Another eventful day for MagAO. The big news is that we unpacked and inspected the shell, and it is in one piece. The delicate unpacking procedure took most of the day.
The process started with carefully removing the lid from the inner box.The mirror still in its shipping frame after being lifted from the inner box.
The moment of truth:
No cracks! Our 1.6 mm thick, 85cm diameter thin shell mirror survived shipping from Florence, Italy to Las Campanas, Chile.
Here’s a longer version of the last few minutes of unpacking, featuring the smooth stylings of Armando Riccardi and the mirror handling team:
Meanwhile, a whole bunch of other stuff was happening. In addition to completing the guider work we also setup the ASM cooling circuit.
Don't worry, the project isn't on fire yet, we're just filling the heat sink. Yes, that is one of our shipping crates.Victor declares victory. The pump circulates water through the ASM and the big tub.Povilas and Tyson made us a nice water fountain. This isn't just for the ambiance. Consider that the specific heat of liquid water is 4.2 kJ/kg, the latent heat of fusion (melting ice) is 334 kJ/kg, and the latent heat of vaporization is 2257 kJ/kg. And we're in the Atacama desert.After dinner we started preparing the flipping bench. Marco Xompero is making some adjusments.A group photo at breakfast. From lower left: Laird Close, Frederico Piccin, Alan Uomoto, Mario Andrighettoni , Marco Xompero, Victor Gasho, Jared Males, and Armando Riccardi (missing Richard and Tyson, who had already gone up to get ready for unpacking).In case we take a day off, there's a nice rec room here. Juan's band has taken over the ping pong table for guitar storage though.Marco gets ready for unpacking.
