MagAO-Classic posts

After 17 days here at LCO Jared and I are heading down today. Overall the “unpacking run” was a success. 1) Secondary Mirror (ASM) with the leadership of Armando and Marco (Arcetri) with Mario and Frederico (Microgate), and Rich (Arizona) we unpacked, flipped, cleaned, clocked, and installed the shell on the ASM. Victor (Arizona) prepared a special ...

After they left, Laird and Jared spent the rest of the day covering optics, organizing the cleanroom, backing up disk drives, and generally getting everything presentable. Not quite the way we found it, but presentable. We’re heading down to La Serena on the 1130 transport tomorrow. I know you’re just here for ...

Over two weeks in and we still have plenty to do. In the morning we mounted the calibration return optic (CRO) truss and the CRO itself, to make sure they still fit. In the afternoon the ASM was unplugged, and wrapped up for safe keeping while waiting for our turn on the telescope. Glenn and Jared ...

Things are winding down here. Today we did a big set of readout noise measurements on both of our cameras. We did a preliminary set a few days ago to make sure shipping went okay, but now that we are pretty much fully integrated we did it again. We’re really happy with the ...

Hi all! So at the end all the measurements are done… First we verified the settling time of the ASM for a reduced set of modes. Here there are some examples of the step responses (the slowest mode and the most overshooting one) and a resume of the general behavior in terms of settling time: After that ...

Tip for users of pyramid wavefront sensors: you are not very sensitive to focus with a large modulation amplitude. For MagAO in particular, you have to get amplitude down to ~.1 milliradians before you really have any z-stage resolution. Tip for users of the VisAO camera: there is a huge factor (it appears to be ...

An argument broke out at lunch today over how many days we’ve actually been here. Luckily we have a blog, so we just looked it up. As the Guanaco noticed, Mario and Frederico have left us after more than pulling their weight. They took the early bus to La Serena. Now that the TSS ...

The clouds went in and out with the TSS problems. AO team discovered a problem with the Thin shell Safety System (TSS) that helps the mirror against the wind effects.  One crate was not applying any TSS current. Both Microgate and Arcetri teams at this point turn the system upside down and started bravely to act ...

The storm is finally gone, and the beautiful clear sky is back. The TSS is fixed too, and after we installed our gimbal mirror motors the W-unit is complete. This (kind of lame) video shows our little W-Unit robot responding to a Board Setup command. This tells it to go to a set of ...

Look what the wind blew in. We met some new LCO denizens this morning. When Laird left his room for breakfast he was surprised to find a horse standing just outside his door. By the way this post is especially for horse lovers Emmeline and Annabel Close, who I hear are following ...