MagAO-Classic posts

tap tap tap tap …hello, hello……is this thing switched on? Great! Here we go… This is Matt Kenworthy, and I’ve been let loose given the reins of the MagAO blog for the night. The word of the night is “plate”, and apparently I’ve been saying “holy guacamole!” a lot. My graduate student, Gilles Otten, and I are here for ...

On this, my (hopefully, fingers crossed) last full night as TO I have the honor to do the daily log entry. Plenty of rules to adhere to, thought (can I suggest next time we only use live performances, performed on site? We could do a gregorian chant on the domes, that would be pretty cool). Can’t ...

Welcome APOD and Sky and Telescope readers. This post was written while MagAO was mounted on the Clay 6.5 m telescope, and we post daily updates throughout the run on the main page. You can also find out about some of our scientific results using the In The News and Results pages. You can ...

This will again be a short and sweet post. For those of you familiar with how the MagAO blog really works, I just want to say that this is not a cover for some major problem that we don’t want to talk about. We’re all just exhausted after the last week of getting ...

We made it to a closed loop tonight. First we had to deal with a bad cable for the guider, and a failed hard drive in VisAO. I’m too tired to really say much about it. Here are some pictures.

We got this close: We wanted to at least be testing the guider tonight, even if not closed-loop AO. But alas, we didn’t quite make it. The last thing we didn’t quite get accomplished was bolting the NAS to the telescope. It’s ready to go though, and we’ll be operating at the diffraction ...

Laird and I buttoned up Clio and Gabriel and I started pumping it down. Jared finished tuning the new X motor and installed it: And Laird and Jared are testing the motors in the NAS: Johanna Teske is observing on Clay/MIKE tonight — see her blog post at Las Campanas Belles. It’s our turn, starting tomorrow night. Quote ...

Ah Las Campanas The Bells. And here are the Belles of Las Campanas: Our friends Jackie Faherty and Johanna Teske are observing on Clay tonight. We got to give them some various tours and they documented it on Twitter — follow the links of their names for their MagAO Tweets! Jared showed us the secondary ...

Today was a challenge on two fronts. Katie and Laird spent the day performing surgery on our beloved Clio camera. They’re doing some housekeeping and getting ready to install our new coronagraphs and Brackett gamma filter. It’s always fun to open a dewar and take apart a bunch of filter wheels. ...

Home at last. After our 24 hr delay in Tucson, and listening to all the horror stories from people who had been trying to get to Santiago for several days, as soon as our plane pushed back the pilot cut the engines and we sat on the runway for an hour to let a ...