MagAO-eXtreme Posts

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 ...

After the embarrassing fate of only the 3 professionals at the helm yesterday, our elders decided that today was the day to teach the youth how to run things. So this post is by and for the young ones. I took the reigns of the AO correction Mega Desk and closed a loop on my ...

After an eventful 24 hour day, a record might have been broken at the Las Campanas Observatory; we have welcome 3 more University of Arizona scientists, making a total of 12 Arizonians on the Chilean mountains. Clay telescope with opened dome Second night on sky began with the customary group sunset viewing photo taken by UA ...

From the long days comes an even longer night with the first engineering night of the run. What follows is a brief recount of the 24 hours spent getting MagAO-X running. Today started bright and early with getting MagAO-X up the mountain. MagAO-X slowly moving up the mountain. Credit: Jared The final 200 meter climb resulted in ...