I really hope we never have to align these cubes again!
Laird Close, MagAO-X 2026A Day 7
Today Laird and I aligned the beamsplitter cubes again. This time we discovered a faulty clamp, which is a better explanation for our constantly having to re-align than “perhaps someone is hexing us.” We’re confident that the problem is fixed for real this time–but if it happens again, we might have to seriously question if we’ve accidentally triggered an ancient curse.
they’re real cute though
The last two nights have been entirely engineering blocks, so tonight was the first time we had dedicated science time. Thanks to our hard work during engineering, the new infrared camera was up and ready to go for Sebastiaan’s observations at the beginning of the night. After the appropriate amount of ooh-ing and ah-ing over the exquisite stability of the H-band images, we spent some time looking for little guys:
That little guy? I wouldn’t worry about that little guy
Sebastiaan being Sebastiaan, we also had another tech demo to do tonight. After a long and arduous FedEx journey, a new coronagraph mask arrived at the telescope a few days ago. This very special mask, fabricated by our friends at UCSB, is a metasurface: a material with tiny (think nanometer-scale) structures printed on it that make light behave in very strange ways. This specific part is designed to function as a coronagraph at one wavelength and as a wavefront sensor at a different wavelength. Tonight was the first time a metasurface has been used for high-contrast imaging on a real star!
The star on the bottom right is actually much brighter than the star on the upper left, but we are blocking it with the metasurface coronagraph
Sadly, we hit a bit of a snag with the telescope hardware during the second half of the night. It’s always a huge bummer to miss out on telescope time, so here are some of today’s animal friends as a consolation prize:
Onto our 2nd night of observing! Despite the burros best efforts to block us in, we managed to get up the mountain again for an action packed night.
Observing snacks
Everyone knows that you cannot observe off caffeine alone. We all bring a wide range of weird but yummy snacks to keep us going during the night.
Asteroid imaging
As part of demonstrating that MagAO-X can work on a wide range of targets, last night we closed the loop and imaged the asteroid 20 Massalia, which is well resolved.
The MagAO-X blower
The MagAO-X blower is a device which sits at the foot of the optical bench and keeps the air moving in a laminar fashion inside whilst removing warm air. It looked a little bland, so we gave it a little makeover. Meet noo-noo!*
* (any resemblance to fictional, copyrighted characters is purely coincidence… after all this is a blower)
I’ve also added an audible alert whenever someone turns noonoo on, attached below:
Find the vizzies challenge
Taken ~1hr before sunset from the back of the telescopes. I see at least 3.
Welcome to the day of flips, we’re back on the telescope and everything feels just a little off. Flip the platform, NASE to NASW. Flip the schedule, day to night. Flip the detectors, visible to IR. We were not victorious for all fights involving negative signs, but our 24 hour day was full of flipping successes.
Family road trip to the summit!
Flipping the alignment with fiducials –Success!
The morning was spent following Laird and Katie’s procedure for getting MagAO-X to the mirrored position of its NASE home. Through some of the smallest moves you’ve ever seen a 2000lbs instrument on rough surface make, we got right to where where the fiducials should sit relative to the instrument and guider. There was some discussion about platform height that would needed to be verified once starlight entered the system.
Katie uniquely qualified for this squeeze.Fiducials on point.
Flipping over the telescope for acc speed – Success!
Post lunch, Parker flipped the telescope on it side to install some new accelerometer raspberryPi hardware and circuits. He’s now able to read out wibbles and wobbles at 10kHz, up from with his previous limits of 4kHz. With these fast and furious speeds a future of predictive control this run is looking bright.
How low can it go?Soloing the scissor lift.
Flipping on all the switches –95%
The rest of us spent the afternoon threading MagAO-X back together again. This endeavor is partially plumbing, partially fishing around for wires in the rack, and as we cable up the DM, somewhat surgical. Everything was connected by dinnertime, and only 3 of our 50+ wires ended up being somewhat loose. We’ll still call that a success. Initial reviews of NASW are glowing
Another Katie sized space. Chemical assistant to the DM cable crew.
Flip-worthy sunset? Success!
We’re almost always on the hunt for a green flash at sunset, and tonight’s really delivered. The cloud layer was flat enough and the air was clear enough to catch a seconds-long glimpse of the green light of a refracted setting sun. We were chuffed to bits, to put it mildly. It may have been one of the clearest and brightest green flash the team has ever seen.
The classic sunset watch selfie.
Flipping MagAO-X to NASW- A success all things considered
Certain parts of our operation depend on knowing where the telescope will move next. The platform orientation flip affects how our k mirror keeps our field steady, our ADCs keeps the atmosphere from chromatically dispersing our light, and our woofer keeps the telescope on track with periodic offloads. Not all the flips were caught on the first go through, but by the halfway point of the night we had a PSF just as pretty as we’re used to back home (NASE). We didn’t even have to run up to the platform and re-adjust the bench position.
Inspecting our first target.First FDPR PSF from NASW.
Flipping to a visitor camera – Success!
Camdurham made its way back inside the instrument and tonight it saw its very first stellar photons through MagAO-X. We got beautiful single and double star spectrum throughout the various engineering tasks. In the image below, you can see MagAO-X providing diffraction limited images throughout the near IR. (You can also see our resolution decrease as the wavelengths get longer.)
Cleaning the prism used for dispersing light on the CRED2.First light raw frame, spanning 900nm to 1700nm.
Flipping off sidereal tracking – Partial success
Tiffany and Jay have been hard at work finding extended objects for MagAO-X to image, such as asteroids or satellites. These are tricky for the AO system, but they’re also tricky for the telescope which can no longer follow the well calculated paths of stars across the night sky, aka sidereal tracking. With the help of our TO Hernán, we were able to center a weather satellite on our acquisition camera. We weren’t able to keep up with it long enough to send through to our science cameras, so there’s more work to be done on the tracking front. Even with our acquisition camera we were able to resolve the solar panels on the 20ft target.
It takes a village to figure out non-sidereal tracking. CamAcq’s satellite sighting. Render of GOES-16
Flipping to remote ops – Setup success
Meanwhile, back in Tucson, we had Jialin and Josh test our remote operations computer. When the rest of us head home in a week, we’ll be using this setup to control MagAO-X remotely in April and May. A huge next step in making MagAO-X available and flexible for our observers.
The hard work of our friends back in AZ.
Color of the Day
Blink and you miss it green, seen tonight but chased after every sunset.
Today’s the day. And it’s going to happen again and again. But for this time, the first order of business is to pick up where we left off at the end of the day yesterday and move MagAO-X, safely, from the cleanroom -> up the summit -> onto the Nasmyth platform.
Moving from the clean room to the telescope
The team continues where they left off yesterday, but now donning hard hats and hard-toed boots since the cranes are needed to transfer the ~2000 pounds of instrument onto its specialized cart (and off its specialized cart later on…!).
Special thanks to the hard-working staff at LCO, we couldn’t have done it without you.
Truly the last thing u see b4 u die
First year Master’s student Tiffany Nguyen captures the vibes expertly on move day.
…But so do the other grad students 🙂
It is critical that once MagAO-X is on the flatbed truck, it is transported -slowly- to minimize the vibrations induced on the various internal optics, which are sensitive.
The instrument was looking a little goofy during the ride up the summit to the telescope, maybe it was enjoying the ride?
Installing the instrument onto the *West* Nasmyth platform
Dedicated readers of the blog may think they’ve seen all this before, but it turns out this install procedure is quite different. How so? Well, for this run, the instrument will be installed on the platform opposite of the usual side of the telescope. This is subject to lead to (undoubtedly) a whole set of new challenges, of which I’m sure we’ll encounter tomorrow when the team works on aligning the instrument to the telescope in this new position with no existing reference marks.
Wildlife intermission
Let’s briefly pause to admire some very nice shots of the various fauna found in and around the LCO campus. Pic credits in this section go to the wickedly-talented Viktoria Kutnohorsky!
Afternoon executive time
Today we ran into an uncommon situation where we weren’t expected to be working on jobs related to the instrument. This is because the Magellan-Clay telescope wasn’t quite ours to infest yet (there is another observer who had one more night of telescope time, and needed sensitive calibrations to be taken during the day). As such, many of us found other outlets to let loose for a bit after a week of hard work preparing the instrument for its first night on-sky.
We’ve a new addition to the calves –> cows crew! Shoutout to our Durham collaborator Rob Harris for hanging out with us at the LCO gym.
Color of the Day
In anticipation of getting on-sky in ~24 hours, the swatch of the day is black w/ white polka dots.
Song of the Day
Today’s song performed by a couple of biblically-accurate French Canadians
To prepare for install tomorrow, we had a whole lot going on. Laird and Katie had some alignment work, me and Eden were finding new focus positions for the camsci stages, Rob and Viktoria worked on camdurham, and of course there were still grad students in the library working on their code as usual.
Maybe they know we’re observing soon… because we got lots of visits, including one from Roburro!
At 5 pm we had our safety brief for packing and installation on the telescope, after which we went right to the clean room for clean up.
With a couple of us new to the procedure, there sure were a lot of helpful hands. We got to work de-cabling, wrapping up the instrument, and moving it in place for tomorrow’s transport further up the mountain.
Sebastian & his work!Just a couple of twins
Song of the day
Welll apparently Jared says he plays a version of this song very often..
Color of the day
Aureolin / #fdee00
Color of that Super K fiber optic cable I learned about today.
