MagAO-eXtreme Posts

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 ...

Today is still ongoing, as I write this blog post at 1 am. I’m currently holed up in the library at the ASB writing my butt off for this 51 Peg proposal. It’s basically like 12-16 pages of highly polished material that they’re requesting for the application, so it’s a lot of work. To keep ...

Walking back in the dark with Jay tonight under quiet stars, I remarked that “even though I arrived yesterday it already feels like a week, but in a good way.” Long days can do that – leaving the cleanroom at 12:00am was pushing well into our sixteenth hour of work. Time in general though has ...

Warren and I made it up the mountain without any necessary running. However, due to the leftover storms from Hurricane Helene, the ride was bumpier than usual thus less sleep than usual. Progressively disheveled. We didn’t want to be left out of Empanada Sunday, even though we technically didn’t arrive till Monday morning, so we managed ...

One of the big goals for this visit to LCO was to troubleshoot a coupled pair of actuators on our precious 2040 actuator “tweeter” deformable mirror (DM). Being coupled meant that when we poked actuator 498, actuator 650 moved (not 498). Actuator 650 also moved when we poked 650. We first noticed ...

Let me tell you about our trip. Jared and I were scheduled to leave on Thurs. 09/27, however our Tucson flight was delayed to the point where we would have missed our ATL-SCL connection, so we got the opportunity to rebook. Whether or not this was due to Hurricane Helene, we’re not sure. Because ATL-SCL on ...