MagAO-eXtreme Posts

Last night, after such quality science, and the night before with rapid fire engineering accomplished, tonight was set to be a good mix of the both. Jared engineering in the early eve and Sebastiaan reanimating the Vis-X visible spectrograph for the rest of the night. Alas, the mountain had other ideas for how we should be ...

Yesterday, we did an amazing job in setting up MagAO-X. Even without direct presence of the PI. Go team! We got the system working at sunset and we spent the whole night performing engineering tasks. One of the last tasks of the night was testing the first coronagraph that Elena made. Below in the picture ...

Hello all! I am excited to have received the opportunity to write my first ever blog post and we have had a jam-packed Day 4! Today was the real deal of installing MagAO-X on the platform. We started the morning by splitting into two crews: one to get the instrument on the platform, and the ...

Well, folks, it’s been a few days but the content you crave is here. That’s right: viscacha photos! Just scroll past all this boring stuff. Today was a sort of sneak preview of install day. MagAO-X exists as two separate and arguably equally important halves, the electronics rack and the optical table. We eventually need both ...

So far, Laird and Sebastiaan have been doing an excellent job directing the in-person crew and we’ve made great progress towards the many tasks that needed to be done before the start of the big move on Wednesday. Here, we see a lot of the team watching and learning during Tuesday morning’s initial alignment procedures as ...

We’re off! The Tucson MagAO-X crew (notably sans PI) set out for our 2024B run at pretty much the crack of dawn on Sunday. Delta Airlines must have heard through the grapevine about Jay and Jared’s intercontinental sprint from last time and opted to intervene—when we booked these flights, the only option from TUS-ATL was ...

Hey there, here is Elena from Leiden. I am new to MagAO-X but jumped right in to write this first blog post of the run. But what do I know? This is my first observation run, first time in Chile, first time many things. I don’t even work in Arizona, what is this mess?! Well, ...

We’re on our way home, leaving behind a fixed, upgraded, and working MagAO-X. Ready to go for 2024B. A Goodbye While we were there they had just finished stripping parts from the famous “NAS” from the venerable MagAO. They loaded it up to take it down the hill to the bodega, where it will be ...

[A peek behind the sausage factory curtain of blog ops: There was a brief moment on Friday night when I could have written this post but decided to go to sleep instead. 36 hours later, I am frenetically making up on lost time from the courtyard of a hostel in the Bellavista neighborhood of Santiago. ...

Those who have passed through this group know that Warren Foster, former Master’s student now CAAO engineer, was personally victimized by the PIAA Complex Mask Coronagraph. From hours trying to figure out how to fit an elevator system into the already chaotic MagAO-X bench so we could drop in/take out four PIAA lenses to cold ...