MagAO-C 2018A

We left LCO 48 hours ago. When we got to La Florida airport in La Serena, it was foggy. And it got foggier. So as we waited for our plane to land so we could board it and travel home, we slowly lost sight of the runway. Then we heard the plane as ...

Hi All, As is tradition the PI will finish off the run with the last blog. This run marked our 7th year operating at LCO making great images and science. This run was no exception with great science delivered (despite the many clouds we encountered as winter is definitely coming). I’d like to thank all the ...

Proto3 has been detached from MagAO, and now MagAO is fully put away. Since this (northern hemisphere) fall will extremely busy with work on MagAO-X, it’ll be a whole year before we’re back here. My check list for today: Switch back to a day schedule all in one go Take the last final exam for my first year ...

Today was the 365th day I’ve spent at Las Campanas Observatory. You only have to go back to May 18th, 2012 to find the first. So 16.7% of my life has been on this mountain over the last 6 years. It was an interesting 1-year day too. Of course, it was ...

Hi All, Yesterday we mounted the SAO’s Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) dispersed fringe sensor prototype (Proto3 — Brian McLeod’s 3rd version — it keeps getting better). This is a complex set of infrared cameras and optics that mimic 3 of the GMT primary mirrors boundaries. It is basically a 2 slit experiment that interferes light (to ...

It’s the fourteenth sixteenth blog post for this run, but it’s my first ever post for the MagAO blog. I’m Joseph Long, a just-finished-first-year graduate student in astronomy working with Dr. (Astr.?) Jared Males. I’m helping out as an AO operator for part of this run, though it may be more accurate to say everyone ...

Ahhhhh. It’s nice to finally not have clouds to fight with. We also have been getting some of that patented LCO 0.5″ seeing. This is what we’ve been dealing with: We finally got to see the Southern Sky in all its glory: Hedwig visits every couple of nights: Tonight was Clio’s last night of the run. You might ...

Thanks to our many resourceful observers posting over the last several days, I have accumulated photos to share. This is an LCO lifestyle post. Song of the day, just cuz I like it: Update: Now that we are in the US, apparently the first version ...

Amelia Bayo, Pedro Poblete, and I here, your friendly observers from Chile! Unfortunately the weather hadn’t improved since the last night at the beginning. We had the telescope closed with very thick clouds (we couldn’t even see the moon for most of the time) until about 3:30 am when the sky rapidly cleared up. We did ...

I was/am excited to be back at LCO to observe with MagAO! I’m came with U. Michigan graduate student Matthew De Furio who is here at Magellan for the first time. When we arrived two nights ago the clouds were rolling in, but last night’s clear sky gave us some hope for our packed observing ...

I don’t have much to say, so I figured I would title this “The Universe” as that covers anything I might be tempted to say. Actually, we were discussing Arthur C Clarke tonight, and Katie found this good quote from him, “I sometimes think that the universe is a machine designed for the perpetual astonishment ...

Last night was my first night, and after I bragged about bringing the clear skies with me, the clouds rolled in. Nevertheless, we got some good data, if “good” can be defined as finding out a star is binary when I was hoping it would not be. Note: It is possible to take 73 full frame ...

I’m not sure what the sky looked like at sunset because I slept straight from dawn to dusk — I think I got 11 hours. Wow I was exhausted from the past week of coding and observing! I was kinda late to the telescope, I really mean to be there before sunset. Luckily our observer ...

The all-sky Magellanic Horned Owl (Bubo Magellanicus) has made its first appearance of the run. R.I.P. Dolores. This cover is a tribute to her (she was supposed to sing the song with them), and it absolutely rocks:

Whelp. Obviously no astronomifying was done tonight. Team Clio got lots of work done. I took a GTL day (I only did 2 of the 3, you guess which). Here’s a gorgeous song by Iron Maiden, with a fitting title. It’s an interesting story too. Good metal is basically just classical music played angry. ...

Hi there, intrepid readers!  I’m Andrew, a first year grad student at Arizona who’s been working with Laird for the last few months.  I had to miss the 2017B run because the timing was way too close to the start of my first semester (quite stressful enough already what with moving across the country, thank-you-very-much!) ...

Today was a long and exciting day for the team. This afternoon we mounted Clio on the NAS (the telescope + MagAO) and Katie and Phil got Clio cold and working with its brand new computer. Despite a cloudy start to the night we did open and Jared tested the new 64-bit computers for MagAO, ...

The ASM and NAS are on the telescope, but, alas, we aren’t quite ready to go on sky. The big news is that, with our usual indispensable help from Alfio Puglisi, we managed to turn on and control the adaptive secondary mirror using our brand new 64 bit computers. Welcome to 2003 or ...

Our surprise mystery guest arrived — it’s Phil Hinz, the PI of Clio, who has handed it off to us for these many years. He came down here this time, for the first time since 2012 or 2013, because we got a new computer and are running new software and we have a lot of ...

Well I’m here. My trip ended up being 27 hours and it was great to get here and sleep and wake up to a delicious telescope breakfast: I found this fine literature in the desk drawer in my room, left from a previous inhabitant: Today we worked hard on cooling and code. Clio code, AO code, DigiPort ...

LATAM airline employees are striking. Luckily it didn’t affect my flight, but Katie had to take a different one (that wasn’t why she was late to dinner, that was an unrelated bus problem). Laird is now on a completely different airline, probably will get lost at sea. And our surprise mystery guest ...

Hello MagAO fans! We’re back with the 2018A run. My trip started out with a swim workout in honor of the flag of Chile: Chilean flag research and workout development and presentation by Coach Janna at Ventana Master’s Swimming 🙂 Now the MagAO team is in various stages of travel. Time for the blog rules for 2018A. There ...