Category: MagAO-X

Well here we go, on our way home. Wow this run felt long, even though we only had 7 nights. The first group of us got here 10 days early, though as is typical we mostly sat around waiting for a shipment to arrive.

In truth we did an unreal amount of work. From overhauling our instrument’s glycol cooling to fixing all the vibrations to installing a new infrared camera, this has been action packed. And it all works!

Our last day/night was not without excitement. Over the last two nights our AO Operators Computer (AOC) has been randomly freezing up. My little buddy (read as either GPT-5 or Joesph, your choice) had lots of ideas. After a dawn reboot it was still spewing disk errors when I woke up this afernoon, so we decided to do some troubleshooting.

In the end we didn’t actually learn anything. We did stop the freezes, but not the disk errors, so we have fewer ideas than when we started.

At least the computer came back up and is operational except for a [_UUU] we have to fix before we leave.

Here’s the craziest part: this isn’t even the end of the run. We have 13 more nights coming up, but we’ll be driving MagAO-X from the friendly confines of Steward Observatory. Another adventure begins.

The color of day is a moonlit-sky-blue

The song of the day is Nothing Else Matters by Metallica

This is my first blog post of the run even though I have already been here for nearly two weeks! It’s great to be back again at LCO. After being here for so many observing runs it is starting to feel like a second home. And it is almost time to go back because tonight was our second to last night of in person observing at LCO. As is tradition, we ensticken the instrument before we start observing. This is a tribute to please the weather gods and grant us good seeing. Due to some unspecified reason, we did not ensticken the instrument until last night. And miraculously, we had good seeing for the whole week! So to make certain we continue this streak, we finally added the 2026A sticker onto the instrument.

And how we hoped that the amazing seeing would continue. Yesterday was great again after the telescope was back on its feet after a brush with a motor. So, today what could happen? The instrument is performing really well. The telescope is back in action. Our team finally switched our biorhythms to the night schedule. We had great food. There was fun. There was excitement. And then the atmosphere took a big dump on us.

The night started off great. The seeing was dropping. Justin Homs was observing remotely. And he was for the first time getting amazing MagAO-X data for his exciting Roman vetting campaign. And then that happened. The seeing went officially off the charts. And that was not the end of it.

Throughout the night we had extremely variable seeing with patchy and thick clouds rolling over our observations. The atmosphere did try to convince us that it loved us. Look at the nice heart-shaped PSF we got from the atmosphere.

It was only between 2:00 and 3:00 (24h format FTW), that the seeing started to settle and give us a chance at correcting the atmosphere. And my dear readers, that is exactly the moment it switched to my observing time for the night. The second half of the night was used to do some new controls engineering. We had two exciting success stories. The first is that we finally got the ADC control to work robustly !!!

And the final excited result is that we got predictive tip/tilt control working! This has been a pet project of mine that I started working on in 2018 after reading Olivier Guyon’s paper on Empirical orthogonal functions. So, stay tuned and I will show some results soon at a conference near you.

Song of the day:

The color of today is red because of the atmosphere’s love for us. And therefore, the song of today is Be My Lover from La Bouche.

Algunos años han pasado desde mi última colaboración con este blog, aunque ya no son tan populares, este sí mantiene su vigencia con el aporte constante de sus integrantes. ¡ FELICITACIONES !

NIEVE
El años pasado tuvimos algunas jornadas con nieve, se cubre el paisaje de blanco, blanco invierno si buscamos en una ferretería el color exacto.

CÓNDORES
A fines de año, durante semanas, nos visitaron los cóndores, andaban las hembras con sus crías, no vi los machos asique rescaté una foto anterior para presentarlos a ambos. Los machos con un cuello blanco los distingue.

GUANACO
Este guanaco es campeón, apareció en el mes de Marzo Calendario LCO 2026.
Cada vez que nos encontramos uno de ellos se siente su majestuosidad, su tranquilidad al vernos, conviviendo en este desierto.

CIELO
Las coincidencias de Luna y nubes ocurren durante el año, a la distancia las últimas podrían confundirse con signos de guerra, la Luna la paz.
Esperar que los vientos de guerra lleguen a su fin, que podamos disfrutar de este planeta que nos permite contemplar las maravillas de los cielos nocturnos.

LUNA saliendo
Comenzando a despertar, la Luna aparece tímidamente por el Este, mientras su amigo el Sol se va a dormir.

Color of the day

El color nos lo entrega la última imagen, un amarillo esperanza para todos nosotros.

Song of the day

La canción, acorde a la temática, Scorpions – Wind Of Change (Official Music Video), porque hoy más que nunca, a cada instante vivimos los cambios.

The day began with the LCO engineers troubleshooting an issue we were having with the telescope last night. After spending many hours during the night and 10 hours during the day, they were able to determine there was an open loop somewhere in the motor through electrical measurements. They found the part that was causing the issue and replaced it with a spare. Big thanks for the great work and quick work done by all the LCO engineers and staff to resolve this and allow us to get back to normal operations in the evening.

The night started off with a former MagAO-X group member, Logan Pearce, joining us from Michigan for the first half of the night. She was able to successfully observe multiple stars with potential white dwarf companions.

The next part of the night we were joined by another former MagAO-X member, Lauren, who is now in New Mexico. We spent the majority of the time working on imaging and using AO on extended objects, which will be an important feature for GMagAO-X since it will be resolving objects.

We ended the last couple hours of the night back with Logan, as well as her student, Emi. There final target was a very interesting observation of a binary star system with the potential for an additional brown or white dwarf gravitational bound too.

A day at LCO isn’t complete without reviewing the local wildlife encounters.

About a dozen Burros refused to let me walk up to the summit, and a few of them even began walking up the path toward me trying to intimidate me, which worked.

Color of the day: Guy Fiery Flavor Town Donkey Sauce

Song of the Day

I really hope we never have to align these cubes again!

Laird Close, MagAO-X 2026A Day 7

Today Laird and I aligned the beamsplitter cubes again. This time we discovered a faulty clamp, which is a better explanation for our constantly having to re-align than “perhaps someone is hexing us.” We’re confident that the problem is fixed for real this time–but if it happens again, we might have to seriously question if we’ve accidentally triggered an ancient curse.

The last two nights have been entirely engineering blocks, so tonight was the first time we had dedicated science time. Thanks to our hard work during engineering, the new infrared camera was up and ready to go for Sebastiaan’s observations at the beginning of the night. After the appropriate amount of ooh-ing and ah-ing over the exquisite stability of the H-band images, we spent some time looking for little guys:

Sebastiaan being Sebastiaan, we also had another tech demo to do tonight. After a long and arduous FedEx journey, a new coronagraph mask arrived at the telescope a few days ago. This very special mask, fabricated by our friends at UCSB, is a metasurface: a material with tiny (think nanometer-scale) structures printed on it that make light behave in very strange ways. This specific part is designed to function as a coronagraph at one wavelength and as a wavefront sensor at a different wavelength. Tonight was the first time a metasurface has been used for high-contrast imaging on a real star!

Sadly, we hit a bit of a snag with the telescope hardware during the second half of the night. It’s always a huge bummer to miss out on telescope time, so here are some of today’s animal friends as a consolation prize:

The color of the day is golden-hour-culpeo:

Song of the Day