MagAO-Classic posts

Well Kate, we don’t have a clever fix for you yet. But why be clever when hacking will do? The technical difficulties last night were from timeouts in the TCS communication (which mysteriously had never timed out until we tried taking data for Vanessa……). Jared implemented a workaround in which we timed ...

Metaphorical rain in this case, not actual rain – don’t panic! I’m told there’s a blog post like this one on every run, though I’ve been lucky enough to avoid being here for them so far. Tonight, we had a few technical difficulties. For those of you in the know, this picture speaks volumes. In good news, ...

I go back down the mountain and begin my journey home tomorrow. I had a successful night and a half with some pretty good seeing, and I’m quite pleased with my data. As Jared mentioned 2 posts ago, my observations required pushing Clio and the MagAO system to their limits. While we identified a few ...

Clio is a good little camera. It has chip defects, cross-talk, and ghosts on bright stars, but what thermal-IR camera doesn’t? It also has a lot to offer and is very popular as seen by the telescope demand for MagAO/Clio. It has a deep enough well depth to take L-band images in ...

So the last two or three nights we’ve been using MagAO at its geometric limits. By that I mean the various angles and rotations and cable contortions that the exciting science targets required. There was a conversation like this last night (accuracy not 100%): Francois: “What’s the elevation limit?” Jared: “Thirty degrees.” Francois: “So I can ...

Tonight started rather auspiciously with the best green flash that I’ve ever seen. Unfortunately, neither Jared nor I got a good picture, but here’s one I took during an  early commissioning run. Trust us – it was epic. During twilight, Jared and Povilas added gaffers tape to the guider CCD. In the end though, they decided ...

My duty here on this run is to give Jared and Katie a bit of a break, which includes taking over some of the blogging. Tonight we started the night by swapping out the batteries in the wind monitor, which meant that we had to tilt the telescope over so that we could get to it. ...

We had an action packed night, with many more targets than we’ve been observing so far on this run. The AO system wasn’t on its best behaviour, but we have learned to recognize most of its bad moods quickly and we can usually slap it back into shape right away. Kate Follette is here, ready ...

Our T.O. for the last week, Jorge, has dubbed us “the aoista operation”. Tonight was pretty calm – no major technical problems, a few scientific discoveries, and a pretty relaxed night. The clouds rolled in a couple of hours before dawn, so we closed out with some minor engineering tasks. Tonight was TJ’s last ...

Things went pretty well tonight. Alfio called us to check in and we could proudly show him that his software is keeping MagAO running smoothly: In fact, we are mostly keeping his chair empty for him: Except for when things need attention: Our friends over at Cerro Pachon are observing with GPI on the Gemini South telescope ...