2016B Day 11: I’ve had it with this monkey fighting Viscacha in this Monday to Friday pupil!

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 got in back in our first commissioning run (see here and here), and took some Italian magic to deal with.

So today, after a long and frustrating alignment, we got started closing the loop on our calibration source and immediately went to war with the pupil viscachas. Simone was even calling for Truly Nolen at one point.

A brand new set of system modes.
After long discussion, it was conluded that it is a viscacha!
By the end of the night we have successfully closed the loop on 400 modes. Still subtle issues to sort out, but 2000 Hz is just around the corner. Going clockwise from left, we have Fernando, Alfio, Laird, Kelsey, Lauren, Jared, Armando, Simone, and Enrico.
Kelsey and Lauren have been spending some quality time with their Grand-Advisor.
Gary Galileo Guanaco is almost tame now. He let us get this close at lunch today. We’ll be riding him soon.
Paparazzi
Gary can’t get away.