MagAO-C 2016A

We all made it home safely. Carefully packing my purse the first time I left the house, I remembered my keys and phone… but forgot my wallet — oh yeah, you need money to acquire goods in the non-mountain economy! At least I remembered I DIDN’T need my flashlight. This 3-song mashup is so ...

Our last day at LCO (this time) was a critter filled day. The Guanaco herd, complete with youngun, made an appearance. The pictures didn’t turn out though. Today we packed up a lot of stuff. Some things were more carefully packed than others. So long LCO. See you next time. Made of Silver. Once.

Thanks to those who help us carry on!

Safe and sound.

Today’s post is brought to you by the number 7. Seven what? 7 Ohms. Apparently, The Artist Formerly Known As Prince must hate youtube, because I can’t find an embeddable link to his wonderful song “7”, so this will have to do: http://videos.sapo.pt/nQFuZzoKsDmHe9IkCtoY And there are also these wonderful songs about the number 7: This one is ...

But I haven’t become one with the mud yet. We’re really enjoying the close proximity of raptors right now. They love the low-turbulence ground layer at LCO as much as we do, and it’s fun to watch. This song has been on the blog before. Then it was in reference to 40 days spent at ...

Day 14 AND post #400. I’d been planning to celebrate.

High 5!

Tonight, Katie and I were escorted to the summit by a hawk and a guanaco. So we did just two stars tonight, both with planets. These stars are bright, and at the infrared wavelengths where Clio is happy MagAO makes nearly perfect images. It’s nice to let MagAO be MagAO sometimes.

Tonight went really well we only had 6 communication errors on start-up of the ASM (whereas we often have thousands but most don’t bother us) — so the ASM is enjoying this warm weather we are having. As you can see for the photos below we had a surprise at the end of last night ...

We had a good night going. We think we’ve found a solution to the ASM electronics problem — one of us just has to get out of bed early and warm it up before dinner. That did the trick tonight, no problems since. But we’ve been stuck with a bum guider for the ...

Tonight we noticed that our pyramid pupils look like Samoa(R) Girl Scout (R) cookies that Laird brought on behalf of his daughter: We started the night with some ASM issues that prompted us to send up the bat-signal to our Italian colleagues: Walking down the hill this morning, we saw fog in the valley and a hawk ...

The internet went down in the middle of the night last night, and just came back. Two nights ago we used a high speed camera, an Andor iXON 897 EMCCD, to measure the vibrations of our system at 2500 Hz (that means we were taking images at 5000 Hz). The camera was mounted ...

We started tonight off with some eyepiece observing. Of course, since we had visitors, the ASM decided to act up. It seems to be the same problem we had in 2015A — and I hope it will go away by itself just like it did then. In the brief moments we had ...

Today was a 7am breakfast to 7am dawn kind of day. Mario Matteo and his team finished their M2FS run with some calibrations, Juan and the crew pulled M2FS and the f/11, Juan et al. installed our NAS and ASM, we cabled the ASM and NAS, and finally we went on sky, closed the ...

I feel so much better after getting 8 hours of sleep in a bed! That red-eye is brutal. But now I’ve had a full day of good food after good sleep, Clio is chilling, and things are good. Today… …I cooled Clio with Victor’s help: …Jared and Laird worked on the NAS and Laird ...

Katie arrived safe and sound, just in time for dinner. During the day: more preparations, mostly working on our new toys. We installed the new field stop, but only after Laird drew all over it with a Sharpie. Oscar helped us countersink some bolts, and Laird tested out the mount for our new ...

Mark Phillips commented, upon seeing me at lunch, that us AOistas always look “so fresh when you get here.” That implies that he has seen me look “not fresh”. It’s fair. Laird made it today, and Katie is in the air. We’re hard at work getting ready. This time, we have also ...

Yep, it’s that time again. If you’re thinking we just left, you’re right. We just barely had more time at home than we usually spend here. The drive up: Some work got done: It’s my turn to set the rules. We’re going back to basics. The only requirement is that any Day X post must ...