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 my morale up, Warren made sure I could read all about our avian brethren that live in the Argentinian region of South America by finding this in one of the many bookcases.
Lunch today consisted of some interesting Chilean-Japanese fusion. I grabbed the “pastel de choclo” which is like a shepherd’s pie, but with a corn topping instead of mashed potatoes. They also had vegetable tempura. This tourno of chefs is killing it, man.
After lunch we returned to our regular duties. However, before dinner we stumbled on an annular eclipse, so we had to go out and check it out. Apparently totality is happening directly over Easter Island, which honestly sounds like a religious experience. Well we here at LCO we ended up getting something like a 30% eclipse. Better than nothing…!
In MagAO-X engineering news…
We got a chance to admire the fruits of our alignment labors last night. A PSF comparison between camsci1 and camllowfs. We want these to look similar, indicating good alignment. So it’s looking good!
We had trouble measuring some optics. Inches were too fractional we couldn’t find any metric calipers. We present a new unit of measurement for the lab: a micromaggie, which is 6.75e-7 inches or like 2 microns or something. Much more useful and reliable.
ICC2 has been sick. In fact, this morning we awoke to it looking almost terminally ill. It wouldn’t boot to the OS and just kept getting stuck at the BIOS, despite working relatively fine the day before. Although it was having trouble recognizing hard drives before it got super sick, usually a reset was enough to fix everything.
Luckily, we got our best doctors on the case (Jared and Joseph). Despite the confusing symptoms and near-death experience, ICC2 managed to make a full recovery once Jared and Joseph found the right treatment for the ailment. I’ve been watching old episodes on House M.D. lately, so I’ve almost been picturing the legendary Dr. House and Wilson themselves working on ICC2.
I think it would’ve made for a great episode! Maybe you’d all like to know- it wasn’t lupus that was making ICC2 sick. Although, it’s *never* lupus…
Song of the Day
I was going to pick Massive Attack’s “Teardrop”, initially released in 1998 because of the House M.D. analogy. But I’m pretty tired. And I think everyone else is too especially after a couple back-to-back 16 hour shifts. So maybe Brain Stew by Green Day better captures the mood here.