MagAO-Classic posts

Regular readers of this blog have been hearing claims this entire run that the weather has been suboptimal and that the poor team has barely been able to take any data. I’m pretty sure this is just laziness on their part, because I’ve barely seen a cloud over the two nights I’ve been here: Tonight the ...

We give thanks for the stars coming out and the wind dropping down a bit, enough to get Trapezium in the North: And my first Thanksgiving dinner was a few weeks ago when my folks were visiting: Thankful astronomers: I really hope all those papi’s let JLo go:

Now that our engineering time is over — without us getting to do any engineering — it of course was a fairly clear night. Still some clouds blowing around, but the kind we can burn through with a 6.5 m telescope. Since we haven’t had much time to shake down MagAO, our first group ...

Well another night like last night. Amali got here today and she started up AO and also learned how to operate Clio. And then we sat here like this: And this: Sadly this means we didn’t get much of our engineering done. Oh El Nino… Another song dancing in the streets: This one to cheer ...

Open for less than 1/2 an hour tonight. I can’t work like this. Since we had a flash mob last night, here’s a song about people dancing in the streets. It also describes our cloud problem.

Today was our first night of Arizona engineering. We have a lot of calibrations to do, with all of our modes, but sadly it was cloudy and windy out of the North. I hear it’s because of El Nino. Sunset: These pictures are all from the past week or so. Which one is Tucson ...

We have reached 100% MagAO for 2015B. If you visit LCO you’ll notice that many, if not most, of the car doors have bird droppings all over them just behind the mirrors. This video shows you why — some of the birds have discovered that other birds live inside the mirrors, and spend most of ...

For the first time in MagAO’s history we closed the loop on our first night. It usually takes too long during the day to get everything done. We didn’t get Clio bolted on, but we were able to close the loop with the “dummy dichroic”. Following last night’s song, which was a Gaga Parody, ...

Clio is cold, thanks to Mauricio Navarette’s help with the liquid nitrogen. He brought a longer hose, showed me how to clear out the warm air before pumping it in, and filled Clio when ever he could today. Jared and I went for a ride in the new Clay car with Michigan grad students Jeb ...

MagAO’s revolutionary visible light capabilities have allowed us to directly image a planet residing inside a circumstellar disk gap for the first time. These images, of the forming protoplanet LkCa 15 b, provide the first incontrovertible evidence of accretion onto a forming planet. In fact, the study joined two independent results from Arizona facilities – interferometric data from ...