MagAO-Classic posts

(This blog is a cross-post from the LBTI blog.) What did you do with your leap second? Tonight we stared at thick monsoon-y clouds for an extra second. And then (many hours later) we went to bed. Here’s the almost-full moon rising at sunset. There was also going to be a spectacular conjunction of Jupiter and Venus, but ...

MagAO has been well represented here at the Spirit of Lyot conference, despite being a much smaller team than the other big AO planet finding instruments. Here are a few more pictures from our presentations over the past few days. Me presenting early results form our GAPplanet Survey (exciting results to be announced soon!) Katie, in a ...

As a number of MagAO team members are currently at the “In the Spirit of Bernard Lyot 2015” Conference in Montréal, Québec, we’ll have a couple blog posts this week discussing this exciting direct imaging-focused conference. Spirit of Lyot is a large meeting held every 3-5 years focused on the imaging of extrasolar planets and ...

During our recent observing run we tested a new set of coronagraphs (devices for blocking star light so we can see planets!), which were developed by our friends Gilles Otten, Frans Snik, and Matt Kenworthy at Leiden University, in the Netherlands. Today Gilles gave a talk at the Spirit of Lyot Conference in Montreal, ...

The MagAO team have left the mountain, and we’re on our way home to Tucson. We don’t have much internet right now — you’ll have to live without more pictures and a song of the day until we’re back in range. Post-recovery edit: Goodbye LCO. Hello World! Last chance for the 2015A song of the day and it ...

Well the system is back in storage, and we’re good and ready to get out of here. We couldn’t go even one last day without troubleshooting something. We did a bunch of testing on our recalcitrant “X stage” motor, including spending some time on the phone with an engineer at Copley Controls. It looks ...

Today I saw: Laird going down. Jared going down. The sun coming up. Laird coming up. Kim and Katie going down. The ASM coming down. Jared coming up. Clio coming down. The NAS coming down. Laird going down. Jared going down. Jorge, Povilas, and ...

Well, the last FITS data files of 2015A have been read out, and MagAO is in the process of being tucked away for a cozy rest until 2015B. I had the last night of the entire run, and just like back in November, we observed well into morning twilight — no photon left uncollected! I’m ...

Home is where I want to be… Guess we must be having fun… Feet on the ground, head in the sky… Cover up and say goodnight… Hiyo… I got plenty of time… I guess that this must be the place… And the run is almost over… I think we’re going to ...

Imagine you’ve got an invisible treasure in a shopping cart with two broken wheels. You’re blindfolded, and you can only keep the treasure if you can push the broken cart to an exact location on a giant noodle flopping in the wind. That’s MagAO/Clio spectroscopy. Since I want to take spectra of “faint” companions to nearby ...