MagAO-Classic posts

The PI got hit with a rock this morning. That’s how hard the wind was blowing. He’s o.k., and the wind has died down tonight. I’ll let Marco update us on progress with fixing the TSS. For now here are a couple of pictures of the work being done there: Laird and I finalized ...

Man, the ASM seemed to work really well and the AO group continue testing the system all the day BUT at a certain point the system started whistling!!! All the actuators were disabled, the system powered off and the shell was safe against the reference body but it was still whistling at about 2 Khz!!!! Microgate ...

The big story at LCO right now is the wind. It is strong enough that it’s hard to walk in a straight line. Here’s a plot of the last 24 hours: It’s still nice and calm in the cleanroom though, and we’re getting lots done. ASM testing continues apace. We finally mounted the W-Unit ...

Yes we did! The last night the shell was re-clocked by Armando and Richard that imposed their hands so this morning the shell went again inside the clean tent and was installed by the AO team. The installation procedure took a bit but the TS1 successfully went up and was pulled by the bias magnets ...

One week in, MagAO shows no signs of slowing down. After starting our day with a hacksaw, and some shaky ground, we prepared the shell for mounting on the ASM reference body and made our first go at it. The shell was clocked slightly, meaning that the magnets don’t quite line up with ...

Last night we bent a pin on the handling cart, preventing us from rotating the ASM back to the vertical position for shell mounting. So this morning, the first order of business was to cut the pin out of the cart. Extra fun since this had to take place in the cleanroom. Problem solved, ...

The big accomplishment today was flipping the shell so that the magnets are now facing up. This video, filmed by Juan Gallardo, shows the last step in the flipping procedure: After flipping, the back of the mirror was inspected. Everything looks great. We also attached the ASM unit to the mount ring, which is how ...

Another eventful day for MagAO. The big news is that we unpacked and inspected the shell, and it is in one piece. The delicate unpacking procedure took most of the day. The moment of truth: Here’s a longer version of the last few minutes of unpacking, featuring the smooth stylings of Armando Riccardi and the ...

Alan and Tyson finished testing our newly installed guider this morning. Here’s a quick demo of the probe moving out of the way, as it would after collimating the telescope.

More progress at LCO today. The ASM unit was unpacked and moved into the cleanroom, the mount ring was attached to the ASM handling cart, the finishing touches were placed on our guider, assorted other odds and ends got checked off, and the Arcetri component of our team arrived. Now on with the ...