Category: MagAO-X

Hi, Happy Thanksgiving and welcome to my first blog post and first time in Chile!

Not long after a long travel, we woke up and were immediately put to work. There were a lot of things to be done on Thanksgiving, and gifts to be unwrapped.

Of course before opening the the gift, we had some tasks to do. We were putting MagAO-X in place! It wasn’t too dangerous, but my screw did get jammed today.

Today was a whole lot of new experiences, but very importantly, I finally learned what it meant to cable the DM.

It was hard, but it turned out that we did our cabling properly! I mean we did have to replace something, but that was actually due to dust.

Today also featured the full tour from Laird and Jared. We experienced the echo chamber and some secret underground parts of the telescope.

And all of a sudden, it was already time for the first shift. Operating looked very complicated, but Katie told me all about it. Seeing PSF’s on sky, AO in action, and everything I learned about in simulations was pretty awesome, though I know there is still a lot for me to learn… (How exciting!)

On the way back down from the telescope we saw all the stars in the sky, and finally I saw a bunch of donkeys! (I was looking for you!) What a long day, but a great Thanksgiving.

Song of The Day:

Following that Radiohead theme. And also me in Chile!!! I’m a tourist and all…

The Tourist Radiohead

Fun Fact:

I was in a Popeye’s ad once.

And now it falls to me to write today’s blog post. The plan for the day was simple enough: adjust the focus on the science cameras and then pack up the instrument for its move to the aux building. However, while one of our fresh postdocs succumbed to the infamous Haffert disease and stayed up until 5 AM taking flat fields, we discovered that with the instrument’s recent changes, we were actually seeing some unexpected vignetting on the science cameras.

After a vigorous morning of re-aligning the beam and removing most of the vignetting (it actually went pretty smoothly, though it did eat up a decent chunk of time), there was unfortunately no time left to refocus the science cameras. MagAO-X had an appointment with some professional riggers to be moved up the mountain, and the first step was to remove all the cables.

And then it was time to move MagAO-X out of the clean room, wrap up the “gift,” and do some serious rigging to get her ready for the trip up the mountain.

All in all, it was a very successful day, and we’re more than ready to set up the instrument at the telescope and begin our first night of observing. In the meantime, we’ve had some new arrivals up the mountain and with even more reinforcements on the way:

Finally, the day was blessed with the first official viscacha sighting.

Song of the day:

A theme song for moving the instrument out of the clean room and up the mountain.

Fact of the day:

Any scramble of a 3×3×3 Rubik’s Cube can be solved in 20 moves or fewer. The highest number of moves required for an optimal solution is often referred to as God’s number in the community.

Welcome to the first blog post of this run from the Leiden team! It’s great to be back up at LCO. Matthijs and I are starting to feel the seasonal depression leaving our bodies thanks to the good old vitamin D we are soaking up these days. Incredible what such a small thing is capable of. Speaking of which, today we talk about many small things that make a huge difference: From optics to spiders. There must have been some confusion lately… Sometimes even small details can change everything! For every picture of today’s blog post there is something right or wrong. Check hover text for the solution.

Many new additions to MagAO-X today. Last night, after a long journey and before going to sleep, I have installed my new PIAACMC masks. I am very proud of my cute little babies, and I hope I will show you some nice results in the next nights of observations. Katie and Laird have worked relentlessly today and brought important improvements to the instrument! First, they have installed a brand new periscope mirror (ttmperi) that is now much smaller and has a much higher stroke. Katie designed a stage plate so that our beloved heroes, Sebastiaan and Laird, won’t have to walk up the platform anymore between observations to pull in or out a mirror to use VIS-X: Now this can be done automatically with a stage that moves up and down! They have also added an old telsim aperture stop (that re-creates the Magellan aperture) and rotated it so that the lab and on-sky alignment are much more similar and consistent. Finally, they have put in a new mount, new filter, and the shutter for LLOWFS (Lyot low order wavefront sensor) with an extra contribution from Parker. What to say, team… Excellent work!

We have also found some small friends (but not the ones y’all were hoping for) around the observatory today. Let’s review them together.

And now we can really say it, Katie has become the queen of the 2025B MagAO-X upgrades. Really bopping to the top.

At the end of the day, Miles and Matthijs also took lots of flat field data (Miles is still working as I am writing).

All the many recent “small” changes to the instrument added up, leading us to have to refocus the science cameras on the coronagraph masks, so tomorrow we will have to work on that. We only have a few more hours before we start packing up the instrument and move it up the mountain top. Stay tuned for the next blog post to see MagAO-X bop to the top as well together with Katie!

Fun fact of the day

Before being an astronomer I was an aerospace engineer. Before I was an aerospace engineer I studied languages about 16 hours per week in high school (yeah, I changed my mind quite a few times in my life). This means I know random facts about literature from different countries. So, today I’m gonna share with you my favorite literature+sciencey fun fact: The etymology of the term “quark”! It comes from one of my favorite writers of all time, James Joyce. In his book Finnegans Wake (which, by the way, still keeps professors and translators awake at night after more than a century!!) he writes:

"Three quarks for Muster Mark!
Sure he hasn't got much of a bark
And sure any he has it's all beside the mark."

This book is full of puzzles, jokes, puns, words spelled wrong, and words literally invented by Joyce that he doesn’t bother to explain – sometimes they can be understood from the context. This is why this book is very difficult to understand or translate. Again, very in line with the theme of my blog post today…

The discoverer of quarks found this term in the book and decided to use it to name his newly-found particles, since you need three quarks to make a proton or a neutron!

Song of the day

I have recently seen Radiohead live, and I must confess this song was my inspiration for the theme of the blog today. But for my elite Radiohead fans, I must also say something like Daydreaming (gorgeous song, among my absolute favs) or Fake Plastic Trees, could also do with today’s theme.

This week started off with the arrival of Matthijs and Elena; welcome (back) to Chile!

New Optics

More optical adjustments and alignments on the MagAO-X bench were led by Katie and Laird to prepare for a new dual-band observing mode. The goals today were to prepare alignment targets, install a new beamsplitter cube, and to install a new filter in the telescope simulator laser enclosure.

The new beamsplitter that was installed has a dichroic cutoff to split between r and i bands, which DOUBLES the throughput efficiency for dual-band imaging between i/r and z/r compared to the 50/50 beamsplitter.

To test this mode, the output of the super-continuum white light laser was modified. A new shortpass filter with a longer cutoff wavelength was installed inside the laser box, which meant an evacuation of the clean room so Katie and Laird could work with proper safety precautions and minimal distractions. This turned into quite the ordeal–re-aligning the single-mode fiber became a tour de force, draining the rest of the two’s energy. Before the end of the day, though, we were treated with this view:

and with the exciting demonstration of the mode by Laird

Here we have z-band (0.7-1.0 um) on camsci1 and r-band (~0.6-0.7 um) on camsci2. So all science photons from 0.6 to 1.0 um are now being detected, which is roughly 400% more photons than before the RI cube.

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My new favorite mode for MagAO-X.

— Laird Close

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Other News

Jared and I finished the implementation of the polarimeter’s HWP stage into the MagAO-X software system, including a pupil-tracking mode. In addition, we attached external trigger cables for the two science cameras in preparation for hardware synchronization. Joseph continued his work on COC and preparing hard drives for the run. Parker continued implementation of the device application for his accelerometer controller.

Song of the Day

Fact of the Day

Orlando, Florida is further west than all of South America.

Parker has been working on detecting vibrations within MagAO-X using some fancy accelerometers and a Raspberry Pi™ and a bucket with a hole in it.

Also, we all had a chance to employ our god-given accelerometers later that evening, as Vallenar had a little baby earthquake just for us.

I spent the day mucking about with computers, as usual.

Laird and Katie went looking for the spatial filter in our wavefront sensing optics and instead found what may be a second, secret spatial filter. Further research is required.

Note: We have no more details to share at this time, as we cannot comment on an ongoing investigation. If anyone has a verified sighting of the pyramid wavefront sensor to report, please call the Las Campanas Observatory tip line. You may remain anonymous.

Our first shipment of Europeans arrives this Monday, so I’m sure there will be someone who can write a blog post.

Song of the Day

I’ve been on a folk / Southern Gothic kick recently. This man really captures the feeling of working hard at a real job—or so I assume, having only worked silly little computer jobs.

Fun Fact

I learned that Las Campanas Observatory has a seismic sensor / accelerometer deployed on the mountain itself feeding data to the USGS earthquake network. They even have pictures of the site on their webpage.

(I assume it looks a little different, 14 years later.)