MagAO-Classic posts

OK, I’ve had enough winter. Look at all these clouds! And the winds, and still the clouds! So we didn’t even open tonight, at all, ever. Well, at least that meant it was a good time to fix Clio. So I’ve been aligning the camera by hand lately, but not anymore! Here was us last week… Pato ...

It was clear tonight, which was nice after last night. But seeing was pretty bad (for LCO), and the winds kicked up again. We’ve had a few days respite from these winter gusts coming from the NE, but now we are again huddling with our back to them, pointing to the SW. This seems ...

Today was T.J.’s first night, which means the start of good solid breaks for Jared and me. It was pretty cloudy which made for a quiet night with no disturbances: Since it was my first break in a long time, my brain was mainly up for a lot of youtubing of Namibian folk songs. ...

Tonight went smoothly… for 2015A. We were doing some of the MagAO Key Project which are the types of observations the system is optimized for, including pointing mostly South out of the wind, and taking deep high-contrast imaging data. Still a bit of weather… but overall quite a calm smooth night in the ...

The wind was blowing and the stars were twinkling hard tonight. We still got some science done, but it was less fun than we’re used to. Also, we only planned some troubleshooting — we didn’t actually do any tonight. Here’s an action shot of the instrument scientist aligning Clio at sunset. This ...

Tonight was a good night: so good that we got to the screensaver on the AO control workstation. That means we went long periods of time without having to adjust anything. Speaking of screensavers, what is going on here? Passed the Burros on my way up tonight. We’re starting to obsess over sleep.

I’m helping my friend Alberto write the post tonight. Another smooth week with the Aoistas Katie and Jared … don’t forget the formula 3 > 1 > 1 A bit of humour …

If you read carefully between the lines of yesterday’s blog post (which were mostly complaints about me trying to do science – hmph!), you may have noticed that we didn’t say anything about using Clio. Because we didn’t. At all. All night long. We didn’t want to panic any of our upcoming observers, but Clio was ...

You’re never going to believe this, but our night started out with troubleshooting. More about the details later, but for now I’ll just note that we have a sign in the control room saying “MagAO has not troubleshot anything for X hrs”. Yeah hours, not days. But the big story tonight is wind. ...

With much regret, I begin my first blog post of my last run as a Magellan observer.  I’m taking a brief hiatus from my new role as a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford (working on the very exciting Gemini Planet Imager) to rejoin the MagAO team this week. My goal for these three days is to complete second ...