MagAO-Classic posts

Hi all you MagAO fans, last night we had some excitement (which as long time readers of the blog know — that means something broke). After a fairly routine night we had just settled into a nice rhythm at around 3AM. Then the telescope rotator decided to stop rotating — which wasn’t a big deal, ...

It was a 3-Sagan day: We’ve had lots of good food this week: And tonight at dinner Hector asked us why we hadn’t asked for empanadas in our night-lunch forms — well, we had forgotten it was Sunday! He sent up plenty of empanadas anyway — he takes good care of us! And Alexis made potato chips ...

The clouds stayed away tonight, and we settled in to our normal habits — it’s been over a year since we did that! As usual when left to ourselves, we spent 4+ hours on one target and let the Sun open the loop. Our friends were out enjoying the warm summer weather today.

It was cloudy and windy and foggy, so we stayed in the control room waiting for the clouds to go away. Laird felt bored at the beginning of the night, but he immediately realized the adaptive secondary mirror was in danger. The ASM is very delicate, and even a single raindrop can potentially destroy it. ...

Like the groundhog, 2 vizcachas decided to appear today — I guess that means we have 6 more weeks of summer (? since we’re in the southern hemisphere). Actually, it meant that we had a nice welcome to our first night on the telescope in 2017. We started with some guider engineering, then went on ...

MagAO is all ready to go on the telescope. ASM is in the dome, NAS is packed up, and Clio is cold (enough). Here are a couple of standard day before pics. A new feature at LCO is a crosswalk at the occasionally busy saddle intersection. Such things usually occur for a reason. ...

The 2017A MagAO team made it to LCO! It’s beautiful here on the mountain. Hector cooked us a delicious dinner of fish, potatoes, soup, salad, and pudding. I checked on Clio’s vacuum (which Victor started for me on Sunday) and it’s at $10^{-6}$ so it’s looking good to start liquid nitrogen cooling first thing ...

Well, here we go. Laird, Katie, Jared, and Ya-Lin are on our way to LCO. We’ve already not seen our first green flash. I’m a bit worried though. We’re not even a day into the run and Laird is already exhausted. So we’re bringing back the old “Telephone Game” rules. As usual, every ...

The MagAO team has made it to Tucson in time for Thanksgiving! And the Gemini Planet Imager team travels seem to be going well too — We ran into Jenny Patience, Julien Rameau, and Ben Gerard of GPIES at the La Serena airport, who were just coming off a 6-night GPI run. Our La Serena-Santiago ...

I don’t have wifi in my room tonight. We’re all done, leaving tomorrow. Song of the day: Dee-ner Dee-ner Dee-ner Dee-ner, Dee-ner Dee-ner Dee-ner Dee-ner, Dee-ner Dee-ner Dee-ner Dee-ner, Dee-ner Dee Dee Dee. (the rules say nothing about what form the song must take)