Category: MagAO-C

So Francois Menard finally left, and everything got better. We had our first clear, calm, good-seeing night of the run.

That being said, we had a communications problem with the ASM last night that probably can’t be blamed on the weather. As always happens, such events happen after midnight on Saturday in Florence. It is also worth noting that we end up performing fairly major interventions as soon as Laird goes home. Anyway, Katie and I got up after about 5 hours of sleep to run some tests with advice from Italy. After a couple of hours of testing with the help of the LCO day crew, everything seemed to be fine and so we grabbed another hour or so of sleep.

Winds did pick up again right before dawn, and right now it’s averaging around 30 mph with some gusts to 35 mph. But for about 11 straight hours, everything was MagAO-like!

Our troubleshooting two nights ago started here:

And in the afternoon included this:

One of the amazing things about LCO is how well they take care of us. The Chefs noticed that Katie and I didn’t show up for dinner (we were napping!), and sent plates up for us. Our TO Mauricio also made sure we had plenty of empanadas. Thanks everybody!

No green flash, but it was nice to see a clear-sky sunset.

Mauricio, just after we opened for the night: We have a problem (every head whips around). . .oh, it’s empanada related.

Katie: there are so many empanadas down there I can’t tell which is which

To the Various Mothers!

So here are some pictures for our various mothers:

There was a big rain storm in northern Chile in March. The grass is green and growing on this typically brown mountain. Here are Yuri Beletsky’s beautiful photos:

And my photo:

Quotes from last week:
Asking the observer on Baade about her night:
“How was your night?” -Katie
“Good, but we lost two hours to a FIRE issue.” -Gwen
“A fire issue?!?!?” -Katie
“Not fire, FIRE — Folded-port InfraRed Echellette!” -Gwen

Our new rain protocol is to put the moon screen at 82% to cover the shell:
“So that’s waterproof?” -Laird
“Well it’s the most waterproof spot…” -Povilas
“Actually Clio’s probably quite water proof. It would probably float.” -Laird

Night lunches:
“They wanted to know if we wanted empanadas… I think I just ordered us 14 sandwiches and ALL of the empanadas they currently have…” -Jared

This song has been on the blog before but it’s a really wonderful song and perfect for today:

The performance that made it popular:

The original writers:

Beautiful:

Powerful:

We think the moms will like this one:

The hipster version — Farmdale: country before it was cool:

This is the 300th blog post. ~40 posts per run adds up quick.

The word of the day is wasabi. They served sushi tonight, which was great, but for some reason several people (all of whom should have known better) thought the thick green paste was just a harmless spread and applied it accordingly. It was somewhat amusing. Also, our wasabi pea supply is holding up just fine.

I’m keeping this short so that Jerry Morzinski doesn’t have to read a long post on his birthday. Also, no random graphs.

The word of the day is windy. Tonight was so windy we could barely open. From the night report by TO Mauricio Martinez:
3.- 23:40 UT High winds for MagAO, Closed. /MMa
4.- 01:56 UT Opened. /MMa
5.- 02:18 UT High winds for MagAO, Closed. /MMa
6.- 03:59 UT Opened, SH Conemode enabled, with better sky condition, better EL SH performed better. /MMa
7.- 06:08 UT High winds for MagAO, Closed. /MMa

And what does that look like?

We kept trying to peek through the wind anyway:

Well after all the work last week and this week to travel here, tear Clio apart, put Clio back together again — we finally have some pretty images on Clio. This is the new Brackett Gamma filter:

And some pretty plots of the pumpdown and cooldown last week:

But it takes a lot of work to get Clio that pretty, and it takes its toll:

I’ve been this sleepy too:

Meanwhile, Laird attached more Arizona gear to the Nas before he left today:

Beyonce knows how it is:

As do Chloe and Halle:

Gilles reporting in for the daily MagAO blog. Word of the day is “sleepy”.

After being blasted by winds in the previous nights, this night was surprisingly calm (*COUGH*andcloudy*COUGH*).
This gave the team the opportunity to relax a bit and work on some maintenance and documentation that needed to be done.

Jared, Katie & Laird are slowly recovering from literally working around the clock to get the system on-sky.
To illustrate how the team looked in the last days I managed to snap a picture of the zeroth member of the MagAO team at the cleanroom building.

This is the final night for Leiden so I just want to say that Matt and I feel very priviliged to be part of the team for the last few days. It was a lot of fun working with you and we’ve seen very exciting images taken with the new vAPP coronagraphs!
Hats off to you for your efforts in the previous weeks to pull this off. Hope you get clear skies during the rest of the run ! Also kudos to LCO for such a pleasant stay during my first time in the Southern hemisphere. I’ll be back!

The title of today’s song is of course very dear to our hearts but the lyrics are probably written by somebody as equally sleep-deprived as us.

The original to lull us to sleep:

and a cover to wake us up again: