MagAO-eXtreme Posts

I was mistaken, but now I’m not: Sebastiaan, Avalon and I are the only team members on this run who haven’t been to Las Campanas Observatory (LCO) before. However, perhaps situation this extends to at least some of the avid blog readers, so I’d like to share what some of my experience has been like ...

So for the last 48 hours Justin Knight and I have been busy working hard at the optical alignment of MagAO-X. On Saturday, after 30 hours of travelling we arrived at LCO, and had a great dinner (delivered to our door here at LCO as we are in the bubble for the next 3 days). ...

My day started with a classic LCO breakfast. A perfect way to start the day. After that we ran up the hill and cabled our 2040 actuator MEMS DM. We got it on the first try! We are getting better at this procedure. Sebastiaan and I cabling the tweeter. Photo by Joseph Long. Sebastiaan is testing ...

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 ...