MagAO-eXtreme Posts

We haven’t seen a cloud yet on this run, but that doesn’t mean we’re sitting pretty. MagAO-X is highly optimized for highly optimal conditions, and these ain’t that. Don’t take it from me, take it from the conditions plot: After a promising start, everything went to heck. I’d love to tell you about the stuff we ...

After very little sleep, I decided to wake up and treat myself with a scenic run around the mountain at noon. This was admittedly more of an excuse to go see some telescopes up close and personal. After my makeshift tour of the exterior of some of LCO’s beautiful telescopes, I returned to find out ...

First off, a special congratulations to Parker for being offered the NSF GRF award! That’s awesome. And it means that the panel that reviewed his application is just as excited about drilling holes in the Magellan-Clay telescope to mount the accelerometers as we are. It sounds a little jarring, but it’s for the Greater Good, ...

The best way to start this blog is being thankful for the paths that lead me to Tucson, UofA, XWCL, MagAO-X and professor Laird Close. I had an great experience as a visiting postdoc in this academic and cultural very rich enviroment. Of course, none of this would be possible without the generous support of ...

Today was a special day; barbecue day. The saddest thing about this was that we just had our 24hour installation and observation marathon. Which meant that I missed barbecue lunch TT_TT. However, I realized that I hadn’t send it my night lunch form yet and I requested a dinner plate. I was still on time! ...

I intended to write a beautiful entry in the blog someday but Joseph intercepted me emerging upstairs to the control room and decided that I could start writing at 3 am, in our shift of 24 hours on a row, so let me invite you to enjoy my tiredness. Hello everyone 🙂 You can María ...

Before we shut MagAO-X down to prepare it for the summit, we had some last-minute tests to do. Over breakfast, Laird and Jared kept talking about “doing the green laser”, which I assumed was some kind of dance move and/or illicit drug. It turns out they actually wanted to send a green laser through the ...

The Leiden team is so back! It is now the Europeans’ turn to tell you about their magical journey to LCO. Throughout the full blog post, we will also play a little game: Find the differences! We left Amsterdam without delay and got to Madrid 6 hours before our next flight. Plenty of time to waste ...

Hey it’s ya boi, JK. No really, Jay here with the latest updates pertaining to the 2025A run. We experienced a very colorful and interesting journey getting here, as we saw in Parker’s previous post. That entire expedition had us pretty much saying to each other out loud, ““Where are you Going? So full of ...

Our travel adventures started in Tucson with joy, enthusiasm, and most importantly, an on-time departure to Atlanta. We carried this positivity through lunch, where we stopped at Jared’s Go To spot. We followed that up with some grease from TGIF’s. As they say, all good things must come to an end, and sure enough our flight ...