MagAO-eXtreme Posts

Well, it’s nearly time to add another MagAO-X night under our belt and be greeted by the calls of the exceedingly uncommon black-billed shrike-tyrant (identified by Prof. Close!) from atop the lodge. I won’t be able to top the wonderful post by our skilled telescope operator, but the show must go on. The Magellan Clay ...

After a long time, MagAO-X has arrived at Las Campanas, bringing the full team and others partners. It is a crowd that keep you alert all night long.  This past Summer 2024 we were visited by several “friends” coming from the valley and also from high mountains. Apart from burros, vizcachas, we had “crias de cóndor ...

It appears precedent has been set by An astronomer’s guide to Valparaíso and Bonus Feature: Santiago de Chile. So here is the chronicle of Katie’s and my traipse through La Serena, Chile on our way back to Tucson. First and foremost we hit the beach! Just like California on the other side of the equator, the ...

Around sunset, two of our finest graduate student AO operators took time lapses of the dome opening. Jay covered the inside of the dome, providing us with a view of the primary mirror cover opening. Eden on the other hand, set her phone on the tripod outside the dome and managed to get a video ...

Every MagAO-X morning begins with a hearty breakfast. Jialin and Logan enjoying their pigs in a duvet. Jialin constructs a finderscope. Jay constructs a breakfast hot dog. Sebastiaan makes an interesting face. Following a scrumptious meal and a full night of observing, I entered hibernation. … … Zzzzzzzzzzzz While I was in my state of low activity, the other group members observed a ...

We finally had an all-night good night. Started with what we call engineering, which means testing new ways of operating the instrument. The big news is that Sebastiaan got his “implicit Electric Field Conjugation” algorithm to work on-sky. This brings MagAO-X almost to its as-planned fully capability. Here’s what that looks ...

If you’ve been around this blog a time or two you’ve probably heard our woes with respect to seeing — the measurement of just how twinkly the stars are. Twinkling is bad for science, and our instrument can’t operate well if the seeing is too high. We started this run with some pretty ...

“Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (Viscacha Edition)” by Caspar David Friedrich and an AI The day-to-day operation of an experimental extreme adaptive optics instrument, pushing all the boundaries at once, can feel like lurching from crisis to crisis. We need to get better airflow in the bowels of our electronics rack. We need to automate ...

Clay and the moon, aka the massless particle in a RTBP, at sunset. It’s the first double digit day of the 2024Aa run! As the master scheduler, tonight’s time is finely chopped up into four different blocks. Let’s hear what the MagAO-X scientists are doing for the night, and maybe ask them some fun questions. Ok, ...

Now’s about the time of the run where the nightly routine just starts to become second nature; eyes are less bloodshot and twilight is here before you know it. We’ll start this post off with some sunset glamour shots… Biiiig telescope Today we were all a bit sad to bid farewell to Katie and Maggie who are ...