MagAO-Classic posts

On July 18 we succesfully mounted the NAS on the tower. Then recabled the system. Illuminated the the ASM at the top of the tower with the white light fiber source. Checked the optical alignment (which was unchanged from before). Then we moved the the PWFS on the 3axis stage (while tilting the dummy 50/50 ...

This week we finished the optical alignment in the optical lab. We also mounted the NAS on the tower as a test. Then we pulled the NAS off the tower and mounted all the optics into the the NAS for the first time. Then we aligned the flowerpot (calibration point source) to the NAS and ...

The PWFS is now aligned on the bench. In the image you can see to the right a single frame of the CCD39 showing a flat wavefront with a slight tilt from our lamp source. On the left you an see the diffraction-limited image of the source on our VisAO camera in r’ band (resolution ...

Here is the current view of the, almost complete, integration of the wavefront sensor, VisAO camera, and their electronics and control computers. Derek Kopon (right) is working on the alignment of the optics and Jared Males (left) is working on the software.  Wavefront Sensor (below Jared), CCD electronics box (on top of bench), VisAO camera electronics box ...

Thanks to the hard work of Jared Males and Alfio and Luca the control software is quickly coming together. In this screenshot we can see: (left to right) the Magellan TCS simulation GUI, the Master AO control GUI, the AO Hardware GUI (running 25 hardware subsystems of the AO system –with the CCD47 selected), the ...

Our mirror in the test tower with its new pupil stop. This is a delrin cap which was bolted on the “tenet” by Derek and then we added a precision  mask to give a 0.29 central obscuration.

Thanks to the hard work of Armando, Marco and Runa the Magellan ASM has had its first round of flattening with the 4D interferometer in the test Tower. It took only one day from start to finish. The shell flattened very well, except in the central area which is hidden from light by the Magellan ...

Today we raised our hexapod-mounted adaptive secondary mirror (ASM) into the Arcetri test tower in Florence, Italy.  The large tower will allow us to operate the secondary at the same focal length and optical conjugates as the Magellan telescope in Chile.  We’ll use this test setup to interferometrically test the performance of our ASM and ...

The below image is our 92% Strehl Sloan r’ band image with our triplet ADC and dichroic beamsplitter in the beam.  The slight elongation of the PSF and the asymetric contrast of the fringes are due to the “zenith spike” effect of the ADC.  This effect is predicted by our models and will not manifest ...

Pictures from the fit check have been posted on flickr by the Magellan Observatory. Here’s a photo of the PI hard at work tweaking the handling cart. More at their flickr page