Category: MagAO-X

You wouldn’t guess it but it was already our third night at the telescope. Which means it was also my third day (night) here at Las Campanas Observatory. I arrived as an extremely fresh (and hopeful) astronomer on our first observing day. It was quite though to go through an almost 30hr journey to immediately observing. However, EFC duty called and I had to respond. I thought I would have been able to slowly ease into it, but I have been EFC’ing already for 3 nights straight. Luckily, the next 6 nights are also EFC nights. This means no breaks for me for at least the next week or so!

After two nights of great observations, it was time to do some engineering. This engineering block was all about commissioning our new Phase Induced Amplitude Apodization Complex Mask Coronagraphs, or PIAACMC for short. The PIAACMC is one of the most performant coronagraphs (if you can actually make it an align it). The PIAACMC has two sets of aspheric lenses that were designed by our one and only Warren Foster, MSc. These are mounted in only the most beautiful of optical mounts that one can imaging. They are also fully remotely controllable, which makes it possible for other people to actually use them. Since last year, Elena Tonucci has been working on getting the PIAACMC to work on-sky. One of the crucial missing pieces was the CMC (CM?) part of the PIAACMC. She uses fancy 2-photon polymerization additive manufacturing to make the focal plane complex mask.

All our troubles, or Elena’s troubles (I was just vibing along), were not for nothing. The new phase masks that were made resulted in much better performance! We were able to to get an order of magnitude better on-axis suppression than last year in the lab.

Our next step was to go on-sky. The first part of the night was great. However, just around the time of switching from Parker’s amazing Tau Ceti program to ours, the seeing started to cause problems. This was not great. We were going to try and image a challenging exoplanet target. Luckily, the seeing started to settle after about 10 minutes into our part of the night. We got really good data and I am excited to see some results.

It is not always fun to look only at speckles. So, our night ended with about an hour or so of imaging close binaries. This was to convince ourselves that PIAACMC actually worked.

At the end of the night, I was passing on my wisdom of observing as many photons as you can each night. No photon left behind! Every photon is precious! The TO was getting a little nervous and started to ask if she could close the telescope because the sun was rising.

Fun fact: “Moretta muta”, an oval mask that women wear for Carnival in Venice has no straps to be fastened to the head. Instead, it has a button on the inner side that is held in the mouth and with that mask is held to the face.

Greetings again from MagAO-X-ville! Us astronomers are equal parts wildlife and planet photographers, although today involved a strong emphasis on the former. Enjoying the beautiful sun over the Atacama and the lack of 2-legged individuals, the burros seized their opportunity to reclaim the mountain (one might call it a burrocracy).

Many a burro photo was captured today by our professional shutterbugs (yes, this is actually a word) so I have included a brief compilation below:

Our professionals also identified an assortment of smaller creatures including (but not limited to):

Birds:

Carloses:

Vizzies (vizzibility was high during both the day and the night):

And Hoomans:

After a busy day at LCO, both the hoomans and the animals must go to bed, assuming they have not already done so.

Song of the Day:

Fun Fact:

I once got attacked by a goose after feeding it a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

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.