It’s been a cloudy couple of nights at Las Campanas.
We’ve watched cloud banks as we walk to the telescope:
Clouds stream overhead as we open the the dome:
Clouds fill the all-sky cam once our targets are up:
monitored the clouds from space:
saw clouds over the Magellan telescopes from the “Hotel”:
and noted clouds as we walk to breakfast in the minutes before dawn:
Nevertheless, we’ve gotten on sky and collected data. Past bloggers have likened the MagAO team to a F1 pit crew. The racing doesn’t happen in our little mountain runabouts:
or on the mountain roads:
But at the Clio controls, where Katie reminded me it takes an aggressive-just-get out-there-and-start-saving-frames attitude, while you check the exposure times and nodding angles, to come out of a blustery and far-from-photometric Las Campanas night with some data. To strain the auto racing analogy, perhaps this also reflects the an improvisational MagAO “straight out of scratch” street racing attitude. With that we’ll leave you with a song: