Category: MagAO-X

After a long time, MagAO-X has arrived at Las Campanas, bringing the full team and others partners. It is a crowd that keep you alert all night long. 

This past Summer 2024 we were visited by several “friends” coming from the valley and also from high mountains. Apart from burros, vizcachas, we had “crias de cóndor y guanaco”, also a solitaire zorro. 

They were flying over our heads and moving around us without caution as if they knew we were not going to hurt them.

The condors are young as you can notice, on the neck will became a thick white collar and the guanaco, more than five at that time, you can see the fur is curly, later it will became smooth keeping almost the same colour.

This zorro was looking for something to eat, I can imagine, far from his home.

As you can see on these pictures and videos, they look so magnificent living on their natural environment, clear blue skies, pure air.

Guanacos were protected by others adult guanacos. Condors, we did not see adults, those are rare to came down.

There were almost four months of warm days and pleasant nights. It would explain why so many “visitors” we received.

And we still can see all of them around the site !!!

Some of those are here:

I have you to enjoy the song of the day, which is of course, El cóndor pasa.

It is a well known song whose original version from 1963 belongs to Los Incas voices. Remind you the Andes mountains, here at South America, involves the whole latin america people at this side of the world.

EL CÓNDOR PASA (VERSIÓN ORIGINAL)- LOS INCAS

Around sunset, two of our finest graduate student AO operators took time lapses of the dome opening. Jay covered the inside of the dome, providing us with a view of the primary mirror cover opening. Eden on the other hand, set her phone on the tripod outside the dome and managed to get a video of the telescope turning, louvers opening, and also DIMM opening. If you spotted the abnormal blockage of the telescope view in the beginning of the video, you have witnessed the little bird that delivered a surprised gift for Eden – its guano. Thank you for your sacrifice, Eden’s phone.

And of course, the blog doesn’t quite feel complete without photos of viscachas.

The night started off with 3 hours of engineering lead by Sebastiaan and Jared, and there are no photo evidence of such event because a majority of us were too amused by the newest entertainment channel at Clay: the window into the supporting astronomer room. As the engineering block ends, the telescope is then handed over to the observers of the night, Logan and Jay. The seeing conditions were non-ideal, but they are still hopeful of their data.

The rest of us spent the night reducing some of the data we have obtained from the past few nights. We are all excited about the science yield in disk and substellar companion imaging. So keep your eye out for our papers on astro-ph and/or ADS!

And I am bring back a segment of the blog that I enjoy every much: quotes of the day! Enjoy the selected anonymous quotes.

“Oh, its so good to have Maggie back”

“Sebastiaan likes his cars like he likes his AO loop closing: operated at unsafe speeds”

“No. It’s not yellow. It’s just a golden hour butt.”

Song of the Day

For the song of the day, I, with the assistance of Eden, have selected a song that well fits with the weather of the night: wispy clouds.

Every MagAO-X morning begins with a hearty breakfast.

Following a scrumptious meal and a full night of observing, I entered hibernation.

…

…

Zzzzzzzzzzzz

While I was in my state of low activity, the other group members observed a wild horse and some Vizzies.

…

ZZZzzzzZZZ

…

I emerged from a long day’s slumber just in time for dinner. Unfortunately there were no food action shots this time.

Eden had an opportunity to experience the LCO flora and fauna before heading back up to the telescope.

Tonight’s observing run got off to a bit of a dramatic start when the operator discovered a strong amount of coma on the telescope. Although I forgot to collect photographic evidence of the events that immediately followed, I constructed an artistic depiction for everyone’s benefit.

After we recovered from the early evening drama, the night progressed very smoothly. In fact, things were going so well that Jared began regaling some MagAO-Xers with tales from his seafaring youth.

And then…a happy accident occurred! Twins!!!!!

To close out this fine day (or evening…I have lost all sense of time), I have included a song by my high school band (per Jialin’s request) that I feel is aptly named.

Song of the Day:

We finally had an all-night good night. Started with what we call engineering, which means testing new ways of operating the instrument. The big news is that Sebastiaan got his “implicit Electric Field Conjugation” algorithm to work on-sky. This brings MagAO-X almost to its as-planned fully capability. Here’s what that looks like to one of our highly trained operators:

Why would one want to conjugate an electric field? Let’s let Sebastiaan explain:

After the instrument-science experiments, we spent the rest of the night hunting planets. Tonight was almost one of those legendary Cerro Manqui nights that keeps us coming back over and over again. It was essentially 0.5″ seeing all night, but we were plagued by our version of the low-wind effect. However instead of Mickey Mouse, we get the Bouncey House: when the wind drops to 0.0 the telescope gets bored and starts to bounce. It makes our control loop more or less impossible to optimize.

We have been conjugating other things too.

The song: