MagAO-Classic posts

Extraction of the NAS Fitcheck team is underway. We all came down off the mountain today, feeling good about a successful run. Here’s our quote from the ride down: “Pirate mining? . . . no no, you probably said iron, but I heard pirate.” (Tyson Hare) Jason is spending the night in La ...

A light day today, if you use the usual MagAO tempo as your standard. Alan and Tyson did a little work on the guider this morning. We had some excitement today. Power to the telescope was accidentally shut off, and there was a brief attempt to blame Jared. It wasn’t him (based on ...

Today started with balancing the NAS on the rotator. We added two big pieces of steel at the top to keep the rotator motor currents even as the instrument rotates. Once that was done, we attached the Anaconda – our affectionate name for the cable that we’ve been spending so much time worrying about ...

This morning started with yet more plumbing adventures. We filled the ASM cooling system with glycol, which meant pumping the stuff we mixed yesterday into the system. Here’s a tour of the filling operation by Alan. Drilling of the hole was completed. And the CCD cooling system was mounted below the platform. The main event today ...

A crime has been committed – and another may be in progress as I type. But we’ll get to that. Today was less exciting than yesterday, but progress was made. MIKE, the instrument occupying the port we want to bolt to, was removed first thing this morning. After it was gone, we started ...

I couldn’t stay awake long enough last night for all of our videos to upload to youtube. Unless your name is Posterity you may not want to watch every second of these, but there are some interesting things happening. Here is the NAS rolling out of the cleanroom. Scroll to 0:56 for Jared’s most ...

A big day for Magellan AO today. As planned, we packed up our computers and the NAS and moved them to the summit. This video shows the truck leaving the cleanroom. This was the practice run for the much more delicate NAS. After lunch, we moved on to the NAS itself. We ...

We start our move up to the Clay tomorrow, so today was mainly spent getting ready. We disconnected and drained the supply lines for the NAS cooling system. That hose, along with a bunch of power and data cables, was made into a cable and we started wrapping it around the NAS. The NAS ...

Tyson and Jason finished designing our new cable wrap system. Here are some views of the plan (note: if you are an important person at Magellan, check your email for more): Luckily Juan found a piece of 4″ PVC pipe to use for the “stove pipe”. I don’t want to know where it was ...

This morning we woke up to this: We’re here for a reason – to find out what doesn’t work so we can fix it before the real deal happens in November. Today’s discovery was that the planned route for our cable wrap through the Nasymyth platform deck won’t work. Our instrument has to rotate ...