MagAO-Classic posts

It’s day 13 – we’ve been here almost 2 weeks out of 6 now – so we’re almost a third of the way through. I think of it like running a 5k (3.1 miles) where the first mile is the phase where you try to get out ahead of the pack, and the second ...

Now that we have 3.3V where we’re supposed to have 3.3V, and we’re using good fiber cables, everything is easy. It was also a nice night, with stable (if not always good) seeing. This is much more relaxing than some earlier nights. It also means there isn’t much to write about. These next ...

The other day we said we were back to normal… the clouds had gone away and we had a great night on-sky with a good AO correction, doing fun science. However, some not-so-normal problems cropped up again, and we just got through a bit of a stressful time. We were losing communication with ...

Tonight was Laird’s last night for the first part of this run — he goes down later today to return home for a couple weeks, then he’ll be back again for the last couple weeks of the run. Jared and I will be taking care of everything while he’s gone. We were also ...

Well things finally got back to normal tonight at LCO. Not a cloud in the sky, seeing was 0.5 arcseconds most of the night, T.J. fell asleep in the control room, and most importantly – our good friend Miss Viz was hanging out at the clean room today! We haven’t seen any Viscachas ...

We were clouded out for the first half of the night. Once we got open, we started out observing “Runa’s Star”. Runa picked his star as a set up target during our commissioning run 2 years ago. He also deserves credit for designing one side of our MagAO coffee mugs. Once the clouds ...

On a submarine they say you don’t really start learning how the reactor plant works until you stand your first watch by yourself. It’s kind of the same thing for us, this is our first run without Alfio here to clean up our messes. Tonight was fun. We pushed MagAO into ...

Tonight we saw some cute pictures of the various children in our lives dressed up for Halloween. Well don’t worry, but we had the holiday covered here as well. Here is a monster of an old man who showed up just before sunset: He looks scary but we let him run our instrument. ...

The big story over the last 30 hours has been our atmospheric dispersion corrector, or ADC. When you look at a star through the atmosphere, it will be “dispersed” into a rainbow, meaning that the different wavelengths of light (colors) will land at different spots on the camera. But if you have an ...

Today was a long night. Too long to report all the events. But, we installed the NAS and Clio, took off the ASM cover and put on the wind monitor, and closed the loop! Three students from the Universidad Tecnica Federico Santa María, Javier Garcés, Sebastián Zúñiga, and Mario Castro, arrived today. They will be working with ...