Category: MAPS

For the first time, Bianca and I are the only AOistas at the AO station for the entirety of a run. After last night’s work, we felt motivated to close the loop. In fact, I would even say we felt confident in our abilities to do so. We began the start of the night CACAO processes while making constant WFS pupil adjustments. Normally our pupils don’t drift this much, so we decided to check the pupil imager. Sure enough, our pupil image was vignetted.

Flashback to last night:

After alignment, we worked on booting up CACAO and acquired an RM. While checking RM modes, we noticed modes were not looking AO ready. They should not have chunks taken out of them. This led us to check the pupil image. We saw the same vignetting we see today.

Our solution was to adjust alignment in the periscopes and MIRAC dichroic. With the remaining time in the night, Bianca and I were able to get to the part of the CACAO process where we open up the gains gui that allows us to close the loop. At this point, we did not notice any extreme drifting. Unfortunately, we were receiving errors while trying to open the gui, and sunrise was just around the corner.

Back to present:

Just as last night, Oli and Maggie adjusted the MIRAC dichroic and top-box periscopes. Bianca and I proceed to CACAO, but continue to face the same drifting issue. We now realize this vignetting/drifting issue is very repeatable. Our suspicion is that this is due to MIRAC being off the center of rotation. To test this, we realign to the telescope chief ray to see how AO performs without MIRAC. By the end of the night we are able to close the loop on 20 modes with minimal drifting. This was a bit tricky, as we did not have a PSF to reference as we were closing the loop (MIRAC is very useful for PSF imaging). Unfortunately, we cannot easily determine how good the loop is working purely based on vibes and what we can see from the acquisition camera.

We came to the conclusion that we do not want to proceed using MIRAC this run. Our plan is to hopefully get PISCES installed before tomorrow night so that we can continue with the optimal setup to perform AO. To be continued…

Stay tuned for the next chapter of the MAPS April 2025 run!

The song of the night is “Drift Away” by Uncle Kracker.

Hello! I’m Alyssa, and I am new to this blog. I am a visiting grad student from the University of Michigan that joined the MAPS team on this 6-night run. This will be my second observing run ever!

The MAPS team headed up to the summit tonight! The skies looked more promising than previous nights.

We had some clouds here and there with periods of high winds. But that quickly died down from up to 35 mph down to 0 mph over a span of a few hours. When aligning the pupil for MIRAC5 and co-aligning with the AO WFS, we have initially found that the source position was barely on the field of view of the detector. Since there is a new dichroic lens in the optical system, Manny and I went up to adjust the actuators near the dichroic to see if we could center the source as much as possible. Luckily, this had solved the issue to a good degree, and after getting through the cloudy and windy moments in the night, we were fortunate enough to start taking some science data tonight with some targets.

With some progress tonight, I want to take a moment for some notable quotes given out from none other than Krishna:

“What is the name of the dog in Scooby-Doo?”

“Is the loop looping?”

“Also, Manny, you look like a Rapper.”

Krishna

Song of the night featuring one of my favorite bands:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhWWlFme0dU

As much as I hate to report it, the MAPS crew is once again trapped in a cloud. For a few days now, the forecast has consistently predicted high cloud coverage for all of tonight. To be sure, we performed our own professional survey of the sky at sunset. Yep, those clouds look cloudy, and it seems like they want to stick around with us.

We decided it was best to make ourselves cozy in the dorm common building while waiting for any break in the clouds. Bianca and I took this time to practice AO/CACAO set up . ݁₊ ⊹ remotely. ݁˖ ⊹ ݁. We have ran through this process four times between the two of us so far this run without making any dire mistakes. Amali has trained us well! Additionally, we properly troubleshooted an issue with the visible wavefront sensor camera, which was reporting a frame rate of ~2000 instead of the expected 500.

Unfortunately, there is not a fireplace here. Instead, we turned on all of the “cozy” lights (minus the lamp that had exposed wires in place of prongs on its plug) and a space heater. For some ambient noise, we turned on the tv to the H&I channel. This was not by choice, but the remote wasn’t working. Walker, Texas Ranger (5.7 stars on imdb), featuring Chuck Norris, was playing. I think the cheesy acting and ’90s aesthetic of the show really helped set the vibes for the night.

I made a few trips outside throughout the night. The fog that engulfed Mt. Hopkins was quite dense, and I could not see further than five feet in front of me. Around 2 AM, we declared the night to be unobservable.

The song of the night is “Clouds” by One Direction, which is featured on their best album (in my professional opinion): FOUR.

Bonus song because it is February 14th: