Category: MagAO-X

Hi! I’m Jensen, a PhD student at MIT and one of this run’s guest observers. This was my first time at Las Campanas Observatory (or any observatory, for that matter), so naturally the universe bestowed upon us the cloudiest, windiest, rainiest, and snowiest May week at LCO in recent memory. The usually featureless “Metro”blue forecasts were often filled with harbingers of astronomical doom. That being said, I’ve loved my time here and hope to come back for future runs!

Today started off strong. The clouds were sparse, the wind was mild, and humidity was low. The local fauna clearly noticed the improvement in conditions, because some grazing guanacos made an appearance for the first time this week.

To make the most of the good weather, and to commemorate my last (full) day at LCO this run, I took myself on a self-guided tour of the LCO grounds. It was fun to see the Irénée du Pont and Henrietta Swope Telescopes up close after several days of admiring them from afar.

As frequently happens at LCO, a lovely sunset closed out our daylight hours. A mountain view like this is hard to beat.

Now, the moment we had all been waiting for: nightfall. The (relatively) clear conditions from earlier in the day had persisted, and after much anticipation, we were finally able to open the dome. The hunt for Hα companions could resume!

Unfortunately, just as the sky giveth, the sky taketh away. After a couple hours of patchy clouds and low- to mid-tier seeing, the clouds returned with a vengeance and forced dome closure. Thus ended our short-lived excursion into actually doing astronomy at a telescope. Some observing is better than none at all, though. At least we generated a few new .fits files in our time at LCO.

On the bright side, things can only get better from here – I look forward to returning and seeing everything to southern sky has to offer!

The Best 15 Minutes

My favourite part of today was when the Clay Telescope’s dome, at long last, opened. I never thought that watching metal panels slide and fold could be so exciting.

The Song of the Day

Today’s song of the day, for obvious reasons, is Nuages from Nocturnes by Debussy.

xwcl admin addendum

The blog operators would like to include these two photos collected by the rest of the team of our guest observers enjoying a clear sunset:

Does it dry up like puddles in a dome floor?
Or fester like astronomers on night schedules with nothing to do?
Does it stink like the Atacama desert in the rain?
Or crust and sugar over like flan in the LCO dining room fridge?
Maybe it just sags like Gabriele’s shoulders?
Or does it explode?

The rain has stopped and the clouds are gone but we are still closed. The humidity is still high, apparently high enough to keep the dome from drying. It’s still dripping, so the telescope cover is closed and MagAO-X is covered in plastic. It’s still Gabriele’s night so he’s struggling to hang on to hope.

But we can’t even go on the internal source to do some engineering, because the puddles have everything off.

MagAO-X wrapped up in plastic

Laird is still decommissioning MagAO. He was up early enough to catch the remnants of the overnight snowstorm before it all melted an hour later:

Jared spent some time tonight dismantling his PhD project, the visible arm of MagAO, VisAO.

The best 15 mins of my day were when my friends made a birthday call. The only place I could find to go that wouldn’t disturb anyone and wasn’t icy wind was in the dome, which was all lit up cause of the water.

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I know! It’s crazy, because my feet are so large, but i was never into swimming

Jared said VM to me again *cry face*

This spaghetti tastes so much better than glycol

“This isn’t a cheese focused story!
It’s merely cheese adjacent” *sad face*

It flagged every instance of ‘cloud’ as ‘butt’, but I couldn’t let it go to press that way…

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The song of the day is for Gabriele:

This is my seventh trip to Las Campanas Observatory (I think?) and the first time I’ve seen actual, bona-fide precipitation in the Atacama desert. I woke up at 2pm to the gentle patter of rain on my windows, and emerged blinking into daylight. I did try to document it with my phone, but in my sleep-addled state I apparently double-tapped the “record” button and ended up taking some neat videos of the ground.

Fortunately, the early shift was up and could take some pictures.

Vizzy Viscacha was wise to stay under cover as the storm rolled in. Even MagAO-X had to be tucked in safe and dry.

Then, it started really snowing.

Laird is the only one brave enough to venture forth from the lodge. He had to get MagAO (not -X) packed up for its international shipment.

After the snow, we got a snow-bow!

Unfortunately, our guest observers Gabriele Cugno from Michigan and Jensen Lawrence from MIT have had just about the worst weather I’ve ever seen here. In fact, this brief break in the clouds after dinner was when Gabriele got his best chance to observe:

Then the hailstorm started.

(Or maybe it was a graupelstorm?)

Today, by the numbers:

New SSH/VPN questions: 2
Spurious Python environments purged: 11
Night lunches recovered from shutdown: 4
Stars: 14 ish?
Hailstones and/or graupelstones: ≫14
Adaptive secondary mirrors: 1 (slightly used)

Best 15 Minutes of the Day

Probably the rainbow. I swear, natural phenomena here look just the way they are depicted in children’s book illustrations.

Song of the Day

This song of the day is not observer-approved.

Remarks overheard

“So, by the way, how does a pyramid wavefront sensor actually work?”
[rueful laughter in response]

“Whatever. I have no excuses, but I’m also not sorry.”

I was home in Tucson for about 5 minutes after the last run. So I only managed to get all of my laundry done all at once just in time to pack for this trip. Upon doing so, I discovered that I was missing some socks. This happens to all of us, dryers being constructed the way they are, and I normally don’t expend much energy on it.

However, this time one of the lost was a brand new wool sock I bought especially for LCO, and I knew I was headed into this:

So I was disappointed to lose my new sock that I’d gotten to wear once or twice on the last run (and an older one too), and worried about potential for cold feets.

But then I did my first round of laundry, and had the bright idea to look in the cupboards above the washing machine… AND I FOUND MY SOCKS YOU GUYS!!!!!

Thanks to whichever denizen of LCO took the time to stow my socks for me.

We had an impromptu birthday celebration for Logan tonight, organized by Eden. Singing, dancing, homemade card, and fruit snacks for all.

Laird has been busy packing up the venerable MagAO ASM, getting ready to send it on its way to its new life at the LBT. I booted up the old control computer for MagAO-C, and it came right back to life.

Being weathered out has some advantages. Olivier made us a new toy, which lets us look at the timing of our system in 3D. This movie shows the response of the MagAO-X wavefront sensor to a deformable mirror (DM) poke as a function of time. Key fun feature: the DM actuators move in a raster pattern, and it takes about 100 microseconds for the whole DM to move. You can see that in this movie.

Best 15 minutes of the day was plugging in the MagAO computers and remembering how it all worked, seeing them boot again, figuring out how to remember the password, and logging in to see an old friend.

There were new faces this time so I am going to introduce myself. I am Carla the youngest Magellan operator eh eh. For now at least.

My week with you guys started on Monday, when I realized you are at the mountain and thinking about the treat I am going to get you this time. So, just before going to El Pino I brought a couple of “dulces chilenos”. I see you like the alfajores and that’s a very typical Chilean dessert filled with the best sweet of all, manjar.

It was a week where we were closed almost all the time, the telescope was open only 22 hours! So that’s kind of a record for me. But it was a great opportunity for me to spend time with you and laugh at your very funny way of being. I appreciate your spirits.

Actually tonight you get the famous picture with the 6.5mts mirror, and I have to admit I can’t believe you didn’t have it before, so it was good. You have the best poses, so of course I copy one of them and get my own picture, thank you eh eh.

Then, we saw the auxiliar building where the mirror is aluminized and got the other instruments ready. It was fun to have this tour. We can repeat these pictures in the future with the other part of the team of course, if the weather allows us.

I get to know better about the work individually you are doing here, so for me it was a very informative week, and I want to congratulate all of you for your amazing and dazzling job you are doing for astronomy. Thank you very much for sharing this with me, you blow my mind.

I hope you have a good rest of the run and take good care of yourselves, especially on the cold nights that are coming.

My favorite 15 minutes of the week was going downstairs and tasting all of the new candy. My favorite was the chocolate eggs and the ones I couldn’t even try were the wasabi ones. I hope to bring you the real merkén next time.

The Song of the Day

A very old song but it is a good opportunity for you to get to know the great Cecilia, also it’s a song that will cheer you up during this very cloudy night.