MagAO-Classic posts

Today we were down 50% of our tenured professors and 50% of our Italians.  Phil left yesterday and Simone and Enrico left this morning.  Therefore, I was a little worried because their presence is definitely missed.  Luckily, it was a good night anyway! We weren’t socked in with high cirrus like we were yesterday, so we ...

The unofficial battle cry of the MagAO project over the last few days has been “More Cowbell!” as we try to get a high-order basis set that keeps our actuators happy. To get the truly amazing image quality that our system is capable of, we need to find a set of shapes for our mirror that ...

Today we worked more on interaction matrices and calibrations during the day. In the evening, Phil and T.J. spent some time optimizing and testing Clio.  Clio got to move to the big computer in the Clay control room for the first time (instead of running it off Phil’s laptop).  Here are some pictures of the big ...

And it won’t stop us tonight either! Rest assured that our PI had the foresight to keep the CRO on today, so MagAO commissioning continues unabated. Look how short that post was!

Greetings MagAO blog followers! Tonight, I’m giving Jared and Katie a well-deserved night off from the blogosphere. Don’t worry – they’re still hard at work on the system, and continuing to collect pithy quotes and hilarious anecdotes for your entertainment. I’ll start with a recap of yesterday, since I neglected to send the “good pictures” to ...

After 13 straight days of nearly perfect cloudless photometric conditions, we woke up to this today. So, of course, we decided to go on sky for the first time. We haven’t completed all of our internal calibrations, but going on sky will let us see if they are valid so that we can complete them ...

Before we tell you our big results for the night… let’s look at some happenings up and down the mountain! Here are Enrico and Alfio waiting for a ride up to the telescope: Armando departed on Saturday, and now Derek and Marco have also gone down the mountain. Derek saw a horse on his way down the mountain.  ...

We passed a big milestone today with the ASM working in closed loop with 400 modes at 1 kHz (the most complex AO mode)!  This 400 mode interaction matrix has been made possible by the excellent trouble shooting from our friends at Arcetri Observatory, Simone, Enrico, Alfio, Armando and Marco! It was such an exciting event ...

Sorry for the tardiness of this post. The internet was down on the mountain when the night shift went to bed this morning. The day was a struggle, but we finally got at least something working, and then did some testing through the night. The issue was a feature in our pupil which Simone ...

Here’s a riddle for all you AO fans out there: What aberration can be sensed but not corrected? Usually an AO system has the opposite problem: There are aberrations you can correct but not measure.  And of course, there are all sorts of aberrations you can neither measure nor correct, like the very highest spatial frequencies. ...