MagAO-Classic posts

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 ...

It is rare for MagAO to carry out extragalactic observations because suitable natural guide stars are hard to find. But this time we have got some luck. A week ago (February 8), a bright supernova, SN 2016adj, appeared in the active galaxy NGC 5128 (Centaurus A). Classified as Type IIb, its progenitor is believed to be ...

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 ...