MAPS – Page 9 – Extreme Wavefront Control Lab

MAPS/MIRAC Mar. 2024A Night 2: Tunisian crochet

Tonight started cloudy and even with a little precipitation! (Which we just can’t bring ourselves to actually complain about, being children of the drought-stricket desert southwest.)

Image description: A closed telescope dome in front of thick clouds on a rocky mountain peak, with snow amongst the rocks and fluffy-looking pine trees in the foreground.

Image decription: Same closed telescope dome from a different angle, with thick clouds in the sky, and the red light of dusk making the mountain ridge redden as well.

So it was time to learn some Tunisian crochet, courtesy of a book authored by MAPS and CAAO colleague Lori Harrison: Exploring Tunisian Crochet: All the Basics Plus Stitches and Techniques to Take Your Crochet to the Next Level; 20 Beautiful Wraps, Scarves, and More.

While we were clouded out, I called in to the MagAO-X run to eavesdrop for a little while on the MagAO-X AO GUIs:

Finally the clouds cleared up around 11pm and we went on sky! Only to have trouble finding our stars. We even pointed at the moon (which is 31 arcmin in diameter) and we could find that! But we tried to focus on the limb and just weren’t able to get the adjustments we needed to sharpen it up. This was all most likely due to the primary mirror cell throwing an error with a garbled measurement that was causing an unknown piston and tip/tilt that we just weren’t able to take out with pointing the mount and focusing the hexapod. We do wish our cameras had a larger field of view to help with finding stars when there’s a trouble issue like this, but ultimately it seemed we didn’t even have the range to take it out.

Meanwhile MIRAC was still working on adjusting its pupil alignment, which was actually a fine thing to do when all you can see is the sky (but no stars). This time Manny and Rory went up and turned one of the screws on the bellows, with little effect. We also tried rotating the instrument rotator, and were gratified to see it did indeed rotate the one bright spider we could see, but still did not help to center the telescope pupil with the MIRAC pupil. Ultimately we had to call it a night around 2am.

The song of the night is the sound of water dripping from the trees.

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.

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: