MagAO-Classic posts

From April 5 to April 21 we were helping other folks use MagAO. It took the work of a large team of excellent folks to make all this happen. In particular, we had the expert help of TJ Rodigas, Katie Morzinski and Vanessa Bailey who all looked after Clio with expert hands. Jared’s VisAO camera ...

We’ve departed the mountain. Thanks for hosting our first full science run, LCO, and we’ll see you next time.

We packed everything up and left the mountain, and now I’ve gotten enough sleep I’m finally awake enough to post some pictures for you. The crew spent most of the day putting MegaCam on the telescope, which uses the F/5 they put on the day before. It’s a big job, being one of the biggest ...

Today Laird got up at 8am while Jared and I went to bed after our Last Star last night. Laird and the crew took down the ASM, then Laird and Jared de-cabled the NAS and I de-cabled Clio with their help. Here are some pictures: The song of the day is inspired by the ...

We have observed our last target star of the 2014A run. It was another great night, with half arcsecond seeing almost the whole way. We now have 2 days of packing and storing and inventory to do, and then we start the long journey home. Laird and Katie got started as soon ...

Only one more night to go — I think we’re going to make it! Tonight was fun in a crazy busy kind of way. We did about 20 targets total, most of them were faint Clio targets. Vanessa had left at the end of the previous night, so this kind of a ...

After another busy night, I didn’t put together a substantive post. Thankfully, today was a beautiful day, with plenty of both literal and eye candy for the blog. Francois played Easter bunny and hid chocolate eggs around the control room for all to enjoy.   Jared spotted our friendly local Easter “bunny”   And Jen had a new roommate when ...

I’m guest blogging for MagAO tonight. I came out on Thursday for Subo Dong’s run, and then I’ll be observing again on Monday. In the meantime, I’ve got some down time for a few days. Mostly I’ve been planning like crazy for Monday’s observations. A big thanks to the MagAO team for all of their help ...

Hi everyone!  With the beautiful weather and amazing avocados for every meal, it’s good to be back on the mountain again!   Because MagAO is now open to the public (so to speak) and we’re executing a variety of programs, I’m learning about a wide range of science projects. Of course, there’s the “run of the mill” high-contrast ...

The big news of today is that our favorite Viscacha made an appearance at the clean room wall today. We’ve been missing him! After a few days of Engineering and Arizona science, we welcomed Subo Dong from Peking University to the Clay telescope. Jennifer Yee (Harvard), who is observing in a few nights, was ...