MagAO-Classic posts

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