MagAO-Classic posts

So you may have heard that we have had lots of things to fix on this run. From the very beginning there was an issue with one of the motor shafts in Clio: you might remember that Clio wasn’t ready on our first night. Everybody but Jordan Stone would have been fine without ...

This is the final night of my 7-night run at the Clay on MagAO, sharing nights with Alycia & TJ.  I have a few hours per night to image Pluto and Charon with Clio and VisAO, to get their separate photometric light curves in many filters over their 6.4-day period. We’re also doing some astrometry ...

Once I was at an hotel in Santiago and I was trying to check my email from Tololo, where I was working at that time, and suddenly a lady from the cleaning staff saw the Tololo web page and asked me what was that … “It’s CTIO web page the place where I work” She looked ...

My family knows that if they want to plan something for me months in advance of when the next semester’s telescope schedule is released, they should consult a Moon phase calendar and choose a time near New Moon. You, dear readers, undoubtedly know that astronomy and not astrology dictated my schedule — infrared astronomers are ...

34 days and counting. My own record is 23 nights, all alone by myself at SMARTS 0.9. So I can relate to the AO Team: you do start seeing life down the hill as a dream. And I can say that this run has been a somewhat dark for the team: it can be either wind, ...

For the third day in a row, the internet connection is spotty to nonexistent. I was thinking  about the early 90s, when I was a graduate student, and my advisor, Gerry Neugebauer, was the director of Palomar Observatory. He wasn’t keen on getting internet to the dome because, as I recall, he thought astronomers would ...

Some light clouds at sunset, but low winds. Looking good (for 2015A) for Amanda and Atom from MIT, to look at various Solar System bodies that tend to be right into the wind: The internet went down but we can run everything internally just fine, so it just meant no Facebooking or emailing our families, ...

Hello everyone, this is the last night of my run, so it seemed appropriate to do the blog tonight. I’ve been here for the past 6 nights. As you might have noticed, the weather (clouds, wind) has not been favorable during this time. Nonetheless, we managed to get about 2+ nights of good data. I can’t ...

We got to open for a few hours tonight, when the winds were only 30 mph: : Winds eventually came back down, and we got another 4 or 5 hours of science done. Hurray! So instead of talking about the wind, let’s talk about our latest PhD*: Vanessa Bailey, first discover-er ...

“Maria makes the mountains sound like folks were up there dyin'” We’ve already used up some of the best wind songs, and we’re just getting started. I saw at least one gust of 64 mph on our wind gage up here at Clay. The LCO weather page doesn’t go that high: Down at the 100″ ...