Category: MagAO-X

Well that was better. After our December run (trucking strike followed by extremely bad luck with the spatial power spectrum) we were all holding our breath for this run. This time, we got a good week in the cleanroom to tune MagAO-X up, and Cerro Manqui cooperated — delivering 0.27″ seeing at one point. As documented in previous posts, we got a huge amount of work done. We also detected a whole bunch of planets.

MagAO-X Phase 1 commissioning is now complete. XKID was the last thing on the official list, but we also got to the point where we can confidently act like a real instrument. We can point at a star, lock the high-order loop, align a coronagraph, lock the low-order loop, and start taking data, and do it all night long. We can target hop efficiently (for Alycia anyway). We’re achieving contrasts with “e-6” in them, and we are working within 2 lambda/D of stars (though not yet at the same time).

Don’t worry though, the excitement will continue. Everybody says the X in MagAO-X stands for eXtreme. But it really means eXperimental. Kinda like the the Billy o’ Tea, we’re never going to be done commissioning — because we don’t know what we don’t know and are still figuring out what works. The only way to find out is to keep coming back for more.

Here’s a viscacha doing an impression of the current state of the MagAO-X instrument and its keepers:

After breakfast today we finished packing up. That meant putting the front door on the big box which holds the optical table, and then loading our electronics into its box and doing the always exciting dance with gravity to get it into the shipping position.

I was given permission to post a pic of myself “being PI”:

After the exciting crane ops, the more tedious stuff has to get done. Applying shipping labels (which involves cleaning first) and bolting down various lifting fixtures we don’t want the shippers to use in transit (our entering assumption: if they can find a way to destroy it, they’ll do it).

After a quick tidy-up in the clean room, we’re finally bound for home.

LCO is an amazing place, with the best seeing in the world (… most of the time), gorgeous sunsets, comfy beds and great food, an awesome crew, and it somehow doubles as a zoo.

Laird hit the road after lunch:

Our last sunset for 2023A — 2023 in total — was as amazing as always:

I brought up The Wellerman during our last-night-that-wouldn’t-end because I’ve been listening to Colm McGuinness a lot since my last “end of run” post. I think I gave Eden the wrong impression though: I wasn’t aware of whatever happened on Tik-Tok vis-a-vis sea shanties and t.b.h. am not at all disappointed that she wasn’t either.

Being even more honest, and probably ironic, I don’t actually like sea shanties as a genre. Mainly because it’s usually done in that comedic irish pub style where for some reason someone hiccups during each verse. But the songs are actually working songs, sung to pass the time or keep the beat during dangerous and hard work, far and long from home with only the hostile sea for company. (let’s leave aside that few of the songs we’re talking about here are actually shanties . . . )

I “discovered” Colm McGuinness last December because of his My Mother Told Me. Which is not a shanty, but I have to say Colm seems to get it the way I get it: these are songs that deserve a little bit of epic flare. Examples: Roll Boys Roll and Santiana. [Dude also does an amazing Jolene, background here].

Before going further, note that this all fits in my series of “music I rocked to with Ben” b/c I recently got into sea-oriented music when he sent this with the assertion that they are what we (including two other friends from high school) would look like if we decided to start a sea shanty band. YMMV. (longer story includes that Home Free recently played in Brookings South Dakota, the official hometown of MagAO).

Anyway, the song of the day is a ballad about the journey home from a long and arduous adventure at sea. I love this job, and we’re doing something amazing as a team. I think we’re on the road to achieving our very lofty goals. But every time we do this thing we do at LCO, I have to acknowledge that “it’s a damn tough life, full of toil and strife, we AOistas undergo…”

Thank god, we’re homeward bound.

This is the time of night an astronomer’s workday would be in full gear, but dear reader, your favorite astronomers are all home or tucked into their LCO beds, dreaming sweet dreams. The MagAO-X team, working 24 hours since you heard from us last, have observed our last target, removed our instrument from the telescope, safely trucked it to the clean room, and started to pack it away for its long trip back home.

In this great relay race, Jared, Sebastian and I were the night team. As the rest of our team hit the hay around midnight, our noble observing efforts were met by some of the worse seeing of the run (after 22B, we do feel lucky to only have one or two nights to complain about, instead of the whole run). Around 1, Jared jinxed us with “At this rate, it’s going to be terrible all night and clear up to 0.5 arc-seconds right before we try to close.” In the great cosmic comedy the universe plays on worn-out astronomers, turns out he couldn’t have been more right:

Seems like LCO weather agrees with my high school track coach, you can’t give up the race right before the finish line. So the night team observed until the sun declared our time up, and only then did we begin the task of shut-down and de-cabling.

We passed the baton to Laird and Joseph around 8 in the morning, and I’m told that the craning, carting, tethering, trucking and boxing all went well. I can only tell you what I heard because once Jared gave me the all clear, I sleepwalked straight down the hill into bed. Though I was solidly asleep for the rest of the day-time packing work, the successes did not go undocumented:

Right before dinner, when I finally woke up, we were much further along into packing than Jared had feared we would be. Huge thank you the LCO crew who got us off the telescope so quickly, then helped us even more this afternoon to get MagAO-X in its shipping box. After a leisurely meal, the AZ crew headed back to the clean room and started corralling our doodads into the right corners.

We start again bright and early at 8:30am to finish prepping ourselves and the instrument for the long flight to Tucson. Think of us, as we all try the magic trick of switching to a day schedule on a days’ notice.

With things going smoothly, we seem to now have this mythical thing called “free time” and with it the team sneaked in a little wildlife spotting:

With these fancy new phone cameras, some team members are getting particularly good at the artistic type of astro-photography:

But wait! Where did Jialin and Jay go?? Rumor has it they got out just in time, and are having plenty of good adventuring before their 24hr journey to the US. Travel safe friends! See you Tucson.

Song of the day:

As we watched the seeing mysteriously dip last night just as we thought about calling it, Jared goes “you know that song, the Wellerman”? To Jared’s surprise and chagrin, I had completely missed the entire TikTok trend of covering this New-Zeland Sea ballad. It became popularized by Scottish singer Nathan Evans around 2021 but the original tune can be tracked back to the 1830s. It loosely follows a Moby Dick-esq narrative of a whaling ship being dragged along by an unattainable whale. Jared goes on to explain that the tantalizing 0.5 arc second seeing is our white whale, dragging us on until the last possible photon. With the night and the run ending, this felt more true than ever.

“The Wellerman” seems like a fitting song of the day, and of course I have heard it, all it took to remember was a quick search. How could I forget it? I love a good folk tune… love a Scottish accent… but wow I love a old sea song! What the conversation with Jared reminded me of is that, though I don’t really care for metal, heavy metal, etc… I LOVE Pirate metal. People yelling in general angst? I’ll pass. People yelling about the high seas? Sign me up. A fellow friend in the AO research field and bassist in their own right introduced me to Alestorm a few years ago, an Scottish band that exclusively does pirate metal. I haven’t gotten to see them in concert… YET, but I take this band as the single most impactful recommendation music-wise I’ve ever gotten. So in honor of our telescopes and how successful this run has been, I’ve picked their song “Magellan’s Expedition” for today.

As a bonus, here is Alestorm covering “The Wellerman” because of course they did, everyone covered it, even Kids Bop 2022.

This evening Dr. Matías Díaz, a support astronomer here at Las Campanas Observatory, helped us take a next-level team photo.

Of course, we have more people in our group than pictured, and by the time we visit again in 2024A (!) we’ll probably have even more new members. By then I will have decamped for the Flatiron Center for Computational Astrophysics in New York, but it’s famously hard to see stars there. Maybe they’ll invite me back.

It’s our last night on sky, which is always bittersweet. Tomorrow’s a long day of removing from the telescope. So, what have we got to show for the past 22 days?

• 14 terabytes of high-contrast astronomical data (and counting)
• a new observing mode that keeps light where it should be, allowing us to pass these savings on to the consumer (shout-out to Ms. Lowfs)
• a handle on our induced DM ✨sparkles✨, which will let us unravel the profound mysteries of pyramids (thanks Eden McSparkles)
• a lot of improvements to VIS-X (gaan met de banaan, Dr. Haffert)
• one new extreme-AO-fed instrument (shout-out to Noah & the Ex-Kids, opening for Weezer on tour this summer)

We’re about to commission our knife-edge coronagraph, but this blog post can’t wait. It’s time for the prospective students to choose their Ph.D. institutions, and we must put our best foot (feet?) forward.

Song of the Day

I went to a liberal arts college, which makes some people assume I didn’t study physics or something. In fact, astronomy is one of the quadrivium of artes liberales, and my college had a Department of Mathematics and Astronomy before it had a physics one. It’s physics now, though. So there.

Still, a smaller student body and more flexibility in courses of study meant some interesting cross-pollination between departments. One of my classmates in Advanced Intro Astronomy was named Maurissa, and she was actually a music major. She took astronomy with us, but she also had a band, did stuff with electronics, and was in a Balinese gamelan ensemble. Anyway, she was the one who introduced me to Brian Jonestown Massacre, the above psych-rock band with good vibes.

Bonus Song of the Evening

Sometimes you don’t need something musically interesting, and swoopy synths suffice. Anyway, the blog title reminded me, and after all—we are almost home.