Category: MagAO-X

We had an all-Laird, all-Hα night. With everything working so well, the most exciting thing going on instrument-wise was the initial setup, which I was able to get in on.

From our control workstation, I dutifully applied the “F-test” (which displays the letter “R”, for reasons lost to history), applied the “J-test” (works as advertised), performed the 253-click process to satisfy the prerequisites for the automated alignment loop, and then performed the other remaining steps when the automated alignment loop ran away. (“Apparently it’s shy and only works when it’s just me and the instrument” — Jared)

Then, we went to look at a star, and instead found two!

Visible near α Eri at almost 12 o’clock, the companion (star, not planet) lies at about 0.25″ separation. Without an adaptive optics system and a decent-sized telescope, you’d have a hard time seeing it at all. With the AO correction, we get diffraction rings around the stars in the scene. That means we can’t get any sharper—or resolve any more details—without a bigger telescope.

Speaking of binaries, we also imaged Mira (ο Ceti), a red giant star with a companion star.

Hmm, one star has a nice core and diffraction ring, but Mira (in the center) does not look as sharp. Why does the scene look so different from the first binary? Baby, don’t you go over-analyze. No need to theorize; I can put your doubts to rest.

Mira is 400x size of the sun but approximately the same mass. So, a big puffball. But the reason for the fuzzy image is not (just) that the star is a puffball. It has to be a nearby puffball for our system to resolve it. We can actually measure half a dozen pixels across the star, though our choice of filter and telescope means that’s only two “resolution elements”. (That’s just physics saying you can use as many pixels as you like but you ain’t getting any more information.)

I regret to inform you that on this night, there were no viscacha observations recorded. But worry not, gentle reader: many graduate students have gone on to have perfectly good careers using only archival viscacha data.

So, instead, I’ll share some computer stuff.

(Yeah, I know, I know. Just shut your eyes and scroll really fast to get to the song.)

It’s not entirely new this run, but I’ve been doing some shaking-out of the data pipeline feeding our dashboards (among other things). This is what a “normal” night looks like: most of the time we’re open, we’re saving data (that’s the “observing” row on the Observations chart). Since it’s a Laird night, it’s all Hα imaging, and everything’s colored red for our filters and beamsplitters.

Before an astronomer takes exception to me calling this a “normal” night when the seeing was hovering around 0.75 arcseconds, I should clarify that ≤0.5″ nights are the only ones worth seeing, the only place worth being.

Song of the Day

Bonus Literary Interlude

—No multipliques los misterios —le dijo—. Estos deben ser simples.
Recuerda la carta robada de Poe, recuerda el cuarto cerrado de Zangwill.

—O complejos —replicó Dunraven—.
Recuerda el universo.

“Abenjacán el Bojarí, muerto en su laberinto” by Jorge Luis Borges (1949)

In English:

“Don’t go on multiplying the mysteries,” he said. “They
should be kept simple. Bear in mind Poe’s purloined letter,
bear in mind Zangwill’s locked room.”

“Or made complex,” replied Dunraven. “Bear in mind
the universe.”

“Ibn Hakkan al-Bokhari, Dead in His Labyrinth” by Jorge Luis Borges (1949)

Empanada Sunday is always hard to follow, but today started off on a really strong note: an adult and a baby vizzy graced us with their presence just before sunset. Viscachas are notoriously jumpy creatures (in both senses of the word), so there was a National Geographic-esque effort to get some decent shots. Fortunately, our efforts paid off. I now present to you some full-resolution images of the cutest little guys known to mankind:

And some slightly-less-cute behind-the-scenes footage:

After the sun went down and vizzy-viewing was over, we got straight to work. Jay and I first fiddled with some cables on the platform to diagnose a shutter issue, and before we knew it, we were on-sky. The seeing started off a little rough at >1 arcsecond, but after a little patience and a little tweaking the AO system, we started to produce some good images for our collaborators at Michigan/MIT.

(quick aside: if you don’t know what we mean by “seeing,” this blog post by Logan offers a quick and easy explanation).

The last few hours of the night were for engineering. We started off with a game of telephone: Laird went onto the telescope platform to do some alignment with Jialin acting as chief flashlight-holder and walkie-talkie user. I sat in the driver’s seat in the telescope control room with the other walkie-talkie and Jared on Zoom. To get our mirror aligned, I relayed communication from Jared over the walkie-talkie to Jialin, who then relayed the message to Laird. Then Laird would tweak the alignment and tell Jialin, who radioed the message to me where it was finally heard by Jared. Thankfully it only took us a couple of iterations, and nothing got too garbled as the message made its way from Point A to Point B.

After alignment we continued with more engineering tasks, mostly trying to use our low-order wavefront sensor to get vibrations under control. I also got some time to experiment with the ADCs (atmospheric dispersion controllers). Unbeknownst to me, as I tinkered with speckle fitting and prism angles, the other two first-year grad students on the mountain (with the help of the talented Jialin Li) were taking portraits that would make any astronomy aficionado burn with envy:

Oh well. There are many nights yet to come. In honor of finally (sort of) getting into the rhythm of a night schedule, the song of the day:

Don’t wake me with so much
. . .
My bed is pulling me, gravity

Michael Stipe (and also me)

With our third car stolen by an unknown observer/animal on the mountain/crew a few days ago, the uber arrangement for our 9 people crew has been a bit tricky. Two brave and kind souls volunteered themselves for a hike up to the telescope, Eden and Katie. They were soon rewarded with spotting of the cutest clean room vizzy on this run (thus far).

Before the dome opening, the crew added the 24B sticker onto the instrument. (Yeah, we are a lil’ late this run).

The sunset viewing session proceeded after the “ensticken” ceremony. Parker’s head acted as the coronagraph for the group photo. Please try to call him by his new middle name, “The Vortex”, from now on. The long anticipated green flash was finally captured by human eyes. On video, which was taken by our one and only Professor Close, the flash doesn’t seem to be so green.

Along with our T.O.’s arrival, a basket full of empanadas entered the kitchen. Whether if the cheese empanadas were deep fried this time around remains a mystery, but they were a lot less greasy, which made it a lot more enjoyable for the meat and non-meat eaters.

On the science end, the first half of the night was VIS-X time, and Sebastiaan observed quite a few targets in high resolution mode during this time. These data will probably be reduced by one of his current or future grad students, so look out for more MagAO-X papers? The good seeing persisted through the second half of the night, which was an joint collaboration between Jensen (graduate student from MIT) , Gabrielle, and us. We spent the rest of the night observing a protoplantary disk in Halpha.

Song of the Day

Since we are now in South America, I have been trying to listen to more music from this continent, particularly pieces by Astor Piazzolla. Per the 24B blog rules, I must include two sentences from the song in the blog post. So here are the lyrics that I like the most:

“Y canto un tango que nadie jamás cantó
y sueño un sueño que nadie jamás soñó,
porque el mañana es hoy con el ayer después, che!”

As a non-Spanish speaker, I won’t attempt to translate for you. I would suggest a google search instead.

Last night, after such quality science, and the night before with rapid fire engineering accomplished, tonight was set to be a good mix of the both. Jared engineering in the early eve and Sebastiaan reanimating the Vis-X visible spectrograph for the rest of the night.

Alas, the mountain had other ideas for how we should be entertained. But what’s a crisis to this elite team? What’s two? What’s three? We are robust, especially with a remote PI directing us like agents on chessboard. Today we survived a glycol booger, a power outage, and mysteriously missing vis-x camera software. Ultimately, it’s not a novel crisis that dampened the night, but our old enemy atmospheric seeing.

Wakey, wakey, rise and shine, the computers are at 99 (deg C). Do not fear, the timely work of Parker and Jay before dinner, in which they had to squeeze the tubes and flush the filters and whatnot, halved the temperatures our control computers. Computers which we would prefer to not live at boiling temps.

The glycol team triumphantly entered the dining hall before service stopped, a real win considering how often we miss dinner for these kinds of things. The night was off to a good start with clear skies and decent seeing for the first few hours of engineering. By the time engineering wrapped up, things were looking very un-twinkly.

Next up, Sebastiaan. Which required half a postdoc professor in the instrument to shift the optics into a Vis-X configuration. Fingers in the blackbird pie, if you would. His spectrograph disperses visible light from 400-900nm in both low and high resolutions modes.

And then things got dark. Literally, the power went out for a good minute. It’s on again, off again, on again. But MagAO-X? It stayed on. A testament to ol’ reliable, the UPS’s. Almost simultaneously, Joseph sprinted to get camera software back where it should have been on ICC. No really, we should all be impressed and very grateful the whole thing didn’t fall apart. Take a bow, take a bow, take a bow.

Back in action, we were pumped to start seeing the spectra roll in:

But then we started to look more like this:

For no good reason, the seeing spiked. And when we say spike, we mean a dramatic 0.6″ to 1.7″ swing. And then we were looking at the DM struggling. The seeing was so unfriendly that even our backup backup engineering targets weren’t interested in the 6.5m telescope.

This didn’t stop our tenacious dutchman from exposing till civil twilight.

All things considered, it was a night. We’re still adjusting to the sleep schedule, and the people are sleepy. Enjoy some photos, and we’ll see you tomorrow. Hopefully we’ll get more of the 0.4″ nights and no more of this 1.2″ nonsense.

Bonus: inaccurate quoting

Thanks to Elena’s camera enthusiasm, we now have a little piece of midnight whimsy captured. For better or for worse. Hover for some choice quote picks that have been randomly assigned.

Thanks Elena! Thanks everyone for having no filter at 3am! or 3pm!

Song of the Day

As per the rules, lyrics from the song of the day can be found sprinkled throughout the blog.

Yesterday, we did an amazing job in setting up MagAO-X. Even without direct presence of the PI. Go team! We got the system working at sunset and we spent the whole night performing engineering tasks. One of the last tasks of the night was testing the first coronagraph that Elena made. Below in the picture we see Elena performing her first observations with a successful test of the PIAACMC! Can you find the two planets in the picture?

After a long day of almost 24 hours, we al were very tired and decided to go to bed. I was looking forward to a long day of sleep because I stay out too late if we observe. However, the Earth had other plans for us.

First I thought the Earth was just being rude but then I realized it just wanted to wake us up in time for lunch. So a short 20 minutes later a large part of the team was having fun at lunch.

After a nice lunch, I went up to the telescope for calibrations and engineering work. We are preparing to make MagAO-X smart by adding all kinds of AI. The most important one that gave MagAO-X its voice was of course already added by the amazing Dr. Long. And now, it’s time to give it brains for AO. Yesterday we noticed that we were missing the most important ingredient in the kitchen (or at least to me). We were very short on our supply of coke zero (“observing runs are fueled by coke.”). Somehow the observatory staff was able to read our minds and stocked up the kitchen with about 3 gallons of coke zero. You can not imagine how relieved I was when I stepped into the kitchen and saw the picture below.

Our night started off a bit rough with seeing up 1.7 arcseconds. For those that are not astronomers – so much seeing makes me want to give up. But Laird was sayin’ it’s gonna be alright because the start of the night is often rough. And he was right, the seeing started to come down and we actually had an amazing second half of the night. Our observations this night were taking for guest observers from Michigan. We had a great observing guest to keep us motivated and on our feet.

At the end of the night, I stayed up after the rest of the crew went down to sleep. This precious morning time was used to take data to get MagAO-X its brains. Hopefully, I took enough data and we will see in a couple of days if it will actually work! But I stay out too late thanks to these engineering tasks and I got nothing in my brain anymore so I will head off to bed. But just before that I got this music in my mind that I need to share with you all.