MagAO-eXtreme Posts

Today marked MagAO-X’s last day in the clean room at the halfway house and its first night in the Magellan Clay dome. The day started with a lift (now almost mundane) of the optics table off its legs and onto the transport cart. We pushed it out the clean room doors and onto the back of ...

Hello XWCL! This is my inaugural blog post so buckle up because it is going to be a sleep-deprived ride. Laird and Alex spent the day prepping the instrument for transport to the telescopes while Jared, Joseph, Kyle, and I were putting the “finishing touches” on various pieces of code. Kyle, Joseph and ...

Just for today, my friends, we have an unbeatable special offer: with each concurrency bug you find, we will throw in another concurrency bug for free! And, if you call now, we will throw in a semaphore collision bug at no charge! That’s a $49.99 value! Call now! Or, if you prefer an event-driven programming model: let ...

Maggie, Joseph, Alex, Kyle, Laird, and Jared arrived at LCO today to prepare MagAO-X for our first time on-sky.  We missed thanksgiving with our non-LCO families, but the chefs made us turkey so we got a good holiday meal (thanks guys!). We’ve already started MagAO-X back up and are making a bunch of last minute tweaks ...

It’s an old MagAO tradition to take selfies for our moms in the mirror that gets you around the bend at the summit.  Long story, but it’s also tradition for it to be poop covered unless Alan is here. Tonight’s song is “I miss the misery” by Halestorm. Since the casual reader of this blog hasn’t ...

In the gym today I noticed a bunch of new trophies. Check it out: This is the clearly the best observatory. These guys agree: I missed the sunset, but came out of the cleanroom in time to catch this: Today’s song is Miley Cyrus’s version of Jolene (the Backyard Sessions one).

As Joseph reported yesterday, we couldn’t find any sign of our viscacha friends and we suspected it was due to the high winds and colder temperatures. Today I was able to gather more evidence. A correlation is seen between the local density of viscachas and the wind speed at their location. The following plot illustrates: We ...

This was, incredibly, a zero-viscacha day. It was quite windy, a bit chilly, and there may have been a viscacha conference (¿visconferencia?) in the next valley over. Dr. Jared R. Males, MagAO-X field biologist, in search of the elusive wild viscacha. Or just stretching his legs after a long day of coding. Meanwhile, in MagAO-X land, we ...

Two days left on the mountain, and two people left from our group. This morning Laird, Amali, Emily, and Katie headed back to Arizona. That means that it’s just me and Jared here from the XWCL. I have another full day, while Jared remains until Wednesday—with only the video chats of Olivier Guyon (international astronomical ...

Friends, this was supposed to be a celebratory blog post. My web-based interface to MagAO-X is getting to the stage where it’s actually useful. My suitcase finally arrived from airline purgatory. I finished my SPIE 2020 abstract. I found out how to make the soda machine dispense plain fizzy water (my one non-caffeinated vice). However, fate ...