Category: MagAO-X

It’s the first double digit day of the 2024Aa run! As the master scheduler, tonight’s time is finely chopped up into four different blocks. Let’s hear what the MagAO-X scientists are doing for the night, and maybe ask them some fun questions. Ok, maybe they are just questions randomly popped into the minds of the deliriously tired interviewer and scientists.

Before we go to the main event, here are some animal spotting! Can you spot the 4 different viscachas and the guanaco?

iEFC on Sky Commission with Josh Liberman

What is iEFC and why is it so important?

Josh: iEFC is implicit electric field conjugation, a technique for removing quasi-static speckle and it allows us to reach higher contrast.

How did commissioning go?

Josh: We drove up at 3pm and performed calibrations. Everything went well, and we opted to skip dinner to finish calibration before sunset. The telescope dome opened after sunset viewing. When we returned to the control room, MagAO-X was in a state of extreme distress: the DM got really angry and the system was misaligned. Everything that could go wrong went wrong.

What were the immediate thoughts that went through your head when the system misaligned after dome opening?

Sebastiaan: God Damn it!

If you can befriend a fictional character who would it be?

Josh: Flat Stanley, he just gives off good vibes you know?

What is an insignificant petty gripe that makes you extremely angry?

Josh: When someone replies all to a group email.

YSES Survey Follow Up Observations with Sebatiaan Haffert

What is the YSES Survey and what observations are you doing?

Sebastiaan: YSES stands for the young suns exoplanet survey. I am doing a follow up of systems with confirmed companion. So far, 2/3 of my targets are successful.

How is it like being both an engineer and an observer?

Sebastiaan: I am not an engineer.

Logan: But you built an instrument!

On a scale of 1 to 10, where 10 is the most tired, please rate how tired you are after working from 3pm to 6am?

Sebastiaan: A three, it kind of feels like dinner time.

Flying or invisibility?

Sebastiaan: How important is invisibility if you have to be naked?

If you were to be a traffic sign, what would it be?

Sebastiaan: The “Watch Out” sign with the deer on it.

If you could make an office rule that everyone had to follow for a day, what would it be?

Sebastiaan: Everyone should walk backwards

What is an insignificant petty gripe that makes you extremely angry?

Sebastiaan: When the toilet paper roll is put in backwards!

Pup Search Observations with Logan Pearce

What is the backstory of the name of the survey?

Logan: the first White Dwarf-Main Sequence binary ever “made” was Sirius A and B. Sirius A, the main sequence star was known as the dog star. So Sirius B, the smaller companion was nicked name the pup. Now I am looking for more pups!

Pup Search and Xoomies (Logan’s project on fetching companions to accelerating stars in Scorpius Centaurus Star Forming Region with MagAO-X) are all related to dogs, will your next project named similarly?

Logan: Man, it takes so much time to come up with names. We (Sebastiaan and I) spent all of the astrobiology conference coming up with the Xoomies names.

Sebastiaan: Mine will be about a stroop waffle. I don’t know what it will be about, but I already have the logo made.

Flying or invisibility?

Logan: Hands down flying! I don’t get those who chooses invisibility…

If you were to be a traffic sign, what would it be?

Logan: Parking signs with a bunch of confusing texts.

What is an insignificant petty gripe that makes you extremely angry?

Logan: Double doors with one side locked. WHY DON’T THEY UNLOCK BOTH DOORS?????

Debris Disk Imaging with Jaylycia Kuenberger

What kind of objects are you observing tonight and what are you trying to get out of your observations?

Jaylycia: I am observing circumstellar disks, which are rings of dusty materials encircling its host star. I look at disks at all stages of extrasolar system formation. But this particular target tonight is a debris disk and I am just trying to get an image of the disk to characterize it.

Disks are generally thought to be difficult, what are your thought about that?

Jaylycia: Yes, they are more difficult than point sources, but they look cooler! They are very faint and they are easily removed during image processing, by accident.

How does it feel to be an AO operator and an observer at the same time?

Jaylycia: I don’t.

Who came up with your new name?

Jaylycia: Maggie-OX did. It’s the best thing that’s happened to me.

If you were to be a traffic sign, what would it be?

Jaylycia: NO PARKING! I DoN’T KnOw!

As a former pastry chef, which dessert do you think best describes you?

Jaylycia: A hefty cream puff with vanilla custard filling.

Song of the Day

Hmmm… What would be a more fitting music than the BBC News Intro music for an interview?

Well, thanks for tuning into the special program of today!

Now’s about the time of the run where the nightly routine just starts to become second nature; eyes are less bloodshot and twilight is here before you know it. We’ll start this post off with some sunset glamour shots…

Today we were all a bit sad to bid farewell to Katie and Maggie who are off to La Serena to rehydrate and relax at the beach. However, we gained a Logan who was eager to join the festivities and contribute her science.

Tonight’s program featured Logan for most of the night and she definitely #nailedit, finding an impressive amount of white dwarf companions in a very short timespan. There’s probably more to come, as she still has yet to reduce her data and uncover what faint objects could be hiding in the bright halo of the host star. I think it’s safe to say that if finding binaries were a crime, she’d be on death row…!

While Logan was winning, the rest of us got to work on doing some networking and installing a bunch of fancy software to be able to control MagAO-X from our own computers. After a bit of labor, I successfully got my laptop connected and was encouraged to parade the fruits of my labor to the others to raise morale. This is needed because it’ll just make our nightly operations more efficient since anyone can contribute to an instrument procedure or data collection without needing to displace anyone in the control room.

The conditions tonight, especially in the later half, were a real treat and encouraged some challenging observations of circumstellar disk HD 145560 (for Dr. Alycia Weinberger at Carnegie) that we would have otherwise not been able to effectively observe. The only way to know if these observations were successful is to perform the full data reduction (coming soon), but we all have a really good feeling about this one!

Taking full advantage of the excellent seeing, we stayed on this target as close to sunrise as possible which presented some interesting photo opportunities.

Song of the Day

Well, that went fast. Maggie and I are the first team members of the run to embark on the long journey down the mountain and trade the Atacama back for the Sonoran desert. But, before then, we had one last night to make the most of our time here at LCO.

After some daytime calibrations (and some very interesting hot dog-based pastries at dinner), we headed up the mountain for a full night of observing. Per tradition, we officially kicked things off with a sunset photo:

Now, don’t get me wrong: the clouds put on a gorgeous show for sunset, but they are not generally harbingers of good astronomy. Nevertheless, we were determined to get as much good science done as we possibly could, and we were pleasantly surprised; clouds passed, and we saw seeing hold steady below 0.5 (and even dip below 0.4) arcseconds for a good portion of the second half of the night.

Maggie, Laird, and Sebastiaan started things off with our dear friend the HDFS, performing some of the first phasing tests on-sky:

Unfortunately, the timing worked out so that Maggie and I will be coming down the mountain at the same time that Logan comes up, so we won’t get the chance to have the whole team here at the same time. Tonight Logan joined via Zoom to observe some of her targets, with a white dwarf companion making a very exciting appearance:

As the night went on, Laird and Jialin got their turn to conduct cutting-edge science in the control room. What was going on in the “kids room” downstairs, you might ask? Only the most important of shenanigans:

This much science is exhausting for anyone, especially the PI of the project. Unfortunately for Jared, MaggieO-X saw the opportunity to usurp and seized it:

I’m about to follow the PI’s example and try and catch some sleep before Maggie and I head down. But, before I go, I’d like to share a bit of personal news in honor of my last night at LCO:

And to go with it, the song of the day:

Hard to believe I’m back here! I was so convinced 2023A would be my last trip to Chile with the MagAO-X team that I tried to do all my tourist stuff in one go last year. In the past year, I’ve defended my dissertation, moved across the country, and begun a fellowship at the Center for Computational Astrophysics of the Flatiron Institute, a division of the Simons Foundation. (That is officially how we are supposed to refer to it, officially. Unofficially, it’s just “CCA.”)

Today’s lesson is that sometimes you try your best to sleep all day and just can’t manage it, even if you exhausted yourself working the longest day. Those of us with this problem were today’s accidental day crew: myself, Sebastiaan, Maggie, and Eden. We got up for lunch and did some daytime engineering on MagAO-X.

Maggie and Sebastiaan prepared to test the Holographic Dispersed Fringe Sensor (patent pending?) on-sky, shoring up its credibility for inclusion in the Giant Magellan Telescope project’s plans. I helped Eden get started with fixr, my Python library to read the format for our images that have been extremely reordered. I did some work on packaging fixr as well as getting various guest observer software creature comforts working consistently once again.

We all met up at dinner (save Jialin, who had to attend a class online). Tuesday is turno day, where the crew that’s been working since last Tuesday gets replaced by all new staff fresh from their week off-duty. While I will miss Sr. Verdugo’s desserts, this turno‘s cooks are breaking new ground in LCO salad bar operations. Imagine, sliced strawberries in a salad! I’ve never seen the like here before.

Josh Liberman regaled us with tales of the risks of excess cheese and the good sense of always traveling with Strunk & White’s elements of style. Katie always carries nail clippers instead. (I’m not sure why either of those were needed at dinner, but it’s certainly preferable to be well-spoken and well-groomed than the opposite.)

Meanwhile, down at El Pino, Logan Pearce was enjoying the local wildlife and natural environment.

Today also saw the arrival of Jialin Li, who arrived on the mountain after a one-day delay not unlike my own. (Did you know LATAM has a ninety minute cutoff for accepting checked bags? Well, I do now.)

Jialin is not only Laird Close’s graduate student but is also a heuristic interactive algorithm for observer time scheduling. Each astronomer has certain targets, which rise and set at certain times, and a certain number of nights (or fractional nights) allocated by their institution. Balancing these constraints is hard, possibly even NP-hard. Unfortunately, Jialin was incommunicado in transit yesterday, and the schedule was pulled in all directions in her absence. Sebastiaan began compiling constraints based on when people would be ready for various engineering tasks, when they’d be arriving onsite, when they’d be leaving, and whatnot.

So, when she arrived, the schedule was still very much in flux. The control room at dusk was alive with furious multitasking. At one point Logan Pearce called in from the hotel in La Serena (where she is recuperating) to try and understand the scheduling spreadsheet, which was live updating rapidly before her very eyes. After much hemming and hawing and proverbial horse-trading, an acceptable schedule solution was reached—just as the sun set.

For tonight’s scheduled performance, the role of Dr. Alycia Weinberger was played by the understudy, Jay Kueny. Jay acquired more data of some of Alycia’s favorite debris disk targets. MagAO-X can image shorter wavelengths than MagAO+Clio could, and produces better images than MagAO+VisAO did. This means the residual light from the star doesn’t spread out as far, making it easier to detect and characterize the parts of the disk closest to the star in our images.

The bad seeing conditions we had initially mellowed out to more typical 0.5–0.6” seeing after the sun had been down for a little while, and we got some good data on HD 61005 for Alycia. Alas, it could not last. Clouds began to gather on the horizon, and the wind picked up something fierce. The telescope can’t operate in high winds, so this kiboshed a lot of our plans for the evening.

You can see what happened on the plot below, most easily recognized by the big chunk of missing seeing data. Winds got above 35 mph average, which meant we had to shut down. Since there’s never any shortage of things to do, and MagAO-X has an internal “telescope simulator” source, we attempted to make the most of this time for engineering.

While Jared continued polishing MagAO-X Halpha performance with internal calibrations, a few of us retired to the break room to audition songs for Song of the Day. There were a few rejected choices (too sad, too raunchy, contains swears, etc.) but I think I picked a good one.

Around 4:58, Sebastiaan popped his head outside and reported seeing “a ton of stars” so we all traipsed back upstairs bright-eyed and bushy-tailed… only to hear Jared say “don’t get excited.” Although a ton of stars were visible, the humidity was climbing fast, and threatening clouds were gathering in the North.

We all got less excited. As we got close to sunrise, humidity plateaued and the average wind speed stayed low long enough that our telescope operator (the incomparable Alberto Pastén) decided it was safe to reopen. At this point, science was off the menu: not only was engineering scheduled for the end of the night, but the conditions were too bad for any but the brightest targets anyhow.

The Chekhov’s HDFS introduced in the beginning of the blog post must go off by the end, so Sebastiaan quickly slotted it in to take some data under realistic 90th-percentile conditions. It was tough to keep things stable, and the dispersed fringes occasionally disappeared entirely, but we took some data of a double star and got to see all the fringes doubled. That’ll be fun to disentangle.

After we finished, Sebastiaan and I stayed up for breakfast and were rewarded with this view of the valley filled with clouds trapped in the inversion.

Today’s song of the day expresses a desire for a counterfactual reality in which the clouds are absent and the seeing is always below half an arcsecond. I think that’s what they were singing about, anyway.

Song of the Day