Category: MagAO-C

For the third day in a row, the internet connection is spotty to nonexistent. I was thinking  about the early 90s, when I was a graduate student, and my advisor, Gerry Neugebauer, was the director of Palomar Observatory. He wasn’t keen on getting internet to the dome because, as I recall, he thought astronomers would waste time on their email and pay
insufficient attention to their observing and that they would come to the mountain unprepared. I think both things do happen, but that generally the benefits of connectivity are enormously high. How else could we blog?
Seriously, though, while we could come prepared with any object we might possibly want to observe, instead we can find the coordinates of objects and their finding charts when we want/need them. While we could come prepared with a library of papers on all those targets, instead we can download them when we need them. When technical difficulties arise, it’s essential to contact the experts who aren’t on the mountain. And  being all the way in Chile is made much nicer by being able to call home easily with VOIP.

As if the internet weren’t already crisis enough, we’ve had technical difficulties with the AO stages last night and tonight (see last night’s blog post and my above comment about contacting experts who aren’t on the mountain and who are, in this case, in Italy).

You might we wondering, am I telling you absolutely everything?

Well not exactly. If that weren’t two crises enough, Katie and Jared are almost out of their Starbucks instant coffee. Panic could ensue before they’re resupplied (see 39 seconds in):

You can tell that’s an old movie because of all the leg room the passengers had. American Airlines executives today would be incredulous at how they could fly such empty planes;  it’d be like the incredulity young astronomers show about how we could live without internet at the telescope.

On a happy note, the wind is low, and the clouds have moved off just north of us:

Since the winds are in our favor, I would post some wind music  from Wind (I don’t think it’s ever been covered), but we don’t have internet access to YouTube tonight. Or email. But we are doing infrared astronomy and weirdly the connections to astronomical databases are working.  Gerry, here’s a toast to your memory.

Edit: I’m back to post the “Wind song” from Wind:

Post Edit by the Blog Administrators to comply with The 2015A Blog Rules:

Some light clouds at sunset, but low winds. Looking good (for 2015A) for Amanda and Atom from MIT, to look at various Solar System bodies that tend to be right into the wind:

The internet went down but we can run everything internally just fine, so it just meant no Facebooking or emailing our families, so we carried on. (How are we still blogging? It seems the commercial internet was down but not the “Internet 2” which carries the .edu traffic so we can still get to the blog hosted on / even if we can’t get to many other sites.)

A small earthquake hit, the loop opened, we all looked around, then got back on target and closed the loop:

Then the X stage controller started acting up, and we had to call it a night. I’m going to get some shuteye here while Jared works on it for a bit with Alfio (remotely from Florence).

Update a couple hours later: X stage motor controller replaced, seems to be working. We’ll start tonight with a bunch of tests, but let’s hope that solved the problem.

From the very start of the evening:

The infamous wind monitor:

Original:

Cover:

Hello everyone, this is the last night of my run, so it seemed appropriate to do the blog tonight.

I’ve been here for the past 6 nights. As you might have noticed, the weather (clouds, wind) has not been favorable during this time. Nonetheless, we managed to get about 2+ nights of good data. I can’t really complain anyway, having spent a lot of time at the LBT and MMT *not* observing due to weather.

During the past week, we made some cool new discoveries, imaged some interesting targets, and stared at the wind monitor. The highlight for me was actually last night. Sure, it was good to get data for most of the night, but I managed to fulfill my promise to Jared and KT by operating all three instruments by myself simultaneously. There’s no photo of this, because people would get mad if they knew I was operating Clio with my right hand, VisAO with my left, and the AO with my feet. Just kidding, Laird. Also, it would have been really hard to take a selfie, so you’ll just have to believe me.

Here is a photo from tonight, showing an actually pretty full control room. We have new arrivals Alycia and Amanda, who will be sharing the next 6 nights. Hopefully the weather cooperates for them.

Quotes:

“She’ll probably be like ‘You’re stuck? Fine with me!”–Alberto, guessing how my wife would react if I ended up getting stuck on the mountain (this all stems from the internet being down for a few hours earlier tonight).

I’m new to this song-posting thing. But the theme from the past few nights has been me pretty much by myself (not quite, because Jared and/or KT were usually also with me. But still).

Edit by the Blog Administrators to comply with The 2015A Blog Rules:

We got to open for a few hours tonight, when the winds were only 30 mph:

[Update at the end of the night]: Winds eventually came back down, and we got another 4 or 5 hours of science done. Hurray!

So instead of talking about the wind, let’s talk about our latest PhD*:
Vanessa Bailey, first discover-er of a new planet using MagAO, has successfully defended her PhD dissertation today in Arizona! Here is HD 106906 b discovered by Vanessa using Clio:

Since so many of her friends and colleagues around the world wanted to watch it, she and Amali Vaz set up remote streaming of the talk. Her dissertation is titled: “Adaptive Optics for Directly Imaging Planetary Systems”, and Jared and I woke up in the middle of the day to watch it:

And here’s the video:

It looks like there was much rejoicing in Tucson:

Quote:
Jared: That’s a lot of pictures of Vanessa, especially since she refuses to come on MagAO runs lately (even if she does help remotely).

Here’s the song of the day for Dr. Vanessa P. Bailey:

Cover:

Note that Vanessa is the 2nd graduate of Brookings High School, South Dakota to earn a PhD from the University of Arizona Department of Astronomy using (in part) MagAO images of exoplanets. Article from the Brookings Register:

*Pending submitting her revisions 🙂

“Maria makes the mountains sound like folks were up there dyin'”

We’ve already used up some of the best wind songs, and we’re just getting started. I saw at least one gust of 64 mph on our wind gage up here at Clay. The LCO weather page doesn’t go that high:

Down at the 100″ DuPont telescope, they were getting hammered by high 60s (mph) for hours. We still haven’t reached the MagAO record. Maybe tomorrow.

I made this recording in the dome tonight while winds were over 50 (it’s not your computer, the lights were off).