Tonight we saw some cute pictures of the various children in our lives dressed up for Halloween. Well don’t worry, but we had the holiday covered here as well. Here is a monster of an old man who showed up just before sunset:
He looks scary but we let him run our instrument. And he did a great job of frightening the PI.
I did a bit of searching to try and figure out what that gorgeous display of clouds was. I’m going to go with Altocumulus Mackerel. Look it up. But I can’t tell if it’s going to be, “Mackerel in the sky, three days dry,” or “Mackerel sky, mackerel sky. Never long wet and never long dry.”
Tonight, though, the clouds remained thick and patchy until the dawn. We were still able to work through the clouds, locking on an 0.5-mag star (Achernar) and later, a -1st mag star (Canopus). The AO system reports the magnitude back to us and we had up to 9 mags of extinction! But this was sufficient to do our tests of things like software, communications, and scripting. I also tested Clio’s wide camera.
Yesterday I was able to focus Clio and verify that our focus positions haven’t changed since the last run.
Our Chilean students (Javier Garcés, Sebastián Zúñiga, and Mario Castro, from the Universidad Tecnica Federico Santa María) left yesterday. We will see them in Tucson in January and look forward to seeing how their vibration data are, which they took last night by attaching their in-house custom accelerometers to the telescope and instrument.
Anyway, it was a good night even for the clouds, because we were able to do so much testing. I’ll leave you with a couple more pictures and the song of the day.
