MagAO-eXtreme Posts

I think I’ve had observing time at LCO in every month (though I’m unable to figure out from the records I have on my laptop if I’ve actually physically been at LCO in every month), but this is the best November that I remember. The days are warm and lovely, the nights are clear and ...

It’s time to finally call off the searches everyone. Tie up your bloodhounds, turn off those spotlights, and park your helicopters. That’s right, the mountain’s most infamous instrument has been located after eons of searching high and low. There were fears that MagAO’s near-IR camera, Clio, had been sentenced to the boneyard to peacefully decay ...

I could feel it from the start: This night was going to be a success. Despite the haze that we could see in the horizon during sunset, the night gifted us a stable seeing and what was cloudy now is clear, baby. Can you believe we are only already at half of the observation run!? ...

With us finally getting used to working on the night shift, it sure feels like we have been racking up the overtime hours. However, we still find time to get our daily Vizzy content. I have decided to start this blog post by giving the people what they want…Viscacha’s and behind the scenes footage. After ...

We had an all-Laird, all-Hα night. With everything working so well, the most exciting thing going on instrument-wise was the initial setup, which I was able to get in on. From our control workstation, I dutifully applied the “F-test” (which displays the letter “R”, for reasons lost to history), applied the “J-test” (works as advertised), performed ...

Empanada Sunday is always hard to follow, but today started off on a really strong note: an adult and a baby vizzy graced us with their presence just before sunset. Viscachas are notoriously jumpy creatures (in both senses of the word), so there was a National Geographic-esque effort to get some decent shots. Fortunately, our ...

With our third car stolen by an unknown observer/animal on the mountain/crew a few days ago, the uber arrangement for our 9 people crew has been a bit tricky. Two brave and kind souls volunteered themselves for a hike up to the telescope, Eden and Katie. They were soon rewarded with spotting of the cutest ...

Last night, after such quality science, and the night before with rapid fire engineering accomplished, tonight was set to be a good mix of the both. Jared engineering in the early eve and Sebastiaan reanimating the Vis-X visible spectrograph for the rest of the night. Alas, the mountain had other ideas for how we should be ...

Yesterday, we did an amazing job in setting up MagAO-X. Even without direct presence of the PI. Go team! We got the system working at sunset and we spent the whole night performing engineering tasks. One of the last tasks of the night was testing the first coronagraph that Elena made. Below in the picture ...

Hello all! I am excited to have received the opportunity to write my first ever blog post and we have had a jam-packed Day 4! Today was the real deal of installing MagAO-X on the platform. We started the morning by splitting into two crews: one to get the instrument on the platform, and the ...