After the embarrassing fate of only the 3 professionals at the helm yesterday, our elders decided that today was the day to teach the youth how to run things. So this post is by and for the young ones. I took the reigns of the AO correction Mega Desk and closed a loop on my own for the first time on sky!
What is my actual project here? I’m syncing! (and it’s even going alright.) As of today we’ve set up a function generator to guide our wavefront sensing camera. Right now we are just using it to remotely stabilize the acquisition rate for the pyramid WFS camera, but eventually we will connect the pyramid modulator and WFS camera for applying incoherent speckles.
On the LOWFS side, Avalon successfully closed on nine modes in Z-band. But is still battling the good fight against speed. The team is planning on testing again with the camera going faster, which will hopefully will help them towards defeating the plague of astigmatism.
Her continued experiments are not the only thing that makes her a star grad student. She also was the finder of Jared’s glasses, which he had already searched the whole mountaintop for.
Jialin, after a few day’s heroic efforts on our observing schedule, got to her first science target tonight. Though seeing deteriorated, we were still able to get several hours of well corrected data and even resolved a disk.
Warren continues to survive marathon PIAA alignments, conjugation errors, and testing. Today he worked further at better alignment and characterization, but did not respond to requests for further comments.
Our merry crew continues to chug along, as our engineering nights start to transition to science and our system is better prepped than ever.
Finally, our first science result of the run, an extended source brought to us by Dr. Haffert that we collected yesterday.
Anonymous, (mostly) Out of Context Quotes pt.2:
“If you look at the DM, all it is is sparkles!”
as it should be
“It turns out that we put it in the wrong place”
our optics bench is quickly running out of room
“Well at least we put it somewhere”
“Eden, some things Jared says can be safely ignored”
a growth moment the PI did not disagree with
“It’s not loose, it’s a delicate construction. It’s a miracle that it works at all.”
from the creator, about the creation
“I feel like all of your sayings are … farmish”
to someone who is farm-adjacent
“Sometimes small true-true can’t apodize big true-true”
regarding PIAA, the everlasting mystery
“oh, I think I need to do… advanced sh*t.”
the group’s catchphrase
We cannot name the new workstation the “Coronagraph Operator Computer”
lines that conventions can’t cross
“I just get a bunch of old men optical engineers viewing my LinkedIn profile. Where are all the fun singles in my area?”
when job hunting is your only social media exposure
“I am currently rederiving s- and p-polarizations for waveguides”
no sympathy for cramped hands
“yeah, that’s a good thing.”
“I’m high-maintenance as heck.”
a princess and the pea moment
“Would you be terribly offended… if I spooned you?”
dinner table conversations
“What kind of a emergency?”
regarding why observatory parking space are back-in only
“… I don’t know, low Strehl?”
“What kind of bananas university do I belong to?”
“If anyone is going to eat my pear, it’ll be Warren”
playing defense on the midnight lunches
“When the f*** did we get a twitter?”
Upon being featured on our twitter @xwclab
Song of the Day:
From a dad rock get away to having the whole world on your shoulders.