Last night we lost ~5 hours to the X-stage problem. Tonight we lost about an hour (of perfect weather and amazing seeing) due to the BCUs locking up and the shell doing that thing where it panics. Yet we still squeezed in some good data for our own projects. Was Vanessa Bailey here? She has the distinction of doing the most with the least bit of MagAO, as far as I can recall. On two separate occasions she had a half night with MagAO and lost most of her time due to instrument problems. Once it was the “wait for AO” problem that took us about 3/4 of her half-night to diagnose, and once — was it the Clio motor failure? They’re all starting to blur together… …yet she still managed to get data on her top targets in just 1 hour and discover a planet with some of her bare-minimum MagAO time. Well, now she’s graduated and moved on to GPI, but MagAO still misses her, and tries to bring some of that Vanessa essence back to the telescope…
MagAO is happiest when it has the most photons. It must be all that radiation pressure that keeps the mirror flat…right? When we opened the loop for the last time tonight, we were looking at the 2nd brightest star in the sky. Here’s the nice flat wavefront on the pyramid pupils:
Um, well I am not a fan of the noise and shouting in yesterday’s song of the day… All I can think of is another song with shouting… and also Shakira!: