MagAO-Classic posts

A closed feedback loop is when you are monitoring some output so that you can control some input. How many closed loops does MagAO run? Here we present: The Loops of MagAO. 1. The AO System’s Pyramid WFS and ASM The top-level loop is the adaptive optics (AO) loop. This is the loop that all the others ...

Vanessa arrived safely today after boarding 6 planes (but only traveling on 3) to get here. We are happy to see her! She is helping with Clio2 engineering as well as AO operations. We also had 2 of our observers arrive today; their run is in a couple days but they wanted to get up ...

T.J., Alycia, and Kate left us yesterday. Vanessa was supposed to be here, but her flight was delayed. So, it was down to Laird, Katie, and Jared to carry on the MagAO mission tonight. Our day started early. We had to get up before dinner to do some maintenance on our shell wind ...

Have you ever heard that pigeons are the rats of the sky? Well, tonight we were contemplating that binaries are the vermin of the sky. The binaries we are talking about are “stars” that are actually two stars, only they are so close together that they weren’t discovered to be 2 stars by ...

Tonight we are happy to present you with the first release of the official trailer for the MagAO movie, directed by Alycia Weinberger. Coming soon to a theatre or scientific journal near you. We’re still here at LCO, observing star after star, seeing disk after disk, maybe a high contrast close separation point source or ...

Greetings everyone! Long time no blog for me, but I’m happy to be back. In between running the VisAO camera to give Jared a bit of a break, I’ve been working on quick reductions of the data that we’ve been getting for the past few days. It’s useful to reduce the data at the telescope because ...

Tonight was an interesting night. We got on sky pretty quickly and proceeded to taking science images with ~1″ seeing. Everything was working well until the seeing blew up to >3″ for about an hour, essentially killing our first target. The AO fought admirably throughout the horrible seeing bursts but eventually we just had to wait ...

I’m very happy about how we switch between our target of interest and its point spread function (PSF) star, so I’m guest blogging about it. We want the same AO correction on both objects, even if they are slightly different magnitudes (usually we choose a slightly brighter PSF). We also want to be very efficient, ...

One of MagAO’s specialties is high contrast imaging in the visible using simultaneous differential imaging (SDI). For this run we bought a new H-alpha SDI filter set, and tonight we really put them to use. This image compares our on and off H-alpha PSFs. These are formed from 1 hour of 45 ...

Our first non-Arizona visiting astronomer was taking data with Clio and VisAO tonight. His name is Brett Addison of the University of New South Wales, Sydney. Also Alycia arrived safely today. Today the seeing was bad to very bad for almost the whole night. Alfio made a new mirror diagnostic last year that shows the mirror commands ...