MagAO-eXtreme Posts

Laird and I arrived back at LCO last night. It’s been 18 months since we were here. Lots of little changes, and some new faces around the mountain — but it’s mostly the same as it ever was. We’re supposed to be unpacking our new instrument MagAO-X. But . . . our shipment has been delayed ...

Today, we handed MagAO-X off to the shipping contractor (all 2961 kg / 6527 lb / 3.26 tons of it). Our dinky little forklift was not up to the task, so Southwest Industrial Rigging Inc. was called in. MagAO-X leaving the Steward Observatory loading dock under the supervision of riggers (center, right), grad students (behind camera), ...

It’s been a very busy 6 weeks since we passed PSR and received the approval to ship out MagAO-X. In those 6 weeks, we’ve been working on putting the final touches for the instrument. On October 2, we were scheduled for moving the MagAO-X instrument into its shipping crate, which means lots and lots of ...

Last Friday, MagAO-X underwent a pre-shipment review. This is the process by which the Magellan Observatory ensures that we won’t waste everyone’s time by shipping our instrument to the telescope. It’s a multifaceted process, evaluating everything from “does your instrument work in the lab?” to “have you baked your shipping crate?” I’m happy to report that ...

Tucson in the summer is a bit like this, only less exciting. However, summer is waning. (Why, it’s only 99ºF at 7:00 p.m. as I’m writing this!) Tucson is filling back up with new and returning students, and I’m no longer guaranteed a table to myself at my favorite coffee shop. This semester, we are happy to ...

To beat the harsh Canadian frost, most birds migrate south for the winter. In Tucson we have the opposite problem! As temperatures rose in the desert a group of us (Jared, Alex R., Kyle, Laird, and Lauren with alumna Kelsey Miller meeting us from Leiden) headed to Canada to beat the heat and present our ...

MagAO-X integration and testing continues apace, with Jared shaving microseconds off the loop latency, Kyle working on making the world’s flattest DM, and Alex H. identifying holes in our hardware that were made in the wrong place. The rest of us are fighting with hardware more indirectly, getting our simulations to converge or our embarrassingly ...

The school year has wrapped up and we’re about to head into summer. Usually we’re excited we survived the year at all, but this time we are celebrating the XWCL undergraduates graduating and completing their bachelor’s degrees! Chris, Maggie, and Madison have worked with us for the past couple years assisting on MagAO-X. Chris joined us ...

* with two DMs! But not at the same time…yet. Late last week, after painstakingly recabling and aligning the BMC 2K following its relocation to the MagAO-X instrument, we closed the loop at 3.6kHz with 2040 actuators. See Jared’s video below: MagAO-X Closed Loop 3.6 kHz What exactly are we looking at in this video? On the far left ...

As of today, our 2040 actuator Boston Micromachines MEMS deformable mirror (BMC-2K DM, for short) has been moved to MagAO-X instrument optical table. With a cost of roughly three houses, it’s by far the most expensive piece of the whole project. (If you don’t count paying half a dozen graduate students for half a decade.) The ...