Category: MAPS

MAPS/MIRAC Mar. 2024A Night 1: Optical alignment

While the MagAO-X run is going on in Chile, your friendly neighborhood MAPS/MIRAC team has just summited Mt. Hopkins to run CACAO and take data on this side of the planet. We spent a lot of time trying to align our pupil planes and focal planes and WFS and science camera.

TopBox GUIs with ZWO pupil image (left) and Basler PSF (center).

The MIRAC pupil was still misaligned so we went to zenith, lifted the platform to rest the instrument’s weight, loosened the bolts, and tried to nudge MIRAC over. But we weren’t able to move it far enough to shift the pupil.

Rory and Manny loosening the MIRAC bolts.

At this point thick clouds had rolled in (quote of the day: “If you can no longer see the moon, it’s cloudy!” –Amali). We waited it out a while, but eventually called it a night around 4am.

Pyramid pupils, obscured by clouds.

Today was Rory’s birthday — Happy birthday Rory! We celebrated with cake(s).

The song of the night is Happy Birthday to You.

MAPS/MIRAC Jan. 2024 (2023B) Night 3: Lynx refuge

Tonight we sought refuge from the snow at the Ridge and then in Tucson.

Here’s what we woke up to:

Photo by Bianca. Image description: Telescopes at the ridge in heavy fog.
Staying cozy in the ridge. Photo by Bianca. Image description: A view from inside of a window bay, a bit of a comfy recliner, and a cold cloudy day outside.

We had to clear the Bowl and Summit due to snow accumulation and possible ice. The Ridge was safe, but we also saw that we wouldn’t be opening tonight or tomorrow, and there aren’t enough rooms at the Ridge, so we decided to go down to Tucson. If the weather clears up we’ll go back up on Tuesday for our last night.

Animal of the day:

The lynx is a genus of medium-sized wild cats.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx

And here’s Lynx, a medium-sized domestic cat who likes to do astrophysics and help close the MAPS AO loop with CACAO:

MAPS/MIRAC Jan. 2024 (2023B) Night 2: Snow torbie

Weather tonight [Image description: Weather webpage snapshot showing: Temp 32*F, humidity 97%, wind gusts up to 55mph, clouds, and snow]

We didn’t open tonight due to thick clouds. The MIRAC team took a lot of darks and dome “skies” to assess their QE and background noise. It started snowing around 2am and we left the dome around 3:30 with snow already accumulating on the ground.

Animal of the day:

The animal of the night is the Torbie cat, a combination of Tabby + Tortoiseshell

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tortoiseshell_cat

Such as seen in this snuggly bug that is helping Jared test his AO loop calibration procedures back in Tucson:

MAPS/MIRAC Jan. 2024 (2023B) Night 1: Coati alignment

It’s a MAPS/MIRAC run! The semester is still 2023B but the year is 2024 and we are back commissioning again, this time the 10 micron Geosnap-enabled instrument MIRAC. Tonight we spent a lot of time on alignment, as we have changed pretty much everything post-telescope, from the dichroic to the detector placement! Pointing and centering with non-linear tri-axial mounts on a cold night in the dome made us really appreciate the bright wintry touches:

A beautifully decorated fir tree [image description: pine tree with Christmas ornaments].
Image description: The MMT atop a snowy peak.
Image descriptoin: Sunset through the pines.

Here are some neat alignment tricks: And don’t forget the pupil imager lens!

A target on periscope fold mirror 1. [Image description: A bullseye on paper, held over a glass, as viewed through a digital camera.]
Pyramid pupils with a bullseye. [Image description: 4 round images with the same bullseye as in the previous picture, off center and zoomed in, as viewed through a different digital camera.]

After alignment, we got some closed loop calibrations and have also been training new AO operators!

Blog Rules for the Jan. 2024 (2023B) Run:

  1. There must be a post per night.
  2. There must be an animal of the day/night.

Today’s animal of the day is a coatimundi or coati https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coati

5 of us saw this one as we caravanned up the MMT access road around 4pm near the basecamp:

MAPS Oct. 2023B Night 4: That’s a wrap

Tonight we had great weather: low winds, moderate humidity, good seeing (0.6”–0.8”), and spent the whole night from civil dusk to civil dawn on bright stars near zenith! We stuck with the IR WFS and did calibrations and noise measurements all night long. For example, here is a Hadamard Matrix measurement using CACAO to look at the inter-actuator stroke:

[Image description: CACAO GUIs showing pyramid pupils and weird spirally shapes commanded on the ASM.]

And here are the CACAO and ASM control screens:

[Image description: Pyramid pupils and ASM commands per actuator.]

And we got some PSFs with MIRAC (although we only got up to 30 modes closed so I don’t have a good AO-on/AO-off sequence), here are some nice L-band speckles:

[Image description: Speckly un-corrected PSF at L-band.]

We compared the latency measured with the visible WFS (top) and the IR WFS (bottom):

[Image description: Two scatter plots of latency tests.]

Video of the night: Inspired by all the animals we’ve seen at the MMT or the drive up here (jack rabbits, owls, grey foxes, skunks, and… baby coatis!), here is a video of coatis looking like brontosaurs if you run them backwards:

[Media description: YouTube video of coatis walking, video has been reversed, and the Jurassic Park Theme music is playing. They look like brontosaurs!]