MagAO-eXtreme Posts

I could feel it from the start: This night was going to be a success. Despite the haze that we could see in the horizon during sunset, the night gifted us a stable seeing and what was cloudy now is clear, baby. Can you believe we are only already at half of the observation run!? ...

With us finally getting used to working on the night shift, it sure feels like we have been racking up the overtime hours. However, we still find time to get our daily Vizzy content. I have decided to start this blog post by giving the people what they want…Viscacha’s and behind the scenes footage. After ...

We had an all-Laird, all-Hα night. With everything working so well, the most exciting thing going on instrument-wise was the initial setup, which I was able to get in on. From our control workstation, I dutifully applied the “F-test” (which displays the letter “R”, for reasons lost to history), applied the “J-test” (works as advertised), performed ...

Empanada Sunday is always hard to follow, but today started off on a really strong note: an adult and a baby vizzy graced us with their presence just before sunset. Viscachas are notoriously jumpy creatures (in both senses of the word), so there was a National Geographic-esque effort to get some decent shots. Fortunately, our ...

With our third car stolen by an unknown observer/animal on the mountain/crew a few days ago, the uber arrangement for our 9 people crew has been a bit tricky. Two brave and kind souls volunteered themselves for a hike up to the telescope, Eden and Katie. They were soon rewarded with spotting of the cutest ...

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 ...