MagAO-eXtreme Posts

Tonight was another Laird night which means more of our favorite target, PDS 70! Could PDS 70 have alien life? Will we find a new planet? Are the answers to these questions always ‘no’? Who’s to say. We will get back to the PDS 70 excitement shortly, but first, a recap of the day’s festivities: Team Leiden is ready ...

A big hello to the GREAT MegAO-X team, great in every way… It’s a well-prepared, friendly, and numerous group. It was really nice working with you, especially the music chosen for the announcements of the program.Thank you for the conversations, il sottobicchiere, and the stickers. You still have a few night, keep up, all for ...

We are happy to report the successful and uneventful homecomings of the first half of our observing crew. Uneventful in that none was stranded in a city they didn’t mean to be in. Successful in that they ended in the warm embraces of various roommate species. Farewell Joseph! Sir Alexander reclaims territory. And we were all jealous. Delta ...

I have an unfortunate secret to reveal: we have been operating MagAO-X in 2024B mode this whole time. When the team first arrived, a wizened mystic emerged from the Room Behind the Kitchens and croaked out a prophecy: Hasta que enstiques el instrumento tendras visión astronómica de baja calidad. Unfortunately, nobody in the advance guard understood Spanish. Indeed, ...

Like our new friend Emi mentioned in her blog post, there were a lot of us on the mountain yesterday. Josh, Eden and I rolled up to LCO that morning after a smooth trip from Tucson, and Matthijs joined us later that afternoon. As fun as it was to have (nearly) the whole crew down ...

Hi everyone! I’m Emi, a second year undergrad at U of Michigan. This is my very first time observing, and blogging! And basically being nocturnal. I’m learning that we are the largest group for MagAO-X yet… so here’s to all 14 of us! Today, we got to go on a tour of the Henrietta Swope and ...

While most of our heroes were still sleeping, Sebastiaan and I went up the telescope to perform some EFC calibration. At first the dark hole digging didn’t seem to work, and it took quite a bit to fix it. Fortunately, just before dinner time we finally managed! We are astronomers and we are digging a hole ...

We haven’t seen a cloud yet on this run, but that doesn’t mean we’re sitting pretty. MagAO-X is highly optimized for highly optimal conditions, and these ain’t that. Don’t take it from me, take it from the conditions plot: After a promising start, everything went to heck. I’d love to tell you about the stuff we ...

After very little sleep, I decided to wake up and treat myself with a scenic run around the mountain at noon. This was admittedly more of an excuse to go see some telescopes up close and personal. After my makeshift tour of the exterior of some of LCO’s beautiful telescopes, I returned to find out ...

First off, a special congratulations to Parker for being offered the NSF GRF award! That’s awesome. And it means that the panel that reviewed his application is just as excited about drilling holes in the Magellan-Clay telescope to mount the accelerometers as we are. It sounds a little jarring, but it’s for the Greater Good, ...