MagAO-C 2019B Day 3: Closed loop Trapezium

Today was the super long day through night. Up at 7am for a quick breakfast, then hurried to the top for a day full of instrument removal and installation, then a full night of on-sky engineering tests. The crew removed MIKE, the MIKE guider, and the f/11. The crew plus the MagAO instrument team (including some Classico and some eXtreme) installed the Nas, the ASM, and Clio. I didn’t take many pictures, but I’m sure those will be coming once the new kids on the block start blogging. The live-view camera of the inside of the Clay dome was cool (see Jared’s MagAO-X post). Here’s what it looks like right now (while we’re still on-sky:)

Live view of the interior of the Clay dome while observing. [Image description: It is a black rectangle. A black rectangle with a border and official-looking timestamp that implies it could have come from a webcam.]

Then there was much cabling and testing of cooling, signals, connections, and functionality. This went on past sunset. Then through the night we further tested on-sky capabilities such as the guider, offsets, angles, volcanoes, scripting, focus, and modes.

A beautiful Clay sunset. [Image description: A horizon lit up with light blue and yellow. The yellow/orange sun is setting behind some low clouds/fog in the distance. In the foreground are some vehicles and gravel.]
We ironed out a few AO, telescope, and Clio bugs, and then were able to test some modes and do some engineering. Here we have closed the loop on Trapezium B. [Image description: A log-scale image of stars in the Trapezium cluster around Theta 1 Ori B. Negative star images are from where the sky was subtracted off.]

Turno changed over today too. Had another nice round of hellos with colleagues I haven’t seen in 18 months. It’s good to see everyone again!

The song of the day is a classical classic, Pachelbel’s Canon by the Canadian Brass. I really like their descant arrangement.