MagAO-Classic posts

Hi there, intrepid readers!  I’m Andrew, a first year grad student at Arizona who’s been working with Laird for the last few months.  I had to miss the 2017B run because the timing was way too close to the start of my first semester (quite stressful enough already what with moving across the country, thank-you-very-much!) ...

Today was a long and exciting day for the team. This afternoon we mounted Clio on the NAS (the telescope + MagAO) and Katie and Phil got Clio cold and working with its brand new computer. Despite a cloudy start to the night we did open and Jared tested the new 64-bit computers for MagAO, ...

The ASM and NAS are on the telescope, but, alas, we aren’t quite ready to go on sky. The big news is that, with our usual indispensable help from Alfio Puglisi, we managed to turn on and control the adaptive secondary mirror using our brand new 64 bit computers. Welcome to 2003 or ...

Our surprise mystery guest arrived — it’s Phil Hinz, the PI of Clio, who has handed it off to us for these many years. He came down here this time, for the first time since 2012 or 2013, because we got a new computer and are running new software and we have a lot of ...

Well I’m here. My trip ended up being 27 hours and it was great to get here and sleep and wake up to a delicious telescope breakfast: I found this fine literature in the desk drawer in my room, left from a previous inhabitant: Today we worked hard on cooling and code. Clio code, AO code, DigiPort ...

LATAM airline employees are striking. Luckily it didn’t affect my flight, but Katie had to take a different one (that wasn’t why she was late to dinner, that was an unrelated bus problem). Laird is now on a completely different airline, probably will get lost at sea. And our surprise mystery guest ...

Hello MagAO fans! We’re back with the 2018A run. My trip started out with a swim workout in honor of the flag of Chile: Chilean flag research and workout development and presentation by Coach Janna at Ventana Master’s Swimming 🙂 Now the MagAO team is in various stages of travel. Time for the blog rules for 2018A. There ...

MagAO’s own Ya-Lin Wu defended his Ph.D. dissertation and is now Dr. Wu! Congrats Ya-Lin! Ya-Lin has used MagAO to study planet formation in many ways, most recently combining VisAO data with ALMA data to study circum-planetary disks. Check out all of his papers on our Publications page. Ya-Lin is now on his way to the ...

UA’s fall semester is done and the campus is nice and quiet. This means… time for an LBTI run! I’m posting from the LBTI AO remote room in Steward Observatory. I’m helping out with driving the first shift AO for 3 nights. LBTI has two eyeballs (to use Amali’s terminology), so it requires 1 AO operator ...

Laird’s blog post yesterday was the last blog post, he said. But today was the day we departed LCO, so usually today is the last blog post. However, he also numbered it Day 15 but the previous day was Day 13. We’ll chalk that up to switching from a night schedule to a day schedule ...