MagAO-Classic posts

While it is Day 21 of operations for the MagAO team, it’s only Night 2 of MagAO observing for me! But it is my Night 9 of observing in total: I just finished a seven-night run with the Gemini Planet Imager and mountain-hopped over from Cerro Pachón to Las Campanas on Sunday to join Katie, ...

I’ve been here for more than 3 weeks. 2 more to go. This time we have actual Danzig, singing to the various mothers.

Last night we lost ~5 hours to the X-stage problem. Tonight we lost about an hour (of perfect weather and amazing seeing) due to the BCUs locking up and the shell doing that thing where it panics. Yet we still squeezed in some good data for our own projects. Was Vanessa Bailey ...

We seem to have more problems on *our* nights than on any others. I guess that’s a great customer service policy, but we’re really in this to do our own science. So, the X stage is dead (again) and it says “Morzinski” on the schedule. We spent the first half of the ...

Jackie and the DTM Tweeps have been putting up signs about Tweeting #LifeAtLCO. We are closed due to crappy clouds here at Magellan. So we had a little coffee party and chatted. #lifeatlco pic.twitter.com/0sc08dAcMU — Jackie Faherty (@jfaherty) November 24, 2015 MagAO doesn’t Tweet (yet) but today it’s time for a ...

Sigh. And also, our X stage started doing that thing again tonight. Laird, we may have to have one of our wonderful cable routing bonding sessions. You know, the kind where I hold the flashlight for 5 hours while you talk to yourself with your head inside the instrument. I can’t ...

We had a solid run of 2 nights with good weather and incredible seeing. Sadly, that run is over. Tonight the clouds came rolling in around midnight and didn’t let up. Before they came in, the wind picked up and forced us to point at a very southern star. While we were taking data, we noticed ...

After that horrible beginning, we’ve now had a solid run of clear calm skies. Almost relaxing. This is Day 14, and it’s also blog post #360. Did we come back around yet? Last night we had some fun with a surprise binary. This is at H-alpha: One of the clean room Vizcachas ...

Well, we hope you enjoyed yesterday’s blog post as much as we did! Amali’s clever and amusing artistry prompted us to develop the first-ever MagAO blog prize, and a new category of Award Winning Posts (at right). Here we present the 2015B MagAO Blog Award to Amali Vaz for her creation entitled A ...

Dear Gentle Readers: My name is Amali and I come from the LBTI and while I am superlative in many ways, generating coherent sentences from real words is not one of them. However! Katie (after, perhaps, too many nights of my not-sentences) says I am allowed to just blog pictures and diagrams, so, here, CHECK OUT ...