MagAO-C 2016B

The MagAO team has made it to Tucson in time for Thanksgiving! And the Gemini Planet Imager team travels seem to be going well too — We ran into Jenny Patience, Julien Rameau, and Ben Gerard of GPIES at the La Serena airport, who were just coming off a 6-night GPI run. Our La Serena-Santiago ...

I don’t have wifi in my room tonight. We’re all done, leaving tomorrow. Song of the day: Dee-ner Dee-ner Dee-ner Dee-ner, Dee-ner Dee-ner Dee-ner Dee-ner, Dee-ner Dee-ner Dee-ner Dee-ner, Dee-ner Dee Dee Dee. (the rules say nothing about what form the song must take)

We went from 2000 Hz to 0 in 1 day: The ASM, the NAS, and Clio all came off the telescope today. That was it; then it was bedtime. Thanks to the technical crew for their hard work getting the Clay switched over in 1 day, and to the humanitarian crew for the delicious dinner ...

Well that sucked. We ended our run with a crap night, high winds, higher seeing, and jumping actuators. MagAO comes off in the morning, so that’s it. The burros made me think of this.

Today was a bit rough, with high winds and heavy cloud cover. But… through the clouds… a beacon of light. Specifically a kick-a** high resolution AO-corrected PSF without the ever-present wind butterfly because… the MagAO adaptive secondary mirror is now officially deforming to correct for the atmosphere at 2000 times per second, twice as ...

Tonight Clio and VisAO were together again — except we didn’t do much together. Separately we tested the new VisAO SDI+ mode and did some basic set-up tests on Clio. And we got AO up to 1.6 kHz! Thanks to Arcetri here and there: And the wind died down and we had as low as 0.35” ...

Tonight we inducted 6 more members into L’Ordine degli Astronomi al Limite di Diffrazione: we observed Mira A and B through the eyepiece. First on the list was Alfio who helped us come up with the name for L’Ordine. Then we got back to work, testing and debugging our new modes, interaction matrices, and higher frequency.

This is my 303rd day spent at LCO. Most of our crew of AOistas have left, it’s down to just Laird, Alfio, Katie, and Jared, with the addition of Kate who joined us tonight.

Marco, Runa, Enrico, and Fernando left yesterday. Kelsey and Lauren left today. And Simone and Armando are leaving tomorrow. After Laird’s very nice technical post yesterday, I will just have some pretty pictures for today. We started the evening with a very delicious meal of Hector’s pizza which is so good! Then we got back ...

Great News MagAO’ers and lovers of the Blog Today we went on-sky after a day of taking interaction matrices (IMATs). We have made many improvements to MagAO since we had to also rebuild so much after the glycol leak. It has been a 10 month saga that has been quite a strain on all of us — ...

Do you remember the Viscacha that sometimes sneaks into our pupils? This is a problem when our mirror is uncalibrated, and the signal it sends to the pyramid wavefront sensor confuses our software. We get dark spots in the pupil (images of the secondary) that often look like our Viscacha friends. They ...

Today was an exciting day for the whole team: MagAO is mounted, poised, and ready to go! The adsec is back, has been flattened, and is lookin’ good (after extensive reconstructive surgery). The pyramid wavefront sensor has been updated (and is swankier than ever). And finally, MagAO is bolted to the Clay telescope, and is ready to show ...

Commissioning is a long and windy road, not unlike Odysseus’ journey in the Odyssey. The MagAO team has traveled half way around the world, and have had our share of battling monsters (like our deformable mirror!), and treasure hunts (to spot that elusive green flash!). We are so close to the end of our journey, ...

Happy to report Simone and Armando arrived safely today.

Were we all on edge today? Nah – not really. As scientists and engineers, do we all have a hip and edgy sense of fashion? Well obviously. But more than that, edges seemed to show up everywhere today. Inside the observatory: You see the outer edge of the pupil in this interferometric image of the adaptive secondary mirror? Yeah ...

Another busy day on Cerro Manqui. Clio came up to start getting ready. Katie will begin drawing a vacuum and start the cool down process tomorrow. Most of today was spent shaking out our new 2000 Hz capability. As of tonight, thanks to Mario and Alfio, we have successfully closed the loop (with 0 gain) ...

Ok Alora! Lots of aligning optics today. Kelsey and Lauren are figuring out the ropes, and Fernando arrived this evening.

After the secondary was installed yesterday, we ended up going to bed with a bad fiber running to the secondary. So the first order of business was to fix that this morning. All Done. Take it away Otis:

Today the telescope became ours! The previous instrument was removed (Pisco) as well as the f/11 secondary mirror. Then we installed our adaptive secondary mirror and our “dummy Nas” which goes in place of the usual Nas to hold the interferometer for testing the ASM. It was a beautiful summer day and a lot ...

Our friends from Italy started arriving today. We welcomed Alfio, Enrico, Runa, Mario, and Marco, who are all here to help us with our upgrades and re-calibration. Much work was done!

My oldest brother Peter gave me this awesome bright flashlight as a gift. When at home in New Mexico we use it to look for coyotes in the canyon. Here at LCO it’s good for vizcacha hunting. It’s also so bright that it’s good for measuring the pyramid wavefront sensor CCD gains ...

Tenemos hemos llegado! 2016B reglas del blog: Al menos un puesto es necesario cada día Se requiere una canción del día (Como lo notó Hernán aquí, no hay regla con respecto al idioma) Hoy la canción del día: Save

Just a quick reminder for MagAO users who may be considering submitting a telescope proposal in the near future: MagAO will not be available for general use in the 2016B semester. The system will be on the telescope during the semester, but for engineering work only. This work includes recalibration, and installation of the ...