Home of MagAO and MagAO-X.
Last Friday our shipping contractor (or at least our shipping contractor’s contractor) collected MagAO-X.
After it was loaded, Dr. Males said “I’m going home to not think about MagAO-X,” as is tradition.
MagAO-X now travels by ground to Miami, then by air to Santiago, then by ground again to the Las Campanas Observatory. I will follow its progress like last time.
Looks like we might actually be doing this … if World War 3 doesn’t break out first. Please enjoy this video of today’s activities from clips taken by me and Alex Hedglen.
Since rights-holders can be so mean about these things, no audio track is included. However, I recommend playing the song of the day at the same time to get the full effect.
There are also a few pictures to share.
Also works great with this one.
With cautious optimism, we are approaching the second ever MagAO-X ship date. It’s hard to believe that it has been 2.5 years since we last did this! The system has grown in complexity in the interim, gaining a spectrograph named VIS-X (P.I. Sebastiaan Haffert) as well as many new controllable degrees of freedom. (Always need more of those.)
We haven’t been sitting on our thumbs for the past two years. Our instrument has been moonlighting as a testbed for the phasing of the Giant Magellan Telescope, among other things. I’ll have to update our publications page in my copious free time.
Yesterday was the last day of lab operation of the instrument and the beginning of packing. I got some final tests of the computer system finished, the optics were covered for shipment, the glycol was purged from the cooling system, and we de-cabled the instrument from its electronics rack (which is traveling in its own crate).
In April of 2019, we were placing the 2040-actuator Boston Micromachines deformable mirror in MagAO-X for the first time, and Jared affectionately referred to the cables as “the octopus”. Well, the octopus has been firmly suctioned to the side of the electronics rack since we unpacked post-2019B, and it was time to detach it.
This delicate work involved many layers of protective equipment: masks, currently a requirement for existing in the world; bootie shoe covers, a requirement for entering the lab; hairnets and gowns, a requirement for entering the cleanroom tent; and electrostatic discharge protection, a requirement for handling the delicate MEMS deformable mirror cabling.
Our electronics rack has been growing new cables and hoses and equipment for 2.5 years without its doors and side panels in place. So, when we tried to put those on, we found they didn’t fit. Much like me after a period of pandemic isolation, its clothes didn’t fit right any more.
Rather than buying it a new outfit, we made some alterations. We sculpted the styrofoam insulation, adding pockets where needed. (Everyone loves clothes with pockets.)
This time, fortunately, the metal tape we used did not taste blood.
By this time next week, we may still need to hedge our predictions for the 2022A run… but we’ll know for certain whether MagAO-X itself is going to Chile!
Your song of the day is “Future Starts Slow” by The Kills.
The city of Tucson was made brighter today with the passing of Jhen’s PhD defense and a much-deserved level up. A huge round of applause for Dr. Lumbres!
Jhen’s talk was very comprehensive regarding her various projects she’s taken on during her time here at UArizona. If you’re like me, you learned a lot about the intricacies of Fresnel propagation and the problems that laser guide stars can solve. It was pretty surreal to me being that the last time I attended one of her talks was at the 2020 OpSci Winter School event when I was but a mere crouton in the world of optics and astronomy.
Moving forward, she’ll be relocating to sunny Los Angeles to work for Northrop-Grumman as an optical engineer and resident chocolatier early next year.
Salamat, Jhen! That’s a fancy Tagalog term that roughly translates to “may your hunts be fruitful and your arrows fly swift.” Or something like that. On second thought I think it just means thanks. We’ll miss you! (and your treats..!)
For about a year, Laird, Alex H., and I have been putting together the protoype-High Contrast Adaptive Optics Testbed (P-HCAT). P-HCAT sent half of the simulated GMT pupil to the “Holey Mirror” which, as the name suggests, is a mirror with a hole in it.
The holey mirror is able to simulate a piston differential with a piezo-controlled mirror sticking through the hole. This light was sent into MagAO-X and the PyWFS was used to sense piston. The next phase of the project was adding post-doc Sebastiaan Haffert’s Holographic Dispersed Fringe Sensor into MagAO-X. This 1″ optic is able to interfere each segment of the GMT pupil with another then disperse them so we can back out the piston differentials. We got some very interesting results we plan on sharing in some upcoming papers!
The next step is to convert P-HCAT into simply HCAT. This new and improved version will have a concept known as the “parallel DM.” This involves sending the entire GMT pupil onto a reflective 6-sided pyramid, a hexpyramid, which will send the light to 6 separate deformable mirrors. The central segment will pass through a hole in the center of the pyramid.
Manufacturing a hexpyramid with a central hole is no small feat. We are super excited to finally have our hexpyramid in the lab and ready to play with. This week we put it in front of an interferometer to check surface quality. To mount an optic this complex you need to be creative to say the least. See our makeshift mount below. We are happy to note the pyramid is very photogenic – it doesn’t have a bad side!
Piston Control is a fantastic mode of risk reduction for the Giant Magellan Telescope and we are so happy we get to be a part of this effort!
