MagAO-eXtreme Posts

MagAO-X and the eXtreme Wavefront Control Lab are affiliated with the Alien Earths project, an interdisciplinary collaboration led by Dániel Apai. I was going to list off the disciplines that they are inter-ing, but they said it best on their website: Our Alien Earths team includes experts in planet formation, exoplanet detection and characterization, planet formation, ...

This year has been a wild ride, which is to say, kind of on par with a normal pre-pandemic year. Conferences were held, telescopes were observed through, new people joined the program in real life (rather than Zoom™) and it wasn’t a big deal. This post is not a retrospective, however. This post is to document ...

Today the rest of the MagAO-X crew left LCO to return to our respective destinations! Slightly sleep deprived and ready for 30+ hours of travel Eden, Jared, and I got to visit the La Recova Market down in La Serena on our way out, where we found lots of fun Chilean items. Alpaca memorabilia galore We are now ...

I first came to LCO on April 18, 2012, for unpacking the one and only original MagAO. It sounds sappy to say, but life was never the same again. Tonight marked the 453rd sunset I’ve been on this mountain for (I can’t swear that I saw them all). You’re never gonna believe this (because ...

Our 24 hour MagAO-X clean up effort has just finished up around dinner time. MagAO-X is off of Clay. After sleeping various amounts of not-enough today, the whole team is more than ready for some sweet sweet shut eye. Hopefully now unbothered by nightmares of 2.0 arcsecond seeing or cart assembly. End of run crew ...

Tonight marks the end of our time on sky for the 2022B run. Though we have had a bit of a rough week of seeing, humidity, etc., tonight we scored some decent conditions and got to do some of the science we’ve all been eager to do. Logan is hunting for white dwarfs, and may have ...

Whelp, this run is old enough to drink. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vo-NJMkOFzE There is a peculiar thing about the way the Universe is constructed: it is nearly, but not completely, impossible for one civilization to detect another civilization (unless they want to be found). That parenthetical caveat is worth explaining up front: essentially all SETI conducted to date is predicated ...

I’m baaaaaack. My last post on April 23 promised that if I got to come in person, I’d bring goodies. I tried to make good, but bad weather makes for a lot of snacking need. Not shown: chocolate covered pretzels The daytime weather has been lovely, for the viscachas and humans who happen to be awake then. ...

So the last two nights have followed the same pattern: decent seeing and good images until about midnight-1am, then seeing creeps up and up and up and blows past the top of the chart, and we all slump around the control room and lounge in a funk. But tonight there is an added bonus ...

Tonight started of quite well. We finally had average conditions, which much better than the 2 arcseconds seeing from before! The first target of the night is one from Logan. She is searching for white dwarf companions around main sequence stars. Stellar evolution tells us that there should be more white dwarfs than we can ...