MagAO-Classic posts

My name is Alan Conder.  I work at GMTO and this is my first trip to Magellan; in fact, this is my first trip to any observatory. I came to Magellan to participate with the team from SAO to field the GMT prototype phasing camera.   In addition, I arrived a week early to test a new ...

Labor rights in Chile come up quite a bit at the Observatory. At Magellan, we usually have three telescope operators between the two telescopes so that they can switch off and thereby not work too more than 11.25 hours continuously. This week, Jorge is stuck with us all night though because Mauricio is on vacation. ...

We might make it. Alycia has one night left, and our next and last observer arrived today (get ready for something different — more to come). The winds were finally a bit calmer tonight, and seeing was bouncing off 0.5″ for a while — but we still ended up with some clouds after midnight. ...

Well, dear AO team, you finally entered to the final countdown, there are less than 10 days to leave “Las Campanas Observatory” just on time for Christmas, I guess. I really hope that all the science you obtained, be the source of great discoveries, that will make your team proud, and also all of the ones ...

One of the downsides of observational astronomy is the lack of control we have over our experiments. It’s just annoying that we can’t re-create star and planet formation in our laboratories and observe the evolution of planetary systems over billions of years. And then on top of that, we have to deal with the epitomy ...

Hello Everyone, Having just finished up three nights over in Baade, the MagAO team has very hospitably welcomed me (Kate R.) as their guest tonight.  As you may have heard, last night didn’t go so well, giving Katie and me the opportunity to poke around in the Baade dome at 1am:   Fortunately, today the clouds have slowly ...

I’m glad to not have to come up with anything terribly clever to say tonight, since Jared and Katie already gave away the 2015B blog award (deservedly, to Amali Vaz). Here is why I’m having my own private pity party right now… and a zoom in on the wind data… My two nights are up, and unfortunately ...

Things are going well this week and the weather is ok. Waiting for the new star wars movie, here we go!!! The song of the day, speaking of Jukebox Heroes and Blockbuster movies: Hero by Chad Kroeger: And a picture of myself for Alberto:

Except when corrupt databases and/or fiber communication problems force us to do a hard reboot of the whole system, and there’s not enough time before sunrise to make it worth bringing it all back up again. Then we stop, even with stars in our eyes. In keeping with tonight’s outrageous claims on astro-ph, we observed ...

Day 22, Kim is helping a lot, Kate R. arrived today, Kate F. arrives tomorrow, astigmatism is fixed, MagAO is well. Things with holes worn through: Dawn run yesterday: Sunrise today: Yesterday’s song of the day was by Dawid Podsiadlo from Poland. Today’s song of the day is by another overseas David, Davido Adedeji Adeleke from Nigeria: