MagAO-eXtreme Posts

I’m a C++ programmer, which means I’ve been here for a week. Consequences include I’m doing laundry already, and I have no idea what day of the week it is (that might be a memory leak joke). Sebastiaan and Warren arrived today, and immediately started tearing the instrument apart (as expected). The XKID crew ...

Today Laird and I continued alignment on MagAO-X with some frustration but ultimately success. The MKIDS team has provided us (among other additions) with a new dichroic that has made a nice addition to the instrument. Keeping up with MagAO-X fashion to consistently sneak new things onto the table in fun mechanical ways! Occasional robotic and sometimes ...

For better or worse, the original MagAO-X NSF proposal included funds to bring a brand new type of camera to the party – a superconducting sensor array that runs at 0.1 degrees above absolute zero. The big idea is that these arrays can tell you the energy of every photon that hits them, without ...

This blog post was titled—somewhat optimistically—earlier today, but rest assured, dear reader: MagAO-X is even more alive now than when I wrote that. There is a polemic I could write about the Linux kernel’s casual attitude toward hardware support, but the short version is: we got everything reinstalled and connected and closed the loop in ...

Today started auspiciously, with a double viz: A viscacha on the left And a viscacha on the right And there was a distant guanaco: A guanaco looking back at me Plus this little guy: A tarantula crossing the road to Magellan But alas, we ended the night with the decision to undo the last two days of Joseph’s hard work and abandon ...

We had a modestly productive day today. Our main goal during these first couple of lab days is to overhaul our instrument control computer (ICC). Joseph has been arguing with it all day, and maybe has it coming into shape as of sunset tonight. The day started with a Vizzy visit. Vizzy the ...

Jared and I traveled to Las Campanas Observatory over the last 24 hours, and we’re finally ready to relax get things ready before the rest of the team rolls up. Also, the travel day blog has unofficially served as the repository for surprises, changed policies, and caveats for travelers in These Unprecedented Times—so I better ...

As we wait for the first members of MagAO-X make their way to Chile for 23A, we bring you a holdover over from the 22B run, an extensive review of food at Las Campanas. When we live up on a mountain for weeks on end with the same folks day-in and day-out, we start to get ...

MagAO-X and the eXtreme Wavefront Control Lab are affiliated with the Alien Earths project, an interdisciplinary collaboration led by Dániel Apai. I was going to list off the disciplines that they are inter-ing, but they said it best on their website: Our Alien Earths team includes experts in planet formation, exoplanet detection and characterization, planet formation, ...

This year has been a wild ride, which is to say, kind of on par with a normal pre-pandemic year. Conferences were held, telescopes were observed through, new people joined the program in real life (rather than Zoom™) and it wasn’t a big deal. This post is not a retrospective, however. This post is to document ...