Category: MAPS

Hello. It is your local CACAO expert here, beaming to you directly from the beautiful peaks of the Santa Rita mountains. I am currently being not-paid to convince a wiggly mirror to un-twinkle stars from a four story building that rotates all night long. The whole experience feels like an internship at something between a castle fort and sea-bound vessel. For the record, I do not think that buildings this big should merry-go-round. However, I will admit that this one is impressive.

We continue to be supported from CACAO sages across the globe. Olivier called in last night about to board a Hawaii-bound plane, and Jared logged on from one of the fastest trains in the world. (Thank you wise ones, for being so generous with your travel time.)

Tonight Olivier split his time between the Subaru team and ours, remotely helping us tie off some CACAO loose ends. Finally, after the trials and tribulations of last night’s clouds and cranky mirrors, we finally have a happily closed loop! Early tonight we had the DoCrimes response matrices loaded up and performing corrections. We’re still working on some other orthogonal control algorithms with CACAO, but for now, enjoy the success of the day, from two different perspectives:

First, mine, as the AO operator:

Second, Jorge’s as the observer (video by Joseph):

“Now that’s what I call an AO System!” Manny.

Summer runs are funny in that you seem to always be running out of time. Sun-down at 8pm to sun-up at 4am isn’t as long as you’d think. We’ve been running our observations into sunrise more often than not.

That said, we still have a few more days to get our loops more stable, but what we’ve accomplished so far has made me proud of my small, button-pushing part of the MAPS team. I have had such a great time working with the crew, have been charmed by MMT, and despite all worries I do believe Joseph and I have proven ourselves helpful.

Song of the Day

The night started off with clouds and the group had a nice and easy time getting to start their systems. Nothing like having time to catch up and get lunch together.

At midnight the weather decided to clear and we had high hopes of starting where we left off last night. It is always good to have high hopes. The ASM decided to change the way it had been functioning for the last night and time was taken to troubleshoot and verify the issue.

Acronyms

What will you hear when you are in the MMTAO control room:

1. ASM
2. CACAO
3. MILK
4. CHAI
5. DoCrime
6. Pisces
7. TBX

In a sentence:

The TBX cameras sent images to CACAO that is using MILK to send commands to CHAI which caused the ASM to DoCrime which allowed Pisces to see clearly.

MAPS is The MMT Adaptive optics exoPlanet characterization System, an upgraded adaptive secondary AO system for MMT. For the next week or so, it is installed on the telescope and the team has important engineering and science to do. To this effort, the XWCL has contributed one CACAO expert on the ground (Eden McEwen) and two remotely (Jared Males & Olivier Guyon). We tried to contribute two on the ground, but the departure of Avalon from Tucson means there was a vacancy in the dorms.

I’ve always wanted to see the MMT, ever since the daily high in Tucson cracked 95ºF (if not longer!). I expressed this wish to Manny, and someone vouched for me as “useful”, and thus did I secure Avalon’s spot for myself.

Now, on the MagAO-X team, our fearless leader likes to surprise and alarm us by turning up in unexpected places—to the point where we have a calendar tracking his movements so we know what timezone he’s operating under. Most recently, we learned he was in Tokyo thanks to Hello Kitty.

I thought it was time to return the favor, by heading up Mount Hopkins without a peep to Jared. We had it all worked out: Eden was going to write blog posts with me lurking in the background of her pictures, and we were going to wait and see if Jared noticed… but the cat’s out of the bag already.

And Eden’s asleep.

So I’m writing the blog post.

MMT, formerly the Multiple Mirror Telescope (currently the Mmt Mmt Telescope), is a 6.5-meter telescope in Southern Arizona at the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory. It’s part of Steward Observatory, and University of Arizona. Also the Smithsonian. Also Harvard. Everyone wants a piece of the F.L.W.O., and who can blame them? It’s gorgeous country out here.

The night shift left Tucson around 1 P.M. with all the food for their 1–6 days of meals in tow (depending on length of stay). With a mere hour-and-a-half drive separating their lab in Tucson from their telescope, the MAPS team has MagAO-X thoroughly beat for convenience.

The delicate optical bits were all in place well before sunset, thanks to efforts of the day team, allowing me to take this glamour shot when we opened up the dome.

The telescope operator had kindly tipped the whole contraption over to make a compelling group photo:

The night began with breezy but clear conditions and seeing hovering just under 1″. Naturally, the first bit of the night was spent debugging, aligning, and turning things off-and-on-again. (We know all about that.)

Once starlight was hitting the wavefront sensor (thanks to Oli) and the pupils were looking good and round (thanks to Robin and Jacob of UToronto): it was time for some CACAO: Compute And Control for Adaptive Optics. The same ultra-fast, ultra-flexible AO system that powers SCExAO and MagAO-X is being implemented as the new brains controlling the adaptive secondary.

Andrew and Eden worked diligently through many fiddly bits of computer plumbing to get pixels from the sensor and commands to the adaptive secondary (under the watchful eye of Jess):

Meanwhile, in Tokyo, MAPS East was supporting the effort over Zoom:

Their combined efforts got us to our final checklist item of the night: close the loop. With an hour or so to go until sunrise, the globally distributed team worked on improving the calibration and setting things up so tomorrow night we can skip right to “the interesting part.”

Stay tuned.

Song of the Day

In honor of the MAPS East team’s contributions, I submit this Japanese groove that’s been stuck in my head.