MagAO-eXtreme Posts

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 ...

Tonight we experienced seeing values that made certain lab members say “Oh lord!”, or “I thought we were taking darks”. Seeing is -quite literally- off the charts Unfortunately for tonight’s observers, we had to close the telescope early. Not only was seeing making it quite impossible to produce any useful data, but the TO went outside ...

Hello! It me, back on the mountain finally. As stated yesterday, I arrived finally yesterday afternoon (after high-fiving the departing Warren and Joseph at the La Serena airport through the window). I managed to stay up for sunset, then quickly went to bed after sleeping not a wink on the plane the ...

Thank you Carla for the wonderful blog post yesterday, and also for taking such good care of us. I of course really mean thanks for delivering our empanadas on Sunday. We’ll see you next turno! I know it looked like a lot of food, but I was actually somewhat disappointed in our team’s commitment ...

I am (Carla) so glad to be at the first and hopefully last night of this MagAOX run. I was here the last first night too (2022A) and both of them were very chaotic. To add one more word to your chilean vocabulary I hope that I am not the YETA one here. To be Yeta ...