MagAO-eXtreme Posts

We’ve got MagAO-X mostly re-cabled in its temporary home in the LCO cleanroom, and Doctors Close and Knight are fresh off the plane and working on the optical alignment. But, earlier, we had a fun discovery: the instrument control computer (ICC) was getting almost no coolant flow. Yesterday, we did some brain surgery on the real-time ...

We hit a pretty major roadblock today. Due to the sky high fuel prices around the globe, Las Campanas Observatory has had to drastically reduce use of most forms of energy, including electricity for cranes, propane for forklifts, and gas for trucks, except as needed for nighttime operations. So we essentially have no ...

Two and a half years ago, I came to the University of Arizona to work with MagAO-X. The plan was that MagAO-X would go to the Magellan telescope twice a year. And then suddenly a global pandemic appeared. However, right now we are really at Las Campanas Observatory preparing for an observing run! We arrived ...

When we last left LCO we expected to be back in just 3.5 months. We’re nerds of the science and engineering type, so we tend to take lots of notes and pictures because we think we want to remember this or that. But there are always those things where you don’t even think ...

(distanciamiento de un metro is distancing of 1 meter, a required anti-COVID-19 measure) MagAO-X arrived on its truck from Santiago this afternoon, and a familiar team of forklift operators and engineers was here to unload it. The next shift will have some new faces, but this shift was people we knew from The Before Times. We ...

To reach Las Campanas Observatory, of course you must book an eye-wateringly-expensive airplane ticket, but once you get here you must still traverse the Santiago airport, a.k.a. Aeropuerto Internacional Arturo Merino Benítez, a.k.a. Nuevo Pudahuel, a.k.a. SCL. For important pedagogical reasons (i.e. four more people coming in two more waves) I will describe how it went. ...

Alexander T. Rodack began the day as any ordinary graduate student: tired, depressed, and wondering when, if ever, it will end? Well Alex, today is that day. Welcome to having a doctorate from the College of Optical Sciences! I’m sure everyone who attended your dissertation defense thoroughly enjoyed your talk. And for those that weren’t ...

Last Friday our shipping contractor (or at least our shipping contractor’s contractor) collected MagAO-X. Grad students are for pushing heavy things Hurry up and wait Fork yeah MySpace angles End of the beginning After it was loaded, Dr. Males said “I’m going home to not think about MagAO-X,” as is tradition. MagAO-X now travels by ground to Miami, then by air to ...

Looks like we might actually be doing this … if World War 3 doesn’t break out first. Please enjoy this video of today’s activities from clips taken by me and Alex Hedglen. Since rights-holders can be so mean about these things, no audio track is included. However, I recommend playing the song of the day at ...

With cautious optimism, we are approaching the second ever MagAO-X ship date. It’s hard to believe that it has been 2.5 years since we last did this! The system has grown in complexity in the interim, gaining a spectrograph named VIS-X (P.I. Sebastiaan Haffert) as well as many new controllable degrees of freedom. (Always need ...