MagAO-Classic posts

Alfio’s here! Despite the flu and flight delays, the captain of our software team made it to Las Campanas. Now we just have to get our system ready for him to operate. We started the day with a plan, and got most of the way through it, but there was a snag (maybe literally). The main ...

Today we moved all the electronics in their final place with AO workstation. After that we started testing the electronics simply switching on everything without the ASM connected in order to see if everything works or not and… AAAAARRRGHHHH: one power supply seems not work. A strange noise like “clic-clic” at few Hertz appeared and in the ...

Today we installed the Adaptive Secondary Mirror (ASM), a critical and exciting event!  This is our 1.6 mm thick 85 cm wide fragile thin shell that was transported to the summit yesterday.  It is now hanging up high above the primary mirror in the dome of the Magellan Clay telescope. We woke up this morning to ...

Today we moved our Adaptive Secondary Mirror (ASM), including our 1.6 mm thick 85 cm wide fragile thin shell, up to the aux building between the telescopes. Needless to say, it was an exciting time. Here’s a video of the cart being pushed and pulled onto the truck: Other stuff got done today too. Alan and Tyson ...

Armando Riccardi is here. That means it is all going to be fine. Seriously – stop worrying. O.k. Maybe worry a little. We had a 6.2 magnitude earthquake today, almost right under us. That’s telescope shaking, rock slide causing, all work stopping strong. Strong enough that Armando abandoned the ...

The MagAO project put together an instrument on a shoestring budget from borrowed parts, to observe one of Nature’s most beautiful spectacles: The solar eclipse! We built a pinhole camera using an obsolete cable bulkhead, an authentic piece of MagAO hardware.  We call it the MagAO Solar Eclipse Viewer.  You can see the cable bulkhead below, in ...

We had an exciting day on the MagAO project here at Las Campanas Observatory.  There were bugs, birds, left-handed translations, a handoff, some solidified N2, and the sun got a little fainter too. Today was the crew changeover.  See Katies’s post about how the next Turno was shown the workings of Clio’s dewar and LN2 ...

Tuesdays are when LCO staff swap shifts.  A meeting is held with all technical staff, who share information in order for the handover to go smoothly.  This afternoon, the instrument staff who are keeping Clio cool met to show each other how it works.  

Alan, Jared, and Katie arrived today as the first of the MagAO commissioning team.  We stopped at El Pino before heading up to the mountain.  Here are Jared and Alan with the eponymous tree: La Serena is a beautiful beach town, and we couldn’t decide whether it reminds us of San Diego, Santa Cruz, or San ...

Manny and Richard are on their way home. Clio2 survived shipping, and is ready for MagAO to send it some flat wavefronts. The last thing the guys did was train the LCO staff on how to keep Clio cold. The next MagAO detachment leaves Tucson today. We’re on our way.