MagAO-Classic posts

After shipping, unpacking, and verifying that everything still works, the last step was for Manny and Richard to cool Clio2 down. Then they took some pictures. Since it works in the IR, basically detecting the heat of planets and brown dwarfs, Clio2 is kept very cold. This is because a blackbody at room-temperature emits most ...

With some help from Shannon Close, the Magellan AO project now has an official logo. Without further ado:

Richard caught a glimpse of the grumpy old man, one of the two Viscachas who live over the clean room. When last we saw them, they had just been caught breaking and entering the ASB to steal bananas, and the last update I got was “the problem has been dealt with”. I was ...

The invasion of LCO has begun. A scouting party consisting of Manny Montoya and Richard Sosa arrived this weekend and began unpacking the Clio2 infrared camera. Here is their report: Day 1: “Clio was unpacked yesterday morning and we confirmed that nothing was damaged in shipping. Clio was put on the vacuum pump ...

Clio has arrived!  The shipment containing the boxes for the instrument, ring, and rack was delivered to the cleanroom unpacking area at LCO earlier today:

Our IR science camera, Clio, has arrived in Chile and is in transit to LCO.  Here’s a pic from last month in Arizona:  Stay tuned – more updates about Clio coming soon.

Preparations continue for the invasion of LCO.  When we’re not sitting around arguing about clouds and chemistry in an exoplanet atmosphere, we’re discussing how to replace a relief valve without draining our cooling system.   Some of this week’s worries included: how are we going to get all of this data home?   We also have to start ...

Now that telescope proposals are submitted we return to our regularly scheduled programming.  Our first order of business is to belatedly congratulate Dr. Derek Kopon, the Magellan AO Project’s first PhD.  Derek is off to Heidelberg to help with the LINC-NIRVANA interferometer, but he’ll still be working on MagAO.   We also welcome our newest team member, ...

Information for Observers The director of Arizona’s telescope time at Magellan has just issued a call for proposals for MagAO for 2013A.  This is for shared-risk observing during our second commissioning run, during early April of next year.  These observations will demonstrate our new AO system and science cameras in the best way possible — with ...

While the NAS was mounted on the telescope we took a quick set of readnoise measurements with the CCD39. Here are the results. The only major caveat is that the telescope was not tracking, so we didn’t test whether the drives have any impact. Otherwise, this is the most realistic set of ...