Category: MagAO-X

Today people discovered I am just an average girl who loves astrology. No offense, but why having to choose between astronomy and astrology when – guess what – you can have both? Not only that, but I like to entertain myself in a variety of spiritual practices, for example, I am currently charging my tarot cards under the light of this gorgeous full Moon. My favorite childhood anime was Cardcaptor Sakura… What did you expect?

Since today marks the moment when everyone has arrived at LCO, and we are about mid-way, I have decided to proudly present the members of our group who joined the run this time, in Elena’s own special way.

The girlies

Elena: Temperance
The creator of this bizarre blog post, carefully mixing science and magic, continuously balancing opposites: Enthusiasm VS crippling anxiety, aligning PIAA lenses to highest precision possible to mitigate pineapples.

Eden: The Star
Eden brings a delicate touch and kindness to anything she does. Carefully handling DM cables and the AO system, she is like the trump card of the group: Give her something do to and she will turn it to being successfully completed. Also, she gave us sparkles. Twinkle, twinkle.

Katie: 8 of pentacles
Katie is not afraid to handle delicate optics. With patience, firm hands, and arms that can extend for multiple hours in a row, she can manage any practical task the big bosses throw at her. Recently crowned the new manager of MagAO-X’s uninstall, she is ready to surpass master Laird.

Tiffany: 3 of pentacles
Tiffany is the new addition of the girlies group. She is carefully observing every move of the more experienced members to learn as much as possible about the delicate and complex system MagAO-X revealed to be.

American bois

Josh: The Moon
Josh is fighting against Zemax just like the dogs in this card bark at the Moon. But hey, at the end of the day, isn’t the Moon almost like a big form of cheese in the sky? Also, he loves sticks.

Parker: Strength
Parker befriended the donkeys and tamed the vibrations of the telescope. Hand-working and tireless, he is always down for a run up the hill or some benching. I only wish he could eat his food without mixing it all together in a disgusting mush.

They say life goes on after obtaining a PhD

Joseph: The Magician
Joseph is the wizard that installs the software on your computer. Knowledgeable and resourceful, he is full of tools and tricks to compromise the entire group and save the day approximately four times per day – one time for each element – just like an expert magician.

Miles: 2 of pentacles
Miles simply enjoys taking cute pictures of animals and stars. Two polarization states, one difference: Guaranteed success! He can also juggle pretty well (when he is not taking pictures and he is not sleeping).

Matthijs: The Sun
Matthijs was revitalized by vitamin D like never before in his entire life. Feeling the Sun on his Dutch face every day after waking up made him a new man. If only the cooks were not trying to poison him, he would have already solved every possible problem of MagAO-X.

Rico: Knight of wands
Rico has just arrived at LCO and has already observed closely how to drive the instrument. Inspired by our science, he has already planned to do some daytime engineering tomorrow to make his neural network smarter. Always moving forward!

The final bosses

Sebastiaan: The Fool
Sebastiaan is always in a good mood, even when he is extremely sleep deprived. He finds joy in the little things of life, like shaking the mouse and seeing the cursor becoming full screen size. He also loves to continuously start new adventures: He has endless hope and endless data to reduce, piled up since 2021.

Alycia: The Empress
Alycia knows everyone around and no one wants to mess with her. If something is not quite right, just let her know and she will have it sorted out. She is basically the true owner of this observatory. She says the word, and Chile answers.

Laird: The Hanged Man
Laird is the giant on whose shoulders we all stand. He has sacrificed himself again and again for the sake of MagAO-X: Positioning himself in the most bizarre ways – almost break-dancing – unscrewing countless nuts, and making peanuts disappear throughout the years.

Jared: Universal Judgement
Jared has to manage all this circus. That’s quite the task, especially when there are so many things going on at the same time. But hey, remember? Having more things just means… Peeking from the sky with a huge trumpet (?) deciding when people can finally get a PhD.

Special

Vizzy: The Hermit
Vast mountains, rocks, and silence, under the perfect night sky. This, the setting where vizzy spends all her time pondering about the meaning of life. The Universe made her a cute, little animal without a way to communicate with us humans, because it knew she would be too powerful otherwise.

Fun fact

Did you know that Black Jack’s mother, Judith Love Cohen, was an aerospace engineer that is credited to have helped save Apollo 13? Shooting for the Moon.

Song of the day

As we enter the final month of the year, I would like to share my Astronomy: Wrapped with you all.

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You deployed six monitors with one viscacha background!

It takes real vizzion to do something like that.

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This year you experienced five Empanada Sundays!

(That means up to 20 empanadas, at maximum order size!)

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You hung out with Dr. Alycia Weinberger on three occasions!

(That’s once more than people who just went on the observing runs!)

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You commited to git on the magao-x/MagAOX repository 137 times!

(Jared’s at 261 commits for the year, but don’t let that discourage you!)

And we still have seven nights to go.

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Today marked the departure of Laird* and arrival of Alycia. Alycia is our local debris disk enthusiast, so it was good for her to meet Miles Lucas (our local polarimetry enthusiast).

*Attempted departure. The Holiday Inn club will be graced by his presence for a night, apparently.

For those of you following along at home, polarimetry and debris disks are best friends. It’s sort of like putting your polarized sunglasses on to cut through haze, only in reverse (to see all the dust).

The second half of the night was Eden’s to look at the beta Pictoris system again in hopes of getting it to reveal its secrets. We have a saying in this field: “It’s never a planet.” However, this is one of the rare exceptions. It’s actually pretty easy to find beta Pictoris b, especially if you already know it’s there.

Of course, as Katie put it, this wouldn’t be interesting unless we were seeing some things nobody had seen before. Time to analyze some data!

Song of the Day

This guy sounds like a didgeridoo, which is really something.

Fun Fact of the Day

A lot of the Spanish words beginning in “a” (or especially “al”) are Arabic in origin:

almohada — pillow
from Andalusian Arabic مُخَدَّة (muḵadda), from Arabic مِخَدَّة (miḵadda) (Wiktionary)

aceituna — olive
from Arabic زَيْتُونَة (zaytūna), via Andalusian Arabic (Wiktionary)

However, not this one:

aguacate – avocado
from Classical Nahuatl ahuacatl (Wiktionary)

Which in Chile, of course, is:

palta – avocado
from Quechua pallta. (Wiktionary)

Tonight started with Katie, Tiffany, and Josh as our dedicated graduate student MagAO-X operators. They were tasked with assisting Logan with her observing program in the first half of the night. While the conditions started out rough, they stabilized after an hour or two on sky.

When 1:30AM approached, it was time to switch to Eden’s observing program. She is on her second of 5 half nights during this run and is taking super interesting scientific observations using the newly commissioned PIAACMC which Elena has spent a lot of time getting to work on sky.

Exciting discoveries are already being made in our short time here at Las Campanas Observatory. Below are images in the z and r bands of two little guys hanging out around a star:

On top of spotting faint objects on sky, preliminary data reduction has shown there to be a super faint little guy hanging out near it’s host star:

Prior to the night beginning, our TO was nice enough to off to point the telescope towards the horizon so we could get some pictures with the primary mirror.

Miles was back at it with taking some phenomenal Chilean wildlife photos. Expanding our wildlife content beyond our beloved Vizzy.

While Miles was capturing amazing photos of the smaller animals, I was back with the burros. Most days, they are very welcoming when I come by, but this time was the opposite of welcoming. Let’s just say, this was the last face I saw before I had to pack up and leave:

I can’t believe it is already December, but the holiday decorations are starting to pop up to remind us of what time of year it is.

Fun Fact

Many people picture North Dakota as just endless farmland and cows, but here’s a fun fact: it actually has only 2.24 cows per person, ranking it as the third highest state for this stat. South Dakota, Jared’s home state, takes the top spot with an impressive 4.00 cows/person, while Nebraska follows closely behind at 3.31.

Song of the Day

If there ever was a day to wake up for lunch, Sunday is that day. While we all placed our much anticipated empanada night lunch orders, nothing beats the pastry goodies paired with the lunchtime soup choices.

Though delicious, the prize lunch came at the cost of some significant sleep debt for members of our crew. Nevertheless, we rallied, drank our little coffee drinks, and went right back up the hill for an afternoon of testing, bug fixing, and poking around on the internal source. I have no photos to show you the productive daytime endeavors, but I do have the motivational poster now stuck to the control room wall to sum up the energy of the participating members.

Turns out if you wake up early enough, you can have a whole day before your observing work day. Enjoy these vignettes from our afternoon on the mountain.

Our empanada appetites did not overwhelm our TO Rebecca, who was able to muscle our nighlunch up the hill. We arrange the spread to remind ourselves of the richness and abundance of life.

The first half of the night was shepherded by Parker, Katie, and Josh. We’re back on tau Ceti with the bells and whistles (iEFC dark holes and almost all the datastreams writing). The seeing gave us a good reason to work a little extra on internal source set up before it settled down to a fairly typical if a bit bumpy LCO night.

At 1am, Parker and I switched. This was actually a big night for me! Though I’ve assisted with observations at telescopes since I was 19, this is the first time I’ve gotten to take data for my own science on my own proposed-for time. I always try to be a diligent AO operator, but it feels different for your own data. (The difference is anxiety.)

Our time on Beta Pic is split in two goals, firstly to try to push into bluer wavelengths (r’ band) where the contrast of Beta Pic b depends on the kind of atmosphere it has, and secondly see if we can observe the closer in Beta Pic c at all. Thank you Katie and Laird for installing the ri beamsplitter cube that makes these goal somewhat simultaneous.

Since Beta Pic c is so close in, and given all the good PIAA work from yesterday, we used the PIAACMC to improve our inner working angles. Thank you Elena for her PIAA expertise, and Tiffany for sticking it out with us for the rest of the night. We wrapped up not too far after our TO gave us the 15 minute warning.

Miles did not lock in on photoshop for his masterpiece to fail to make an appearance on the blog. The whole team in one photo! How lucky to be planet hunting with them all.

Fun Fact: Pablo Neruda’s favorite soup

As Duo Lingo likes to remind me, I really need to work on my Spanish. As I was ordering my soup, the chef very excitedly explained something I only vaguely understood to be about Pablo Neruda, the Chilean poet. I since learned, and now you will know this too, that the soup from lunch today was popularized by Neruda’s “Oda al caldillo de congrio” (Ode to Conger Chowder). The conger chowder is one of many everyday items Neruda romanticized in his series of Odes, among soap, socks, and salt. It is considered today one of the most popular Chilean dishes, partially because of his love for how it represents Chile.

“… deliver
the treasure to the flame,
until in the chowder
are warmed
the essences of Chile,
and to the table
come, newly wed,
the savors
of land and sea,
that in this dish
you may know heaven.”
– Pablo Neruda

Song of the Day:

Wait what do you mean Katie hasn’t used a Stroke’s song yet?