MagAO-eXtreme Posts

We finally had an all-night good night. Started with what we call engineering, which means testing new ways of operating the instrument. The big news is that Sebastiaan got his “implicit Electric Field Conjugation” algorithm to work on-sky. This brings MagAO-X almost to its as-planned fully capability. Here’s what that looks ...

If you’ve been around this blog a time or two you’ve probably heard our woes with respect to seeing — the measurement of just how twinkly the stars are. Twinkling is bad for science, and our instrument can’t operate well if the seeing is too high. We started this run with some pretty ...

“Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (Viscacha Edition)” by Caspar David Friedrich and an AI The day-to-day operation of an experimental extreme adaptive optics instrument, pushing all the boundaries at once, can feel like lurching from crisis to crisis. We need to get better airflow in the bowels of our electronics rack. We need to automate ...

Clay and the moon, aka the massless particle in a RTBP, at sunset. It’s the first double digit day of the 2024Aa run! As the master scheduler, tonight’s time is finely chopped up into four different blocks. Let’s hear what the MagAO-X scientists are doing for the night, and maybe ask them some fun questions. Ok, ...

Now’s about the time of the run where the nightly routine just starts to become second nature; eyes are less bloodshot and twilight is here before you know it. We’ll start this post off with some sunset glamour shots… Biiiig telescope Today we were all a bit sad to bid farewell to Katie and Maggie who are ...

Well, that went fast. Maggie and I are the first team members of the run to embark on the long journey down the mountain and trade the Atacama back for the Sonoran desert. But, before then, we had one last night to make the most of our time here at LCO. After some daytime calibrations (and ...

Hard to believe I’m back here! I was so convinced 2023A would be my last trip to Chile with the MagAO-X team that I tried to do all my tourist stuff in one go last year. In the past year, I’ve defended my dissertation, moved across the country, and begun a fellowship at the Center ...

Do you have what it takes to be the next great AO operator? Well today is the day that tests your mettle. Starting as bright an early as our crane operators will let us, we do a little bit of everything this 24hr shift. We pack, we crane, we unpack, we unwrap, we level, we ...

We are less than 24 hours from observing and it was crunch time today! We needed fuel so thankfully Sundays at LCO are empanada days! Chef’s kiss Laird and Jared were making bets on how long till we get a “grumpy cat”, ie an error message in our computer’s hardware tracking system, once we are on-sky. ...

Today was an eventful day. Almost every blog post by me has mentioned VIS-X, the beautiful integral field spectrograph for MagAO-X. And, every run up to know had me doing optical alignment on the Nasmyth platform during morning shifts (after observing 🙁 ). This time the optical alignment finally did not drift during shipment! I ...