MagAO-Classic posts

It’s the fourteenth sixteenth blog post for this run, but it’s my first ever post for the MagAO blog. I’m Joseph Long, a just-finished-first-year graduate student in astronomy working with Dr. (Astr.?) Jared Males. I’m helping out as an AO operator for part of this run, though it may be more accurate to say everyone ...

Ahhhhh. It’s nice to finally not have clouds to fight with. We also have been getting some of that patented LCO 0.5″ seeing. This is what we’ve been dealing with: We finally got to see the Southern Sky in all its glory: Hedwig visits every couple of nights: Tonight was Clio’s last night of the run. You might ...

Thanks to our many resourceful observers posting over the last several days, I have accumulated photos to share. This is an LCO lifestyle post. Song of the day, just cuz I like it: Update: Now that we are in the US, apparently the first version ...

Amelia Bayo, Pedro Poblete, and I here, your friendly observers from Chile! Unfortunately the weather hadn’t improved since the last night at the beginning. We had the telescope closed with very thick clouds (we couldn’t even see the moon for most of the time) until about 3:30 am when the sky rapidly cleared up. We did ...

I was/am excited to be back at LCO to observe with MagAO! I’m came with U. Michigan graduate student Matthew De Furio who is here at Magellan for the first time. When we arrived two nights ago the clouds were rolling in, but last night’s clear sky gave us some hope for our packed observing ...

I don’t have much to say, so I figured I would title this “The Universe” as that covers anything I might be tempted to say. Actually, we were discussing Arthur C Clarke tonight, and Katie found this good quote from him, “I sometimes think that the universe is a machine designed for the perpetual astonishment ...

Last night was my first night, and after I bragged about bringing the clear skies with me, the clouds rolled in. Nevertheless, we got some good data, if “good” can be defined as finding out a star is binary when I was hoping it would not be. Note: It is possible to take 73 full frame ...

I’m not sure what the sky looked like at sunset because I slept straight from dawn to dusk — I think I got 11 hours. Wow I was exhausted from the past week of coding and observing! I was kinda late to the telescope, I really mean to be there before sunset. Luckily our observer ...

The all-sky Magellanic Horned Owl (Bubo Magellanicus) has made its first appearance of the run. R.I.P. Dolores. This cover is a tribute to her (she was supposed to sing the song with them), and it absolutely rocks:

Whelp. Obviously no astronomifying was done tonight. Team Clio got lots of work done. I took a GTL day (I only did 2 of the 3, you guess which). Here’s a gorgeous song by Iron Maiden, with a fitting title. It’s an interesting story too. Good metal is basically just classical music played angry. ...