAO-C post per day.
The post of the day must include a Classic song of the day.
The end.
Song of the day: This is a Classic (in fact, a MagAO-Classic) because it came out the day we left Tucson for the first full (non-commissioning) science run in 2014A, over 5 years ago. It’s also a Classic because my heart always sings Shakira when I’m in Latin America. Finally, as noted in the original blog post, it’s a Classic because it has an astronomical theme (which used to be a typical blog rule).
It’s Empire by Shakira (we should start writing the song names for those cases where YouTube takes down the video and we otherwise can’t tell what it is a few years from now).
To simplify maintenance, we’re making the MagAO-X blog a continuation of the MagAO blog. Going forward, we will be doing our project updates here on xwcl.science. I did my best to migrate things without breaking references to our previous nine years (!) of posts. However, if you notice any broken links to visao.as.arizona.edu, do let me know.
