…hello, hello……is this thing switched on? Great! Here we go…
This is Matt Kenworthy, and I’ve been let loose given the reins of the MagAO blog for the night. The word of the night is “plate”, and apparently I’ve been saying “holy guacamole!” a lot.
My graduate student, Gilles Otten, and I are here for three engineering nights with the MagAO team testing three grating vector APP coronagraphs that we have had manufactured. These APP coronagraphs enhance the sensitivity of direct imaging cameras such as Clio2.
Getting the APPs installed in Clio was an epic task which the MagAO team rose to without a single complaint (that we heard…) and last night we saw the first light through the first APP – and it works!
Tonight, after a fight with high wind, we’ve been doing more engineering tests for the A1 APP and then we tried the 360 degree vAPP – which worked as well. Amazing stuff.
On this, my (hopefully, fingers crossed) last full night as TO I have the honor to do the daily log entry. Plenty of rules to adhere to, thought (can I suggest next time we only use live performances, performed on site? We could do a gregorian chant on the domes, that would be pretty cool).
Can’t really tell what happened during the day, although it seems that finally the full AO team is on the unnatural night shift (based on the vibes here at the control room at 4 AM). Good for you guys! Only 4 and some weeks to go!
The night started pretty good, on sky very early on, on our first official science night. Of course, after 2 (3) great Engineering nights Murphy had to apply, and a network failure had us on our heads. And double bad luck: once fixed, wind speed was too high to safely open. Sorry, that’s the one thing I can’t fix. That and the damned plates.
Better play safe. Hold on to your hats!
Thank a LOT for the opportunity of watching through the eyepiece. I was flabbergasted, really. See you next week. Oh, and a bit late, but: May the 4th be with you!
Welcome APOD and Sky and Telescope readers. This post was written while MagAO was mounted on the Clay 6.5 m telescope, and we post daily updates throughout the run on the main page. You can also find out about some of our scientific results using the In The News and Results pages.
You can also read about our eyepiece observations in a post by Tom Beal at the Arizona Daily Star.
On our first night on-sky in 2015A, our infrared camera Clio wasn’t quite ready to mount on the telescope. We also needed to test operating the AO system with a different camera, since there are several new instrument concepts in the works (Clio’s entrance window is the dichroic which sends light to the Pyramid and VisAO). The result of these fortunate circumstances is that we mounted the eyepiece for the very first time.
Laird presents the MagAO eyepiece. It is mounted where Clio normally goes.
The night started out poorly. It was cloudy, a guider communications cable failed deep inside the telescope, and one of VisAO’s hard drives failed.
Our first night started out cloudy. (Picture by Yuri Beletsky, click for larger image)
The telescope staff went to work on the cable, and Jared tore apart the VisAO electronics. Meanwhile, Laird was doing some last minute alignment checks on the eyepiece. At around midnight, all the problems were fixed and the sky magically began to clear.
Once we opened, we immediately pointed at alpha Centauri A which is a very bright star and so makes a good alignment target. Working out on the platform in near freezing temperatures, we moved the MagAO Pyramid wavefront sensor around until it was aligned to the star with the eyepiece dichroic.
Eyepiece alignment was done on the platform. At left is a cellphone image of alpha Cen A&B imaged on a card through the eyepiece. At right is the simultaneous image on the VisAO camera (on a laptop screen on the platform). These are open-loop images (before we turned on the AO).
Then, on the first try, we closed the loop at 1000 Hz controlling 300 modes.
Proof that the loop was closed while we were observing.
At that point, we were observing the alpha Centauri system at the diffraction limit of a 6.5 meter telescope! Luckily the moon was out, giving Yuri Beletsky plenty of light to document the whole thing.
Laird Close, the MagAO PI, observes alpha Cen at the diffraction limit of the 6.5 meter Clay telescope. The inset shows an image recorded with VisAO, MagAO’s visible wavelength science camera, at nearly the same wavelength (i’). Reports from all observers indicate that it looks just like this through the eyepiece! (Photo by Yuri Beletsky, click for larger image)
The eyepiece had a very red filter installed, passing wavelengths longer than 685 nm. This means the sharpest details in the image were as small as 22 milli-arcseconds. We’re pretty sure that this is the highest angular resolution image ever formed on a human retina. We compared what we saw to images recorded on the VisAO science camera at nearly the same wavelength, and it was very gratifying to see the similarities.
Katie tried her hand at drawing the image. You can see the 22-milliarcsecond core of A, the control radius around A, the chromatically elongated speckles, some atmospheric dispersion is evident, and you can see that anisoplanatism is affecting the image of B.Jared, Katie, and Laird pose next to the eyepiece. Katie is holding The Book. (Photo by Yuri Beletsky, click for bigger version)
During the night, 9 people looked through the eyepiece. These astronomers are the inaugural members of an exclusive club: “L’Ordine degli Astronomi al Limite di Diffrazione” (The Order of Astronomers at the Limit of Diffraction). In this moonlit timelapse you can see most of them take their turn.
Special thanks to Yuri Beletsky for documenting this great night.
This will again be a short and sweet post. For those of you familiar with how the MagAO blog really works, I just want to say that this is not a cover for some major problem that we don’t want to talk about. We’re all just exhausted after the last week of getting the system ready. Seriously, everything is working really well.
Vizzy looks like we all feel.Gilles and I saw a nice green flash at sunset
Clio is finally mounted on the telescope. Katie might actually sleep now.
Here’s Katie hooking up cables on a freshly mounted Clio.Clio has never had enough LN2 to eat. It keeps demanding more and more.
Matt Kenworthy and Gilles Otten arrived from Leiden University today to help us commission the new vector apodizing phase plate (vAPP) coronagraphs. The big news from tonight is that they all survived cooldown, and appear to be working very very well. Congrats to Gilles, Frans, and Matt!
Matt Kenworthy, Gilles Otten, Laird, Katie, and Jared, pose with a beautiful pupil image through one of our new vAPPs. Hooray! They survived and appear to work well.
Tonight was pretty windy, and seeing wasn’t that great. It’s actually howling outside my room right now. Ordinarily this wouldn’t be a problem, but Laird is still here so we have to follow the rules.
We made it to a closed loop tonight. First we had to deal with a bad cable for the guider, and a failed hard drive in VisAO. I’m too tired to really say much about it. Here are some pictures.
The NAS getting lifted off the cartNelson guides the NAS onto its pins.The cart, with dust covers, heads back to the Aux. We won’t need it for more than a month.Katie fills Clio with liquid nitrogen. Clio is *almost* readyThis is what a computer failure looks like on the Nasmyth platform.Jared putting the finishing touches on VisAO after swapping out a failed disk.Povilas and Laird removed the protective cover and installed the wind monitor.Laird presents the MagAO eyepiece. More on this later.Johanna left us encouraging words. Laird did eat his night lunch. Including the onions.
