MagAO-Classic posts

  It’s been my first time observing at Magellan and I hope it isn’t my last! Everyone here at Las Campanas have been great, especially Katie and Jared, thank you guys for all of your help and company through the night shifts 🙂 This was possibly the closest to America that I’ve been for a Thanksgiving, I’m ...

This is my 3rd thanksgiving in 4 spent with MagAO somewhere other than home . 3 years ago I had “thanksgiving” in Florence with my Mom and Dad and Laird. 2 years ago we were here at LCO duing our first-light commissioning run. This ...

Infrared cameras are tricky beasts, forced by us ground-based astronomers to work while bathed in background photons impinging from every direction. Clio is also a bit on the complicated side, working as it does all the way out to 5 microns, with two camera scales (hence a movable camera lens), two filter wheels, and various other moving parts. During some ...

Ending last night, I left the telescope thinking of what to share on this blog, driving “home” (Nagoya Palace). A cute shot shaped the place where we stay half of our life. “Nagoya Palace” from the road.   Day 30 is not from a regular night shift, longer than my 12 days a long time ago. Even though, ...

We had another good night. Some thin/patchy/high clouds blew in after about 2 am, but we were on a bright star and really didn’t notice. It was “Empanada Sunday”, and we all had empanadas for our night lunches. The most exciting part of my day was getting to see Vizzy at the ...

My blog post for tonight was inspired by the coincidence of Katie searching the online astronomical database SIMBAD for a bright star near where I wanted to point on the sky and finding “AO Men.” No, Laird and Jared haven’t been honored with entries in SIMBAD. As I said, it was coincidence.   Variable stars, as they ...

Tonight was great. Good AO loop, good weather, good science. Last night, though, the internet was down for a few hours in the middle of the night, so we weren’t able to investigate the airglow until tonight, which we saw last night as fringing on the all-sky cam. Yuri Beletsky, Magellan Instrument Support Scientist and ...

We opened our blackout curtains to a cloud-free sky yesterday evening. And then we had a long relaxing night in 0.5″ +/- 0.1″ seeing. We feel much better about life this morning. After 26 days of continuous MagAO, we have a few corrections and clarifications to make: First of all, I did not change my ...

Long boring night tonight, sitting around waiting for clouds to clear. We started out ok, but after about 2 hours the clouds rolled in. We closed for several hours, and then opened but couldn’t get anything done with extinction jumping between 0 and more than 5 mags. The only other noteworthy event was that ...

The past few weeks have been full of exciting firsts* for me: first trip to South America, first real Spanish conversations, first taste of mote con huesillos, and especially exciting — first time observing at Magellan, and first time using MagAO! *Unfortunately, there’s not been a first sighting of the famed viscachas — or any other high desert ...