Hardware posts

We’re on our way home, leaving behind a fixed, upgraded, and working MagAO-X. Ready to go for 2024B. A Goodbye While we were there they had just finished stripping parts from the famous “NAS” from the venerable MagAO. They loaded it up to take it down the hill to the bodega, where it will be ...

[A peek behind the sausage factory curtain of blog ops: There was a brief moment on Friday night when I could have written this post but decided to go to sleep instead. 36 hours later, I am frenetically making up on lost time from the courtyard of a hostel in the Bellavista neighborhood of Santiago. ...

Those who have passed through this group know that Warren Foster, former Master’s student now CAAO engineer, was personally victimized by the PIAA Complex Mask Coronagraph. From hours trying to figure out how to fit an elevator system into the already chaotic MagAO-X bench so we could drop in/take out four PIAA lenses to cold ...

Today is still ongoing, as I write this blog post at 1 am. I’m currently holed up in the library at the ASB writing my butt off for this 51 Peg proposal. It’s basically like 12-16 pages of highly polished material that they’re requesting for the application, so it’s a lot of work. To keep ...

Walking back in the dark with Jay tonight under quiet stars, I remarked that “even though I arrived yesterday it already feels like a week, but in a good way.” Long days can do that – leaving the cleanroom at 12:00am was pushing well into our sixteenth hour of work. Time in general though has ...

Warren and I made it up the mountain without any necessary running. However, due to the leftover storms from Hurricane Helene, the ride was bumpier than usual thus less sleep than usual. Progressively disheveled. We didn’t want to be left out of Empanada Sunday, even though we technically didn’t arrive till Monday morning, so we managed ...

One of the big goals for this visit to LCO was to troubleshoot a coupled pair of actuators on our precious 2040 actuator “tweeter” deformable mirror (DM). Being coupled meant that when we poked actuator 498, actuator 650 moved (not 498). Actuator 650 also moved when we poked 650. We first noticed ...

Let me tell you about our trip. Jared and I were scheduled to leave on Thurs. 09/27, however our Tucson flight was delayed to the point where we would have missed our ATL-SCL connection, so we got the opportunity to rebook. Whether or not this was due to Hurricane Helene, we’re not sure. Because ATL-SCL on ...

After some berating from @jlong, here is my inaugural post! First, an obligatory observatory picture. The MMT at sunrise with the full moon on the horizon The MIRAC-5 team arrived Friday, June 2nd to prepare for installation of the latest iteration of the instrument. Originally conceived in 1988 by Bill Hoffmann at the University of Arizona, MIRAC ...

“Without phasing, there’s no real reason to build the GMT.” -Andrew Szentgyorgyi The biggest optical/infrared telescope in world will be the Giant Magellan Telescope, which will be built on a nearby mountain peak within sight of the Clay and Baade telescopes at Las Campanas.  The telescope will have 7 primary mirror segments and 7 adaptive secondary mirrors, ...

If you read carefully between the lines of yesterday’s blog post (which were mostly complaints about me trying to do science – hmph!), you may have noticed that we didn’t say anything about using Clio. Because we didn’t. At all. All night long. We didn’t want to panic any of our upcoming observers, but Clio was ...

We’ve had a few meetings lately to prepare for our upcoming 2014B run in Oct–Dec. This will be our second regular science run, and our operations are becoming more smooth and efficient, so we are going to have a more streamlined personnel plan. It will also be our longest run yet (37 nights!). We ...

Today was a busy day, and we began splitting MagAO’ers into day and night crew.  See Derek’s awesome post for the bulk of the day’s tasks: aligning the CRO and ASM. The next major happening was mounting Clio to the NAS.  Even though we didn’t play the theme from Top Gun as we did it (sorry ...

Manny and Richard are on their way home. Clio2 survived shipping, and is ready for MagAO to send it some flat wavefronts. The last thing the guys did was train the LCO staff on how to keep Clio cold. The next MagAO detachment leaves Tucson today. We’re on our way.

After shipping, unpacking, and verifying that everything still works, the last step was for Manny and Richard to cool Clio2 down. Then they took some pictures. Since it works in the IR, basically detecting the heat of planets and brown dwarfs, Clio2 is kept very cold. This is because a blackbody at room-temperature emits most ...

The invasion of LCO has begun. A scouting party consisting of Manny Montoya and Richard Sosa arrived this weekend and began unpacking the Clio2 infrared camera. Here is their report: Day 1: “Clio was unpacked yesterday morning and we confirmed that nothing was damaged in shipping. Clio was put on the vacuum pump ...

Clio has arrived!  The shipment containing the boxes for the instrument, ring, and rack was delivered to the cleanroom unpacking area at LCO earlier today:

Our IR science camera, Clio, has arrived in Chile and is in transit to LCO.  Here’s a pic from last month in Arizona:  Stay tuned – more updates about Clio coming soon.

While the NAS was mounted on the telescope we took a quick set of readnoise measurements with the CCD39. Here are the results. The only major caveat is that the telescope was not tracking, so we didn’t test whether the drives have any impact. Otherwise, this is the most realistic set of ...

Meanwhile, back in Tucson… We interrupt the NAS Fitcheck program to bring you this update on the Clio2 infrared camera. After the Pre-Ship Review for Clio2 in Amsterdam in July, we have been completing preparations to receive diffraction-limited near-IR to thermal-IR photons from MagAO. Yesterday and today we installed the new J-band filter, and the cold ...

Jason finished assembling our new CCD (and shutter) cooling system in the mirror lab yesterday. After several tries, and finally replacing the threaded cap that wouldn’t hold pressure, the system passed a pressure and operational test. It’s on its way to Pasadena, and from there to Chile.

I have updated our VisAO filter curves to now include the effects of 3 reflections from Aluminum mirrors (important because Al has a feature at 0.8 microns), the Clio dichroic, the AR coated surfaces of the VisAO Optics, and the protected silver gimbal mirror in the VisAO camera. Most of these are small losses, ...

On March 10, 2011 the MagAO secondary shell had its frontside successfully aluminized at the University of Arizona, Steward Observatory coating facility in Tucson by Richard Sosa and Gary Rosenbaum. This also took a lot of hard work by Jason Lewis and Victor Gasho.

After completing our work with the laser, we switched to a white light source to test the camera’s performance in broad band filters. This is our PSF in the Sloan Digitial Sky Survey (SDSS) i’ filter (a nice set of filter curves is here), which passes light from roughly 0.684 to 0.840 microns. ...

After a very intense couple of weeks, we have built up the nearly complete VisAO camera in the Magellan AO Lab at Steward Observatory. The images below show the hardware mounted on the board. Missing is the wavefront sensor (WFS) hardware, which is waiting for us in Florence, Italy. The numbers label specific components: 1: ...

Here is a demo of our filter wheel assembly (designed by Kevin Brutlag and assembled by Jason Lewis) spinning under the control of the AO Supervisor software.