Category: MagAO-X

There is an eerie silence in the Clay control room. It’s a bit like a spooky Twilight Zone episode where everyone has disappeared, but their disembodied voices periodically ring out.

Despite the remoteness of 2026A, it made sense for me to be here, as I will be spending the rest of the week at LCO meeting with colleagues to work on a new Magellan instrument called MagNIFIES. When it comes to Magellan in about 4 years, it will be the best infrared spectrograph in the world. How awesome to use one amazing instrument and plan another in the same week.

I arrived yesterday, hung out a bit with the MagAO-X remoters and visited Baade by moonlight to see the engineering in action (their control room was almost as crowded as when the MagAO-X team is here).

Speaking of the Moon, my flight was landing in Santiago just as the Moon was rising. The couple in the seats in front of me asked the flight attendant why it was such a strange color. The flight attendant turned out to be a keen observer of the sky from the plane, and clearly understood that the Moon could only be seen like that at certain times of month and that the orange was normal (but she didn’t mention Rayleigh scattering). In contrast, a few minutes later, the people behind me, apparently less keen observers of the sky, asked her, “What is that thing?” and had trouble believing it was the Moon.

A different color is definitely on my mind today, as it is May 1, i.e. “College Decision Day,” and that means that my youngest offspring decided whither he will fly from our nest. I helped my mom find yarn in “CWRU Blue” so she could make him an appropriate hat. Yes, there is a web app for finding yarn to match a given hex code.

However, unless it is allowed to be totally self-referential, that is not really a color associated with this blog post, so …

Color of the Day: Rising Moon Orange

Song of the Day: The Sounds of Silence by Simon and Garfunkel

Ever since the MagAO-X team left the mountain, we have not had a sunset view nor the company of Maggie-OX in the control room. Well folks, that changes today. Our long time collaborator and primo disk observer, Alycia, has made her journey up the mountain tops today. She shared some familiar views of the sunset and wild life up at ~8000 feet.

Thanks to Alycia, we also got a sneak peak at the new setup in the LCO control room and the snacks she brought for her observing nights. Meanwhile in the ROC, the voice of MagAO-X has returned with a small tweak. The first shifters (Tiffany, Jay, and Katie) and Jared agreed upon the name of Magnus (or would Magnux be better???). We are still figuring out our feelings towards Magnus…

“Hey Magnus, can you come see me after this shift?”

The team worked hard to image some GEOs and moons around asteroids in the newly set up mood light. The moons Aegis and Gorgoneion might have been spotted around its host, the main-belt asteroid (93) Minerva. Who knows? Maybe after some post processing, some undiscovered moons will become visible.

The first half night seeing was decent with some dramatic spikes, likely from the higher winds. As the observer of the second half, I was hoping the seeing stays where it is with slightly less winds. The sky did let me have my way for a few hours, so I got to challenge the AO operators with some faint targets.

Unfortunately, the wispy clouds began to roll in a few minutes before the transit of my second target, a V=13.3 star. Our dedicated AO operator of the night, Eden, fought to keep the loop closed. Even with a low loop speed and modes applied, the loop opened once every 1-2 minutes. More attempts were made in hopes that the clouds would clear, but alas, the observer called it a night an hour before sunset.

Color of the Day:

Song of the Day:

The observing night started with myself (and Josh to supervise me…) aligning the instrument rather early before observations began. Since I am less familiar with the startup and aligning process, this was a good time to get some practice in.

Once aligned, we began the night with our collaborator from MIT joining us, Jensen Lawrence. For these observations, the AO operators had to remain actively involved because we used a technique in which we switched between a science target and a reference star of similar brightness. This target and reference switching allows for post processing PSF subtraction.

Throughout the night, we had some special guest appearances. First and foremost, Steward observatories very own Director Buell Jannuzi stopped by to see how remote observations were going. Shortly after, MagAO-X alumni, Maggie Kautz showed up and Josh proceeded to give her an overview of the current state of the instrument and the science being done.

Around 10:00PM Tucson time, the second shift relieved the first shift of their duty. Shout out to Katie for making a Costco run to load up with some snacks.

The special guests didn’t stop for the night either. Our favorite little culpeo made an appearance. Jared seemed to make friends very quickly.

Color of the Day:

Average color of a culpeo shakes out to be roughly the same as “Nuthatch”.

Song of the day:

We had some quality control stop by the remote operating room this evening. Though I wasn’t in attendance for the early shift, I did hear we passed with flying colors. Or flying animal crackers, as it were.

MagAO-X has been operating true to the golden rule “Having more things just means more things can go right.” Things going right, right in the nick of time, include our stagebs. This stage allows us choose what light to send to the WFS, either a percentage or a wavelength split (specifically H-alpha /IR). Without it, Jialin’s H-alpha observations would have had fewer photons of interest heading to the science camera. Cheers to Jared and the LCO crew for helping us sort it out before observations tonight.

We started the night observing for our highest tier MagAO-X loyalty member, Alycia Weinberger. Thankfully our seeing has returned to reasonable levels and was decent enough for a disk image (or four). A few weeks from now she’ll actually be in Chile observing on another instrument, and can give MagAO-X a good wave for us.

Jialin kept us on our toes in the wee hours of the morning with star hopping, a technique for reference differential imaging (RDI), as apposed to our more common angular differential imaging (ADI) approach. Rumor has it (because no one put it on the blog) that we’ve gone as fast as 39s in a hop between the target and reference star. Tonight we timed to 1m15s, which isn’t bad for a remote operation.

You could say we’ve gotten in the swing of things, hitting a standard of operation. See you next at the end of the month!

Color of the day:

I think in this marathon observing run the original rules still apply. So enjoy Oreo box blue, inspired by the true backbone of SO579.

Song of the day:

Lauren Schatz, XWCL alum here! I flew in from Albuquerque, New Mexico to observe GEO satellites with MagAO-X to see if coronagraphy is possible with an extended source. It sounds simple enough right? “Put dot on top of satellite, done”, but turns out it is more complicated than that.

The first thing you have to do is to actually find the satellite, and we spent some time trying out different methods of determining AZ/EL coordinates. Some were more accurate than others, but all required some noodling around to find the satellite. One thing we tested out was Tiffany’s spiral search code, which worked great!

We had some head scratchers though. Some satellites that should have been visible weren’t! And then we had a real shock, we were trying to see one satellite, but accidentally found a second! (see pic below). Predicting satellite conjunctions is really hard so to stumble upon one accidentally was pretty crazy. The satellites are separated by about 45 arcseconds. Assuming they are at about the same range from Earth, this would be a distance of ~7.8 km. This is a good reminder that space is getting more and more crowded which is why we need the Space Force 🫡 haha. So who is this mysterious second satellite? Aliens? Spies? Direct-TV??? We might never find out. Well I might. Maybe I will tell. Maybe…

Step two of doing coronagraphy on a GEO is to close the AO loop. The sky had other plans however, as the seeing bounced around from 1 arcsec to 2 arcsec and worse. There was a lot of griping about this in the control room, but to me this was excellent seeing compared to Starfire! It was really interesting to see how different AO systems can be and how highly optimized they are for a given site. Average seeing at Starfire is 6 cm r_0 which is about 2.6 arcsec in I-band. The personal best I have ever seen was 11 cm r_0 which is about 1.6 arcsec in I-band. And yet we are able to get meaningful AO correction while tracking LEO satellites screaming across the sky. My personal philosophy is that all problems can be solved with more laser beacons and more AO… so maybe think about LGS-MagAO-X someday…

So I wasn’t able to get the data I needed so this trip ended up being an excuse to binge all my favorite food and shopping I have been missing. It has been really wild to realize I graduated and moved out of Tucson 5 years ago, which is almost as long as I spent living here working on my PhD. Having that context gave me a little bit of an extistential crisis. What have I accomplished in 5 years of my professional career compared to what I did in grad school? Not as much as I would have liked… It is hard to get support when you are a small fish in a big organization so you end up stumbling around trying to get things done by yourself. I have a new appreciation how fast MagAO-X is able to implement new ideas because of the close knit team. Keep on keeping on~

The song of the day is Möbius Chicken Strip by Origami Angel