Category: MagAO-X

Tonight started of quite well. We finally had average conditions, which much better than the 2 arcseconds seeing from before! The first target of the night is one from Logan. She is searching for white dwarf companions around main sequence stars. Stellar evolution tells us that there should be more white dwarfs than we can see. These white dwarfs could be hidden as companions close by brighter stars, which make it difficult to see them. MagAO-X is an ideal instrument to search for faint things next to bright things. We use coronagraphs to block the starlight of the primary to search for faint companions. Below is a video showing MagAO-X running at full steam trying to get maximum performance.

Sadly, we had to stop again around midnight. The seeing went through the roof.

The seeing became so bad that we just gave up trying to get science data and we switched to sparkle engineering. This also allowed us to explore the more important things in life. Such as tasting all the different types of milk that LCO has to offer. The reviews and commentary are outside the scope of this blog post and will be part of later work.

At the end of the night the seeing became a bit better and Logan could take over again to search for her white dwarf companions. Somehow it looked like all stars we looked at were binary stars. After seeing 5 binary systems we realized that it was the system itself that created the binary components!

And during the lows of the night we also lost our dear friend Vizzy. As if the night had not been bad enough.

After the night ended I continued to work on some daytime engineering to get the new integrated coronagraph/wavefront sensor to work. This has been manufactured by the local manufacturista Avalon McLeod. Yesterday night we commissioned the coronagraph part of this optic. And today we did the lab tests of the wavefront sensor side. Now we only need to get the wavefront sensor on sky!

The last week has been though weather wise. So here we are hoping for better skies in the next couple of nights.

Tonight we experienced seeing values that made certain lab members say “Oh lord!”, or “I thought we were taking darks”.

Unfortunately for tonight’s observers, we had to close the telescope early. Not only was seeing making it quite impossible to produce any useful data, but the TO went outside at about 4am and noticed condensation on the sides of the building.

Nonetheless, the night was not a waste as we got to squeeze in a bit of Engineering and were able to use our lab source to continue testing after the dome had closed. Dr. Sebastiaan Haffert and I have been working on a knife edge Lyot coronagraph (inspired by him and fabricated by me), and we got to take our first on-sky data with this earlier in the night. Not only was it exciting to see my handy work in action, but I even got to close a tip/tilt control loop on the reflected psf!

Before the night began, we got to enjoy our last sunset with SO PhD student Jailin (she heads back to the States this morning) and our first sunset with Dr. Alycia Weinberger.

Shortly after sundown, P.I. Dr. Males was able to capture a pretty cool shot of the Clay primary as it was aiming low on the horizon.

Thank you for reading my short and sweet update. We leave you, as always, with the song of the day!

Hello! It me, back on the mountain finally. As stated yesterday, I arrived finally yesterday afternoon (after high-fiving the departing Warren and Joseph at the La Serena airport through the window). I managed to stay up for sunset, then quickly went to bed after sleeping not a wink on the plane the night before. I slept all through the night and all through the day, finally rising for good at around 4pm. (note: this was partially on purpose so I could switch onto a night schedule, but my body did not object).

One thing that is super nice compared to our last run is that the nights are much shorter and we have a good amount of time after dinner before the sun sets around 9pm. Last run the sunset was basically during dinner, so we had no time to enjoy it before the work began.

We begun this evening with a vizzy hunt. We have yet to see any clean room vizzies, which is disappointing, but we can climb down a smidge from the telescope to a vizzy wonderland in the rocks below. Tonight was epic vizzy spotting, with a vizzy family and a little vizzy baby!

Laird caught an awesome video of the vizzy family! We decided the one is the mom and the little one is her baby.

But the fun didn’t stop there. We went to see the dome opening, and the TO was kind enough to put on a little show for us!

But the fun doesn’t stop there. After it got dark Jared and Laird took us to the spoooooky tunnel under the telescope:

“Avalon there is a statistically significant number of pictures with your eyes closed that exceed what it should be for random chance.”

And Laird visited an old friend:

Last night we did a little surgery on VIS-X. It seems that manufacturers think that it’s mandatory to put a blinking or blaring LED on your tech. One of the science cameras in MagAO-X has a bright green LED on the back that shines right into VIS-X’s optics. It was giving ~700 counts just from the LED alone! Bad for science. So we activated VIS-X’s ghost mode:

Problem solved!

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Now onto some science. Sebastiaan spent the first half with VIS-X, the integral field unit (IFU) spectrograph. He observed the huge and close giant star R Doradus. This guy is sooo big and soooo close that we are able to spatially resolve the star. That means that we can observe the surface of the star, instead of just a point source like pretty much every other star!

Unfortunately the seeing is terrible tonight and the wind is HOWLING. Bad for science! Jialin and Laird took over around midnight, and we spent the next many hours fighting the seeing and getting terrible AO corrections.

But it wasn’t quite bad enough to foil VIS-X, our champion for the night. Sebastiaan hopped on and did another spatially-resolved star, Betelgeuse! He has now gotten 3 of the 4 spatially-resolved stars with VIS-X. Soon he’ll be first kid on the block to collect the whole set!

Despite our vizzy-blessed night, Jared once again banished our lucky vizz from the desktop. Hope that doesn’t bode ill for our observations.

#ripvizzy

But wait! There’s more! In a moment of triumph, Avalon got her much-labored-over low-order wavefront sensor closed and controlling 16 modes!! WOOO! She can now use past-tense in her phd applications and finish up her masters thesis.

Let’s end with some sunset telescope + Jupiter pics

Some quotes:

Damn she thicc

On several things tonight…

I had the flipaqc in again! It’s flipping me out!

On flipping out the flip mirror

There’s nothing like a pack of wild dogs to ruin your day at the beach

There sure isn’t.

I should have watched Super Troopers between the last run and now so I’d be briefed up on my quotes.

On inside jokes on runs.

We had nubbins. Now we don’t even have subnubbins.

On the poor seeing and it’s effect on our observations.

Observing runs are fueled by coke.

For legal purposes this is clearly about coca cola.

“<slightly judgementally>How long do you want to be on this target Laird?</slightly judgementally>”

“It was your dumb idea to go to it Sebastiaan”

Difficult seeing makes for strained interpersonal relationships.

“Avalon don’t listen to this crap”

“Oh I have been, as they say, lost in the sauce.”

On the requirement of luck for impactful science.

I gotta go yell sh*t at Laird

On doing science.

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Song o’ Day:

Thank you Carla for the wonderful blog post yesterday, and also for taking such good care of us. I of course really mean thanks for delivering our empanadas on Sunday. We’ll see you next turno!

I know it looked like a lot of food, but I was actually somewhat disappointed in our team’s commitment to Empanada Sunday. This tradition at LCO is one of my favorite experiences here, and part of what makes this place so special. I have seen the lounge table tiled with empanadas. A friend of ours even flew home once with her carry-on full of empanadas.

So yes, I ordered 4 empanadas. But that was only because the new night lunch order form limits you to 2 carne and 2 queso. I would have ordered 8. But the trick to hording empanadas here is that you have to defend them.

We said goodbye to Joseph and Warren this morning. Joseph was debugging software while Warren was frantically taking PIAA characterization data until the Sun forced us to close up, and they then ran down the hill to pack and catch the bus. After some sight seeing in La Serena they met up with our fellow Stewardites for the traditional Papas Fritas at the La Serena airport.

On-telescope optical characterization can be pretty draining.

Tuesdays are shift-change day, “turno”, at LCO. So fittingly our departing AOistas passed their relief.

Logan has returned! She managed to stay awake after the 24+ hr journey just long enough to watch the sunset with us.

Some of our crewmates manage to avoid the stresses of cutting edge astronomical instrumentation research, and just go with the flow.

Since the day after thanksgiving one of the features of sunset watching from the Clay telescope has been the intense glow of the lodge Christmas Tree.

I am (Carla) so glad to be at the first and hopefully last night of this MagAOX run.

I was here the last first night too (2022A) and both of them were very chaotic. To add one more word to your chilean vocabulary I hope that I am not the YETA one here. To be Yeta means that every time I am around, bad things happen … but that’s the reason for engineering, to have a looooong time to solve problems. Maybe we will meet again on your next run jujuju.

As TO, there is not much work to do. I am just responsible for centering the field and then you unfocus whatever we do so, the rest of the exposure I have the time to get to know you all better and talk about different things, from science to travel across Chile.

I am so excited about this revolutionary science project that I hope to see you over the years and to continue learning from you. This week I learned a lot about the coronagraph. I have never had the opportunity to see this in action, it is exciting so I wish this works better every time. And thus I can read more about your science results. I never told this yet but I have an astronomy outreach project for BVI people, so I want to absorb all of your knowledge to make a tactile model of something new. This is my secret plan through the week xD.

I love your spirit, even when the things are not working or you have problems with the installation or something doesn’t fit or the ADC is bothering, somebody in the room finds the right solution or the right joke that raises and spreads the energy that we all need.

Just want to highlight one fun fact that I have never expected. During these 4 days I need more than one canasta to transport all the food from the hotel to Clay. Especially on Sunday, the kitchen staff prepare two whole trays full of empanadas and meals for all of us. Thank you for helping me carry all the food these days.

I really look forward to meeting you again in 2023A. I wish you a nice trip back home, a very good and deserved break for all of you and a very happy holidays. 

PS: I hope to remember to bring you chilean candies for the next one!

PS:: We are at Clay jujuju.

Song of the day:

The beauty of astronomy is the geographical union through the world atlas.