MagAO-eXtreme Posts

The long days spent waiting for a resolution to the trucking strike were unwanted but provided unusual tranquility on a mountain normally full of activity. Starting work yesterday morning brought welcome relief to have control back in our hands: turning wrenches and aligning optics was made sweeter by the ennui and uncertainty we had experienced ...

MagAO-X is here on the mountain, and we have been working to unpack it since its arrival at 10am. As such, anyone looking for coherent prose in what follows is warned to expect disappointment. We got pics tho. This is not a pic. Unpacking is dirty work, but it’s all worth it. Our hands look like this: So his ...

MagAO-X is coming to LCO! We received news late last night that the trucker strike that has left our team on the mountain with no instrument has come to a conclusion. MagAO-X is scheduled to arrive tomorrow morning/early afternoon wherein our team will be eager to greet it and start preparing for out first night ...

First post from Jialin, a new astronomy grad of the MagAO team! As a part of the Gen-Z crew that arrived yesterday, I spent today in my “bubble” keeping myself busy with work and olive counting while waiting for the arrival of MagAO-X. We should be freed tomorrow at 10am after our final COVID test. ...

Eden here, representing the three exhausted first year grads that just landed in Chile. This second wave of helping hands will get to join the great thumb twiddling. (We have also beaten MagAO-X’s shipping crates to the mountain.) There’s no new news regarding the strike, but kindly telescope-time neighbors have agreed to swap nights: time ...

The truckers are politely “only” causing traffic jams rather than a full blockade, but if you depend on freight vehicles for your business—or telescope operations—you’re still hamstrung by the fact that a ton of the trucks in Chile are busy blocking roadways and not shipping goods. The government has read them the riot act and started ...

We’ve recently had cause to learn a new Chilean Spanish idiom: kilometric tacos, which means (more or less) “kilometers of traffic jam”. The strike shows no sign of going away, and the rhetoric has gotten somewhat nasty. So here are some scenic pictures to take your mind off things. We had our first Guanaco ...

Ninety minutes west of Santiago lies the fantastical, ebullient town on Valparaíso. Known as “Valpo” to the locals, it offers endless labyrinths of hidden staircases, harbor views and consistently interesting street art. Though well ensconced in long-haul South American itineraries, it is not well-known to most traveling astronomers despite its easy access from the Santiago ...

We were waiting eagerly on any news about the arrival of MagAO-X while the trucker strike continued. The first good news we got was that MagAO-X was cleared through customs and we got visuals. MagAO-X somewhere around Santiago. People with keen eyes might see that certain Tip-N-Tell’s are not attached anymore. The Tip-N-Tell’s are used to ...

There seems to be a rule that no matter how early we ship MagAO-X, it won’t get to the Santiago airport until I do. This trip followed that rule. The instrument has now cleared customs and is scheduled to make the journey to LCO tomorrow. However, it could have been on its way as ...