Category: MagAO-C

Only one more night to go — I think we’re going to make it! Tonight was fun in a crazy busy kind of way. We did about 20 targets total, most of them were faint Clio targets. Vanessa had left at the end of the previous night, so this kind of a night kept me really busy and missing her. Here is a picture of Jared and Vanessa and me at the end of last night right before Vanessa left to go back to Tucson:

Tonight we bagged about 20 targets and spanned a factor of a million in guide star brightness. And that’s without any optics changes — we just bin the pixels on the CCD and adjust the gain, and we can lock on zero-th to 16th magnitude guide stars!!

Here we are locked on one of the brightest stars we can do:

And on one of the faintest stars we can do:

We also got some amazing images with VisAO:

And finally, we imaged yet another faint substellar companion — Pluto!

Quote exchange of the day:
“Ok, open the AO thing.” – Jen.
“Ok, the AO thing is open.” – Laird.

Video of the day: Amanda Bosh’s video of the Baade (left) and Clay (right) telescopes going on-sky for the night. Really cool! Thanks, Amanda!

Song of the day:

After another busy night, I didn’t put together a substantive post. Thankfully, today was a beautiful day, with plenty of both literal and eye candy for the blog.

Francois played Easter bunny and hid chocolate eggs around the control room for all to enjoy.

 

Jared spotted our friendly local Easter “bunny”

 

And Jen had a new roommate when she woke up this morning

 

I took a few last photos of the local flora at sunset

 

Here are a couple more  stunning photos Jan Skowran and Yuri Beletsky took over the last few nights:

I feel like I’ve just arrived, and it’s already time to head home. It’s been a blast working with a great group of team members, telescope crew, and observers.

Until next time, MagAO!

Though it’s about 24hr door to door, I remind myself that it’s not so far in the grand scheme of things:

I’m guest blogging for MagAO tonight.

I came out on Thursday for Subo Dong’s run, and then I’ll be observing again on Monday. In the meantime, I’ve got some down time for a few days. Mostly I’ve been planning like crazy for Monday’s observations. A big thanks to the MagAO team for all of their help answering questions.

The free-time also means I can take leisurely walks up to the telescope and watch the sunset.

I’ve been hanging out in the control room, watching the operation of the telescope and the instrument, and generally trying to absorb as much information about the system as possible.

Practical tidbit: I’ve been working on a way to implement a 9-pt dither pattern on Clio.
This turns out to be non-trivial since the available ways to move are either to do an AB nod (which only gets you 2 points) or to move in X or Y (moving in both is a two-step process). Katie came up with a clever way to combine different AB nods so you can move efficiently, which saves time overall if the integrations are long. The trick is to split the exposure at each nod position into two, so you can repeat the last ‘B’ position as the next ‘A’ position. So the sequence is nod AB, nod BC, nod CD etc.

(I’ve also been spending a lot of time sampling the contents of the cookie cabinet).

Because I’m feeling silly and haven’t really been doing too much over the past few days:

Hi everyone!  With the beautiful weather and amazing avocados for every meal, it’s good to be back on the mountain again!

 

Because MagAO is now open to the public (so to speak) and we’re executing a variety of programs, I’m learning about a wide range of science projects.

Of course, there’s the “run of the mill” high-contrast imaging with VisAO. See the ring around the star in the image? That’s not a disk of material around the star; it’s a sign of a beautiful AO image. With very high-quality correction, the star’s light in concentrated into the core of the star image, leaving a “dark hole” around the star. The better the correction, the deeper the hole. Outside the hole, at the “control radius,” is a ring of small uncorrectable residuals. They look really prominent here because of the stretch, but they’re actually incredibly faint. At the right edge of the picture is a faint reflection, or ghost, of the star; you can see how tight the core of the star image is and how very faint the ring is by comparison. As Laird put it, “We get better quality on our ghost than most people do on their images!”

Switching gears, we also took wide-field images taken of stars toward the “bulge” in the central regions of the Milky Way. After spending so much time taking really sensitive images of single star systems, I’d forgotten Clio could take images like the one below! Subo, Ping, and Jen are following up “microlensing” target hosts with these data. Microlensing is a sweet technique for indirectly detecting planets around other stars. The gravitational pull of a massive object like a star or planet can actually bend light passing by it, creating an effect similar to how a glass lens bends light that passes through it. An everyday magnifying glass uses this bending of light to magnify objects. In the same way, a “gravitational lens” can magnify objects behind it via the gravitational bending of  light. So if a planet and star just happen to pass in front of a more distant star, they will briefly magnify the light of the distant star in a particular way that astronomers can use to measure the mass of the planet – pretty wild! High-resultion imaging helps to constrain the planet models, so we followed up several different planet candidates as part of this program.

 

AO was running very smoothly for most of the night tonight under Katie’s watchful eye (the screen saver went on several times because nothing needed adjusting for so long!). We also had our first guest AO operator tonight. Dave Osip stopped by for a while to check in, and we roped him into operating for a while. It’s a good sign for the usability of the system if we can start having guest operators – thanks to the AO team for all the user interface and hardware reliability improvements!

And, of course, I went wildlife watching.  From the control room window at dawn I saw a couple vizzies hopping on the rocks below.

And I’ll leave you with a very serious analysis of the vastness of the universe in song form. Including, perhaps, a postulate on multiverse theory:

The big news of today is that our favorite Viscacha made an appearance at the clean room wall today. We’ve been missing him!

After a few days of Engineering and Arizona science, we welcomed Subo Dong from Peking University to the Clay telescope. Jennifer Yee (Harvard), who is observing in a few nights, was also here to help out and see how things work.

We continue to make progress in improving the quality of MagAO operations.

The MagAO team is thoroughly nocturnal now. But that means our food is eaten in the wrong order by all standards of civilization.

Finally, we have a clarification from Katie’s post about all of our control loops. Though not specifically annotated, the VisAO Gimbal was shown on the diagram, and you just have to know where to look for our X-Y-Z stages.

Listen close to this song, and you’ll hear an entire verse about adaptive optics. Plus, once you’ve been on a month long MagAO run you’ll know what Bono is saying, though maybe not in spanish.