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 only had to do some minor alignment of VIS-X to the MagAO-X output beam. Everything was aligned by the middle of the afternoon. No more mornings full of alignment for me!!!!
While I was doing the alignment on VIS-X, Laird was leading a small group to check on the MagAO ASM. The MagAO ASM is going back to Tucson after many years of living at LCO.
Laird invited everyone to have a last look at the ASM before it goes off to it’s new destination. Jared was not interested and tried to ignore the existence of the ASM. We now have MagAO-X which is a lot of fun! The MagAO-X OCAM2K was recently updated with new binning modes that should improve our performance on fainter targets. Jared was busy trying to figure out how the new binning modes could be calibrated. This was not straight forward.
The animal of today is Carlos and he showed up during dinner as a nice surprise.
After dinner, Eden took all the LCO first timers to see the other telescopes on the mountain top.
Song of the day: