Category: MagAO-X

Hello XWCL! This is my inaugural blog post so buckle up because it is going to be a sleep-deprived ride. Laird and Alex spent the day prepping the instrument for transport to the telescopes while Jared, Joseph, Kyle, and I were putting the “finishing touches” on various pieces of code. Kyle, Joseph and I were able to get the auto_focus code running fairly smoothly. The question of the day seems to be on the focus curve plots, to show or not to show?

Some burros decided to hold us up from going to lunch, but luckily they were very cute. There were a couple exciting animal sightings today!

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Pre-installation Safety Meeting

Jared led the pre-install safety meeting to go over logistics of packing up the instrument, driving it up to the telescope, and installation.

After dinner we began the decabling and packing up process. It was hard disconnecting such cooperative DMs but it had to be done.

And That’s a Wrap!

Once the cables and eyepiece were removed, and the instrument was closed up, we shrink wrapped the entire instrument.

MagAO-X is packed up and ready to go! Since MagAO-X is going to be installed on the telescope tomorrow I think it is safe to say that we will be running with the

Just for today, my friends, we have an unbeatable special offer: with each concurrency bug you find, we will throw in another concurrency bug for free!

And, if you call now, we will throw in a semaphore collision bug at no charge! That’s a $49.99 value!

Call now! Or, if you prefer an event-driven programming model: let us call you with this exclusive offer!

Okay, now that I’ve gotten that out of my system: we have been vexed by concurrency bugs today. These are the absolute worst. To reproduce them, you must get everything just right. (In astronomical instrumentation, that can sometimes literally mean the stars aligning.) Then, once you’ve reproduced it, you’re still only halfway to figuring out which element of your system caused it.

To make a long story short, my PurePyINDI library wasn’t equipped for the huge numbers of elements Kyle wanted to control. Once I sorted out the locking in PurePyINDI, Kyle was able to apply his eye doctor script (previously blogged about) on more than the previous maximum of 36 modes. (Modes, for the uninitiated, are a bit like “things that can go wrong”. The more modes you can take to the doctor, the better your images will be.) Now we can theoretically access the 1000+ modes CACAO spits out when we take a system response matrix, and make our images very sharp indeed. On the way there, we get a bit of an Eye of Sauron look:

I’m not even going to tell you about the bugs in the linear stage logic we shook out today. As soon as we squashed one, we found another, more subtle one. And another. Until we were all quite sick of stages.

This was also the day of a very important MagAO-X ceremony. Today, at 9:00 A.M., Laird and Alex unveiled the dedicatory tailpiece and plaque, which surround (and cover, when not in use) the hole for the MagAO-X eyepiece.

Here’s a closer look:

According to Professor Close, it is traditional for a new instrument to be adorned with a tailpiece as a sort of maker’s mark once it’s complete. Great work, everyone!

In honor of Kyle’s Eye of Sauron, “Ring of Fire” by Johnny Cash is MagAO-X’s Song of the Day.

Maggie, Joseph, Alex, Kyle, Laird, and Jared arrived at LCO today to prepare MagAO-X for our first time on-sky.  We missed thanksgiving with our non-LCO families, but the chefs made us turkey so we got a good holiday meal (thanks guys!).

We’ve already started MagAO-X back up and are making a bunch of last minute tweaks to get it ready.

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MagAO-X 2019B Blog Rules:

1. There will be at least one blog post each day
2. The blog post of the day will have a song of the day

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The song of the day is The Thanksgiving Song by Adam Sandler

It’s an old MagAO tradition to take selfies for our moms in the mirror that gets you around the bend at the summit.  Long story, but it’s also tradition for it to be poop covered unless Alan is here.

Tonight’s song is “I miss the misery” by Halestorm. Since the casual reader of this blog hasn’t signed up for Lizzy Hale with the power on, here’s a “subdued” version of it:

And here’s the knob-at-11 version:

Also, the block editor in WP needs to die.

In the gym today I noticed a bunch of new trophies. Check it out:

This is the clearly the best observatory.

These guys agree:

I missed the sunset, but came out of the cleanroom in time to catch this:

Today’s song is Miley Cyrus’s version of Jolene (the Backyard Sessions one).