MagAO-eXtreme Posts

Do you have what it takes to be the next great AO operator? Well today is the day that tests your mettle. Starting as bright an early as our crane operators will let us, we do a little bit of everything this 24hr shift. We pack, we crane, we unpack, we unwrap, we level, we ...

We are less than 24 hours from observing and it was crunch time today! We needed fuel so thankfully Sundays at LCO are empanada days! Chef’s kiss Laird and Jared were making bets on how long till we get a “grumpy cat”, ie an error message in our computer’s hardware tracking system, once we are on-sky. ...

Today was an eventful day. Almost every blog post by me has mentioned VIS-X, the beautiful integral field spectrograph for MagAO-X. And, every run up to know had me doing optical alignment on the Nasmyth platform during morning shifts (after observing 🙁 ). This time the optical alignment finally did not drift during shipment! I ...

I hope you enjoy content from the newbies! It was Josh’s first blog post yesterday, so naturally it was my turn for a blog debut today. Actual footage of me when my alarm went off this morning Gary came over again to say good morning (and strut his stuff) With the loop having been closed at the end ...

Gary Guanaco gazing into the abyss. Gary werkin’ it for the camera. Hello and welcome to my first ever blog post! Day 2 began with yet another Gary sighting–our good luck charm for the DM cabling and optical alignment to come. Following our daily dosage of guanaco, we got to work in the clean room. Me wearing sunglasses ...

The sun rising on a day of unpacking. Is there anything more tantalizing than an fresh, unopened box of MagAO-X? This team just couldn’t resist. The unpacking festivities started at the first call of the returning night shift astronomers and did not finish until our good friend Orion had completely risen. The very first gift ...

It’s been a whole year but the team is back! The unpacking and alignment crew arrived at the beautiful Las Campanas Observatory this afternoon. Josh is there we promise! Fun fact: if you have items to declare upon arrival to Chile, your line takes you to a fun sign that only you and your advisor get ...

Maggie giving her HCAT talk, overviewing phasing on the testbed. GMagAO-X just hit another big milestone, we just finished up its Preliminary Design Review (PDR). If you haven’t been to one before, a PDR is a chance for a design to be critiqued and tweaked before moving on. If a project does well on its PDR, ...

MagAO-X is up and off to the great mountain in the south! As we are approaching our next great observing run, this time in two parts: 2024Aa in March (14 nights) and 2024Ab in May (10 nights). We spent the week packing her up and buttoning her down, and today saw her stuffed ...

Hello from Arizonans in California! I just got back from the UC Santa Cruz Center for Adaptive Optics (CfAO) Fall retreat, where members of the AO work through some of the pressing problems in the field. This year was focused on High Contrast imaging testbeds, lessons learned from Magellan’s MagAO-X and Subaru’s SCExAO and what ...