Category: MagAO-X

This week could have gone better: Delayed and missed flights, fog, clouds, bad seeing, and I got a head cold. New at LCO this trip: no Covid test on arrival. In case you’re wondering, I brought my own, and I don’t have Covid.

Last night, I turned the super fancy MagAO-X system with its three deformable mirrors into a very expensive speckle camera. 30 years ago, when AO was in its infancy, I did my PhD thesis taking short exposures to “freeze” the seeing and a lot of Fourier transforms to recover high spatial resolution images. Well, in 1.3″ seeing, MagAO-X could still do some correction (miraculously) and the EM-CCDs in MagAO-X can run fast (I ran at about 60 ms, which is considerably longer than the normal coherence time at visible wavelengths). I can play some of those old speckle imaging tricks on images like this:

See the binary star? Of course you do. I select the best of the tens of thousands of images I took and average them up. Combined with other data I have, these images will let us measure masses of the stars.

Tonight, however, the seeing is finally down to median LCO conditions and the forecasted clouds have not yet arrives, so MagAO-X is weeping tears of joy:

I may be bummed about the weather, but it’s been fun to be back here and collaborating with the ever-growing team. People are working shifts, so we didn’t get a photo of everyone, but here’s an obligatory sunset selfie with clear skies above.

And, dear reader, as a devoted blog follower you undoubtedly know that as predictably as the approach of winter brings clouds, Sunday brings:

I saw a fox today too, but sorry, I didn’t get a picture.

Today’s best 15 minutes were spent finishing the Sunday NYTimes Crossword Puzzle with the band of Js (Joseph, Jay, and Josh) as we froze speckles.

Song of the Day

I almost went with Lady Sings the Blues, one of my favorites for bad observing weather combined with colds, but I don’t want to be a downer. So, I’m going with Freeze Tag by Suzanne Vega in honor of those fast images we took and the coming week’s temperature forecast.

The sun is fading fast
Upon the slides into the past…

Thank you for tuning in for “Eden’s screenshots of the firewalled LCO weather page.”

I have good news and I have bad news. The good news is that we are open! The bad news? The seeing is just on the edge of usable. And by “on the edge” I mean we’re getting something on the science cameras… but it’s the kind of data we dread to process. What a tease.

On top of that, the wind is whistling something fierce. Like living next door to a two-note pan-piper. Every 5 minutes, Maggie-O-X will announce that we’ve hit our wind limit, just for the wind to slink back down again. Like a threat that it could shut this whole operation down, clouds or not. We thank Carla for being a merciful TO, and we are planning on allocating portions of our empanada orders tomorrow to her, accordingly.

Did I forget to mention that I have worse news? In a novel first for this team, we are expecting rain. Yes, in the Atacama Desert, that gets an average rainfall of 15 mm a year. We found it, folks. The one day of rain a year. Stay tuned for the MagAO-X raincoat wrappings.

Weather like this could really get you down, but luckily we have a great team that keeps even these kinds of days full of laughs and good stories. Our night started with high hopes. Since the sky was clear and the winds were low, the walk to the telescopes was appealing for the first time in a week. Some of the team caught a crisp green flash on their way up.

As an early-shifter, I’m headed to bed, but I know the control room is staying merry with Alycia wisdom, Jared sea stories, Joseph whimsy, and Josh punchlines that are actually just events from his life. All as it should be.

Best 15 minutes of the day? Filling out the night lunch for 4 whole empanadas. Just like the boss ordered.

Overheard at LCO

“I struggled with the scissors unit in kindergarten”

won most improved on MagAO-X scissor duty

“As long as I’m not playing a sport I won’t get injured”
“Why would you say something like that”

someone who could definitely get injured in offseason

“I will be Clay’s Gollum”

someone with career ambitions

“Keep the icc data away from the tea.”
“How about you keep the tea away from the icc data.”

not all of us have Sebastiaan level tea charisma

“I wasn’t allowed near the model trains because I kept wanting to touch them”

still let near our picomotors as a trust exercise

Song of the day

This one isn’t my pick. It’s Clay’s.

And there was light. After 3 tortuous days with nothing to look at but an internal source, we *finally* opened for business. However, as a member of the 2nd observing shift, I was MIA during this time. The below meme described my state of mind in the hours leading up to my shift:

While I slumbered, various team members wandered the mountain in search of wildlife:

When the telescope opened, Jared described the mood as one of giddiness.

At around 2 AM, we closed down once again due to high humidity. This allowed me to hone my skills in MagAO-X alignment, iEFC-ing, and bump mask removal on the internal source.

With the telescope closed, Jared went back home in a car covered with ice.

My brain is running out of real estate, so I’m going to wrap up this blog post.

Highlight of the Day

The best part of the day was being able to once again close the loop on-sky with MagAO-X.

Song of the Day

Greetings from the downstairs lounge, where you can see exactly as many stars as upstairs. That’s right: it’s another cloudy evening here at Las Campanas Observatory, but one ray of bright starshine has broken through: Dr. Alycia Weinberger! She had to spend a night in Miami, and another night in Santiago, but she has finally arrived!

We all forgot to document her arrival for the blog, so have a condor instead.

Since the clouds stubbornly remained at sunset, we went on an expedition beneath the Magellans.

There was a fad in the 90s for two-for-one telescope deals, along with vague plans for interferometers (some realized). True to form, the two Magellans are connected by a tunnel.

We also explored the maze of twisty passages.

We descended into the oubliette.

There are removable floor grates to confound your enemies.

Here’s a view upwards through the central core where all the wires and hoses snake up to the telescope platform, eventually entering a cable wrap.

There is a two meter thermal exhaust port:

Evidence of researcher enthusiasm underneath 100 tons of telescope.

Maggie Kautz bid a fond farewell to MagAO-X, as she will be leaving in the morning. Maggie has graduated, which means she probably needs to defend her dissertation soon.

Then she came back and replaced a picomotor that had gone on strike due to the cold conditions.

Once she finishes up her doctorate, she will be starting a new job… as a staff engineer at Steward Observatory, home of MagAO-X! (And some other stuff I guess.)

After we bid our actual farewell to Maggie-O-X, it was time for Josh to drive. We found that all of Sebastiaan’s notebooks were still on the old ICC data drives, so some surgery was required to get them back into place on the new and improved SSD array.

As I write, there’s some serious disk pic analysis happening in the lounge, so maybe this night won’t be a complete bust…

Highlight of the Day

Per 2024Ab rules, the best part of the day… might be the underground Magellan tour, actually! So, you already read all about it.

Song of the Day

(Technically a waxing gibbous, but I can’t see shit.)

Our semi-occasional recurring feature: “Overheard at LCO”

“We’re just roadies for a metal band called MagAO-X.”

“At least on the internal source I can’t break anything.”
“Why would you say that?!“

“It’s a dissertation. It doesn’t have to be perfect.”

Like that classic painting, LCO took on some majesty and wonder today as the valley filled with clouds to compliment the cloud-covered skies.

Which gave way to another great sunset

Which gave way to another set of sad astronomers. Jay was eager to hit his disk target right away, but clouds are opaque to dreams and starlight alike.

This run, since the nights are so long, we’ve broken them into shifts with shift turnover around 1am ish. It’s 1 am now and the first shift is done for the night, I’m going to bed. There are faint whispers of hope in the cloud trend, but I suspect it is futile. Trust not to hope, it has abandoned these lands.

The best 15 mins of my day I guess was sending the first draft of my dissertation (minus a chapter) to Jared. Oh and then I played Untitled Goose Game with Joseph for an hour.

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The song of the day is Sad Songs by Elton John.