Category: MagAO-X

MagAO-X 2022B Day 0: Launched to LCO

Well, @warrenbfoster still owes us vacation photos from Valparaiso, but who knows what his internet situation is. Someone’s still gotta write the Day 0 blog post, though.

Hello again, LSC hardstand.

Compared to last time this trip didn’t have many surprises. We did learn several things, though:

  • When there’s a choice of LATAM and Delta for the 10-hour flight, Delta’s got the better seats. Jared reports leg-room upgrades on LATAM are barely anything, and not worth the additional cost. I had to sit on my complimentary blanket to sleep because the hard seats were tough on one’s rear after a few hours.
  • COVID-related arrival measures are entirely gone. No test on entry, no verification of vaccine documents. The Ministerio de Salud has dispensed with mask-wearing requirements indoors (except for healthcare settings) and most employees and passengers opted to go bare-faced.
  • Passport control took a while, but kept moving. Single line for nationals and foreigners.
  • Customs enforcement seems to be up. The scannable tags system that was new last time is now gone, replaced with brief interviews with Jared and myself about equipment we were carrying. We aren’t importing anything (of course) so we explained we had tools for scientific research and they let us go.
  • They no longer seem to care about the purpose or destination of visits. I have a slip saying I’m visiting Santiago for vacation that I must present on exiting the country, but I was never asked for those details.
  • As always, the “collect your bag, complete customs, re-check your bag” dance is a pain. Unhappily we must report that LATAM domestic baggage recheck is now even sillier. There is a counter in the international terminal, down the hall with the taxi stands right after customs but before you actually exit. It was super backed up and after waiting 10 minutes not one person had successfully re-checked their bag and left. If it’s not busy, it might be better than the situation across the road. We schlepped our bags across the way to the old terminal (T1) and went to a place with approximately 4 actual agents and all self-service kiosks. Of course, the self-service bag check does not work with our pre-tagged bags so you can go straight to the “I need an actual human” line.

Song of the Day

“Preparada” by El Columpio Asesino

Okay, so the song’s about a violent break-up but… we are preparada for 2022B.

Someone should probably come up with Song of the Day rules.

2022B Packing Operation: Success

What’s on more wheels than it should be, has three bulk bags of desiccant for a carry on, and is heading for a South American Vacation??? Only our favorite high contrast imaging system!

The team has spent the last week in booties and safety boots making sure that the instrument gets to Chile as cozy as possible.

Monday: Batten down the hatches!

Mere hours after its last lab experiment, MagAO-X is wrapped into shipping shape. This is the first “All hands on deck” of the week: cables unplugged, optics covered, mounts tightened, glycol drained, etc.

Prof. Close and Dr. Haffert work on protecting optical components as Logan and Dr. Males secure the cabling.

The whole package is wrapped, and rewrapped (after that thing we forgot), and wrapped a third time (just to be sure) in anti-dust plastic wrap and anti-static covers. You better believe we used extreme amounts of bubble wrap wherever possible.

Tuesday: A hard hat kind of day

Tuesday 7am and we’re back in lab (the morning people are, that is). We meet up with Tom and Pat, the guys qualified to work the heavy machinery, and get to work making MagAO-X portable. First, the crane with a fancy name is assembled with grad student labor and good balancing skills.

The final steps of the hallway assembly, requires lots of shimmying and a few good kicks.

We tuck the support into the lab, right below the highest point between the vents and lights. We lift the beam as high as possible, and attach a pulley system to hoist up MagAO-X. This gives us enough of a gap to attach a specially designed cart to the table’s base, the right width to wheel down to the cargo elevator.

MagAO-X has got its wheels.

After carefully wheeling our cargo to the loading doc, we get to work with unsealing the large wooden shipping crate.

Proper safety shoes and headgear are essential.
Dr.Males explains the finer points on disincentivizing bad shipping practices.

Next, we gently lift the instrument, wheel the base underneath, bolt the instrument to the crate base, then undo the cart. We can bolt the box back together once the top is lowered into place.

MagAO-X catching some air.
Top goes back on the box.

After the instrument, a lunch break. Then we do it all again with the electronics rack.

Electronic rack gets lifted into its box before getting turned to its side.
The electronics box gets re-bolted twice. After all this box work, you could call some of us drill experts.

Our two big boxes with instrument tucked in tight, and we’re done for the day. Done by 3pm? Our best time yet.

Friday: Load ‘er up!

The movers show up like clockwork, right during Logan’s internal symposium talk. Those of us not giving Xoomies facts hustle back from LPL to the loading doc and help scoot boxes to the forklift pickup.

Liftoff!
Very important supervision work.
Goodbye computers!

The instrument is on the truck!

One 2 million dollar Jared Males signature later and the instrument is officially in the shipper’s hands. Have a nice flight to Chile MagAO-X, we’ll see you in November.

Bonus: MagAO-X says Happy Halloween

See you space cowboy!

Song o’ the day:

Historical and topical.

In recognition of astronomically significant time intervals

According to Poor Vizzy’s Almanack, every October 14th some nonsense transpires in Tucson, Arizona. Usually having to do with this guy.

This time, he received a surfeit of cupcakes:

Artisanal wrapping paper:

A Starbuck™:

Many happy returns!

Inspirational stickers will be available through the usual channels.

Song of the Day

Well, what’d you expect?

Happy Birthday Swing – Lucky Seven

AO Summer School 2022: Eye Day

Summer school posts were delayed due to blog server space, but we’re back with recap blogs!

It’s summer camp season. The older you get, the harder it gets to secure a summer full of bunk-bed living, bug spray, buffet lunches, and late night card games. The folks at Santa Cruz gave us a pretty wonderful approximation, chock full of AO knowledge to boot.

The accommodations were a mere minute walk from the conference hall.

All last week we started our days in campus apartments, wandered to breakfast in the nearby dining hall, and then took the short walk to the conference center. All in the idyllic redwood forest of Santa Cruz, of course.

Today it was the vision scientists turn to talk.

Possibly one of the most exciting part of the summer school was the vision science talks. The first two days we took deep dives on AO generically and AO for astronomers. The third day, we got the rundown on resolving the cells of our eyes, sorting by color receptor, and exciting them individually to mimic colors independent of the excitation laser.

An AO system for measuring the distortion of the eye, set up in the lecture hall. Used since the early days of the AO summer school.


We got the opportunity to measure the aberrations in our own eye! In real time Professor Austin Roorda was able to map the distortion in the SH and tell participants the magnitude of each Zernike polynomial. Of special interest were those of us who had glasses, where he was able to get uncannily close to their true prescription (from the focus term). He’s been teaching at the summer school since its inception in the early 2000’s

Austin taking a wavefront measurement of my eye. We were unfortunately not able to see the edge of my contacts.

In the lab section of the day, after lunch, we were lucky enough to get to see the aberrations in our own eyes. There were a few sized pupils we could check against, and we could convolve the distorted PSF with letters to check our vision.

My Eye distortions, decomposed by zernike polynomials (top left), plotted by phase (top middle), turned into a PSF (top right) and convolved with the letter E (bottom middle).

We also got to see a bare-bones AO bench, where we closed the loop and inserted a turbulence screen. They trusted us enough to take out some lenses and have us put it back together again. Even for those of us with experience in labwork, it’s still a treat to get to investigate a system with minimal hazard to research deadlines.

Warren (middle) and Jay (far right) study the AO bench kit.

On the last day, after some exciting HCIPy talks and hands on work, we were treated to a much anticipated event, the Visual Optics Awards! Catagories included the Thirty Meter Telescope award for largest pupil, The Hubble Space Telescope Award for the poorest optics, and a medal ceremony for best RMS WFE after defocus and astigmatism correction.

Top 3 smallest RMS errors in the class, with PSF displayed below. Our own Warren came in 3rd.

Suffice to say, the week was over too quickly. A huge thank you to the organizers at UCSC and CfAO! I learned more than I thought I would, have many foundational papers to start reading up on, and a whole new community of AO enthusiasts to look forward to at future conferences. Hopefully I will be back at some point to help out! For now, I’ll be fondly remembering Santa Cruz with all my sunset beach photos.

Almost full moon at the Memorial lighthouse down on the coast.

Song of the Post: Home by the Sea by Genesis

Bonus: Warren wheeling away on our last day.

The bike rental is in town.
He had to get it all down the hill somehow.

UCSC’s AO Summer School 2022: The Times That We Live In

I think I speak for all three of us MagAO-Xians that went to the AO workshop last week when I say that it was a blast! Between the beautiful campus at UCSC, fun hands on activities, and friendly participants there was always something to focus on (heh). Unfortunately it was probably the diverse group of international attendees that had COVID-19 prowling for victims, and I was one of the ones to get caught in the nets…! Thus I unfortunately had to miss the last few parts of the event, but the parts I did get to participate in was rich in really cool AO things.

Like Warren and Eden I got my eye’s aberrations measured by happily staring into every (very low power) laser they told me to.

I was mesmerized by lectures detailing all the non-astronomical applications of AO — who knew microscopists could benefit so much from AO? I also got a chance to converse with Dr. Phil Hinz who (to my surprise) contributed work towards the MagAO/Clio project. Astronomy is such a small world. I especially enjoyed seeing Prof. Olivier Guyon’s presentations on things going on over at the SCExAO project.

Super hike through the greater UCSC campus area with some UA friends! (ft. Hélène Rousseau from Steward Observatory)
Lunch was made interesting with aggressive squirrels wanting to go halfskies with everyone on the delicious cafeteria food!
One last stroll through the campus to spot more wildlife before making arrangements to stay off campus for the last day.

Onwards on the road to recovery…

Song of the Day

The Police – Don’t Stand So Close To Me

BONUS CONTENT: Santa Cruz Boardwalk

On the first night of the workshop we visited the beach and walked along the boardwalk which had a lot of fun carnival games.