![Clay right? -- No, Baade. Are you new here?](/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/clayclouds.jpg)
Today was our first official science night! The previous nights were engineering, but tonight we had a visiting astronomer here at the telescope, and he was calling the shots for his observations. He took logs while we helped him take data, and the operations went pretty smoothly.
![Feral Vizzies](/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/claysunset.jpg)
The night started out well, with Alfio successfully managing a difficult aquisition, and with the data coming down the pipeline looking just fine.
![Trapezium!](/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/trapezium.jpg)
However, around midnight the clouds thickened up, and the AO system couldn’t stay locked.
We kept trying brighter and brighter stars, eventually trying a 0-th magnitude star — the wavefront sensor would alternate between saturating counts on this bright star to not even seeing any photons from it at all — 12 mags of extinction! Sigh. So it was a disappointing night. At least we were able to get some testing of various modes and set-ups done, so that’s good. But we are really hoping for a better night tomorrow!
Time for the pretty pictures:
![Sunrise, sunset.](/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/sunset1.jpg)
![Kangaroo-squirrel-bunny](/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/wildviscacha.jpg)
![See how tame she is?](/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/mizzvizz.jpg)
This is the song in my head when we are watching the photons on the wavefront sensor slowly diminish: