MagAO-Classic posts

We went from 2000 Hz to 0 in 1 day: The ASM, the NAS, and Clio all came off the telescope today. That was it; then it was bedtime. Thanks to the technical crew for their hard work getting the Clay switched over in 1 day, and to the humanitarian crew for the delicious dinner ...

Well that sucked. We ended our run with a crap night, high winds, higher seeing, and jumping actuators. MagAO comes off in the morning, so that’s it. The burros made me think of this.

Today was a bit rough, with high winds and heavy cloud cover. But… through the clouds… a beacon of light. Specifically a kick-a** high resolution AO-corrected PSF without the ever-present wind butterfly because… the MagAO adaptive secondary mirror is now officially deforming to correct for the atmosphere at 2000 times per second, twice as ...

Tonight Clio and VisAO were together again — except we didn’t do much together. Separately we tested the new VisAO SDI+ mode and did some basic set-up tests on Clio. And we got AO up to 1.6 kHz! Thanks to Arcetri here and there: And the wind died down and we had as low as 0.35” ...

Tonight we inducted 6 more members into L’Ordine degli Astronomi al Limite di Diffrazione: we observed Mira A and B through the eyepiece. First on the list was Alfio who helped us come up with the name for L’Ordine. Then we got back to work, testing and debugging our new modes, interaction matrices, and higher frequency.

This is my 303rd day spent at LCO. Most of our crew of AOistas have left, it’s down to just Laird, Alfio, Katie, and Jared, with the addition of Kate who joined us tonight.

Marco, Runa, Enrico, and Fernando left yesterday. Kelsey and Lauren left today. And Simone and Armando are leaving tomorrow. After Laird’s very nice technical post yesterday, I will just have some pretty pictures for today. We started the evening with a very delicious meal of Hector’s pizza which is so good! Then we got back ...

Great News MagAO’ers and lovers of the Blog Today we went on-sky after a day of taking interaction matrices (IMATs). We have made many improvements to MagAO since we had to also rebuild so much after the glycol leak. It has been a 10 month saga that has been quite a strain on all of us — ...

Do you remember the Viscacha that sometimes sneaks into our pupils? This is a problem when our mirror is uncalibrated, and the signal it sends to the pyramid wavefront sensor confuses our software. We get dark spots in the pupil (images of the secondary) that often look like our Viscacha friends. They ...

Today was an exciting day for the whole team: MagAO is mounted, poised, and ready to go! The adsec is back, has been flattened, and is lookin’ good (after extensive reconstructive surgery). The pyramid wavefront sensor has been updated (and is swankier than ever). And finally, MagAO is bolted to the Clay telescope, and is ready to show ...