MagAO-eXtreme Posts

Greetings from the home office! I’ve always been a fan of using my laptop to run my computations on other computers in the lab or data center, so you’d think this MagAO-X Stay At Home run would be mean standard operations for me. Unfortunately, while I’m rarely at my desk in my office, I’m ...

Let’s continue in the spirit of the blog post of yesterday with the introduction of another new member of the MagAO-X team. Last fall I finished my PhD at Leiden University in the Netherlands and I was lucky enough to get a fellowship to work at the University of Arizona. Now I do have to ...

Greetings blog world. You haven’t heard from me yet, because this is my first post here on the XWCL blog! First let me introduce myself. I joined the group last fall as a new 1st year graduate student at Steward Observatory at Univ of Arizona in Tucson. I came from the ...

Since most of the MagAO-X team resides in Tucson, home of the University of Arizona and Steward Observatory, we are about to come under a stay-at-home policy starting tomorrow, 3/31, at 5 pm MST. This removes all doubt: there will be no MagAO-X run in 2020A. We are on the telescope schedule for ...

Happy new year from MagAO-X! The instrument is back in the lab, and today we opened the panels for the first time to find that no optics have been damaged! “Another happy landing,” as Obi-Wan would say. On January 10, MagAO-X arrived at the University of Arizona. Southwest Rigging used the forklift to bring the ...

Well that was exciting. The last three of us are on our way back to Tucson. We love being at LCO, but after spending most of two months there it’s a great feeling to be going home. In case you missed it, MagAO-X works! We can close the loop on sky with real starlight propagating ...

Well it has been a long, exciting, and successful run for MagAO-X first light, but now it is time to say goodbye to LCO (until next time). We successfully closed the loop on-sky with MagAO-X and took plenty of data to take home with us, and now we are all packed and ready to ship ...

Yesterday, after our last night on-sky, we began moving the instrument off of the telescope to get it ready to ship back home to Tucson. This also meant that we had to shift back to a day schedule, so Laird and I woke up from a short nap to begin the move at 8:00 am ...

Last night was our fourth on-sky night. It also ran right in to our instrument removal/moving day. So, we went from taking a nice long dataset of beta Pictoris directly into taking off cables and connectors for our electronics. I’m still awake, despite feeling like someone dropped a truck on me, so I might as ...

“Can we stop calling it Nth light?” Dr. Jared Robert Males Tonight marked MagAO-X’s return to doing AO on starlight rather than an internal calibration source. The Observatory kindly allowed us to remain in place on the platform, so our return to operations was as simple as turning off the lamp and closing the loop on the ...