MagAO-Classic posts

After the dome closed at sunrise we shutdown VisAO, Clio2, and the ASM.  Here are the big moments. (Don’t get the wrong idea. We all actually love Clio – it just became the scapegoat for any and all problems that occurred in the last month.) It is indeed time to go home.

Tonight is the last on-sky night for MagAO in 2012. Don’t panic. We’ll be back with a vengeance in Spring, 2013! We began the night tonight by looking at a bright star that Runa chose for calibration. Upon further inspection, and much to our surprise, it turned out to be a heretofore unknown binary! We’re calling it “Runa’s ...

This is my first post…had to do it some time…. Tonight was divided up into two separate halves. In the first half of the night, we went back to some faint guide stars to both confirm that the AO could reliably lock on them, and to test out a few bugs on Clio. The previous night, Clio ...

Well, we tried out our faint guide star modes tonight. We locked on a 14th magnitude guide star in bin 3, and a 16th magnitude guide star in bins 4 and 5! We were getting down to 90 milli-arc-second PSFs in K-band, where diffraction-limited is 70 mas, while correcting fewer than 100 modes. In ...

Here at LCO, we spend a lot of time staring at the sky, and not just with our instruments! I’ve noticed, for example, that the Belt of Venus is quite prominent and beautiful at sunrise and sunset. For those of you who’ve never noticed it, the Belt of Venus is the pink band of light ...

The return of the Crow part II: Edgar Allen Poe— Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary, Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore… …Only this, and nothing more: The excerpt from the poem “The Raven” is brought to you by the Return of the Crow part II. That is, we put the CRO ...

Things are always exciting here on the MagAO project. But nothing – not earthquakes, viscacha attacks, not even non-orthogonal basis sets – can keep us from doing what we came here to do. Now that we are on-sky, we are taking advantage of the *amazing* 0.5 arcsecond seeing common at LCO to take some nice ...

Tonight started with a hard to understand communications problem between our AO system and the telescope control system (TCS). It’s been working for days, but tonight we started having some messages get dropped. We have to keep the elevation of the telescope above a certain value to keep our delicate mirror safe, and this communications ...

Our ranks are thinning — Alan Uomoto left today and I didn’t even get to say goodbye.  Bye Alan!  Thanks for all your help in getting us up and running!! We are still engineering our many modes on sky and debugging telescope and instrument problems.  One of our exciting new modes is Simultaneous Differential Imaging (SDI), ...

For all of the non-astronomers out there (hi dad!) who have been patiently wading through our blog because they love us, here is a very brief crash course on AO. We thought that this might help you to understand why what we’re doing here at MagAO is so exciting. The first important concept is that, in ...