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.
We didn’t want to be left out of Empanada Sunday, even though we technically didn’t arrive till Monday morning, so we managed to find a tasty new, or at least new to us, spot in the Santiago airport.
Up on the mountain, spooky clouds were a-brewing.
Okay they were kinda pretty. After dinner we got to work. Jay and Jared worked on telescope proposals while Warren and I staged the instrument for upgrades tomorrow. We moved PIAA hardware out of the system so Warren can install alignment motors on them and I’ll have room to install a reflective Lyot mask for LLOWFS. For unfamiliar readers, PIAA stands for Phase-induced Amplitude Apodization and is a type of coronagraph that utilizes four specially shaped lenses, two on either side of a light’s focus with a diffraction mask placed directly in the focus. This device will allow us to block out light from stars with Earth-like planets orbiting very close-by. Lyot-plane low order wavefront sensing (LLOWFS) will allow us to track lower order modes of turbulence in the atmosphere and enhance the PIAA’s function.
Only bad news of the day: The focal-plane LOWFS (FLOWFS) shutter gluement failed. Luckily, we have three jam packed days here in Chile to work on a bunch of engineering tasks in prep for our November run.
Song of the Day:
We aren’t at a hotel in California, but an observatory motel in Chile is close enough. Hotel California, The Eagles, 1977.