So far, Laird and Sebastiaan have been doing an excellent job directing the in-person crew and we’ve made great progress towards the many tasks that needed to be done before the start of the big move on Wednesday.
Here, we see a lot of the team watching and learning during Tuesday morning’s initial alignment procedures as we prepare to install all the fancy new Lyot and focal plane masks brought down from Tucson.
The first optomechanical task of the day was to install the special masks for the new self-coherent camera. Check out the pinhole on the very upper edge of the mask when held up to Eden’s computer screen! That little pinhole, we’ve since learned, is the key for fancy new speckle-nulling strategies, like Coherent Differential Imaging. Sebastiaan’s and Parker’s faces says it all
… and after a bit of alignment work from the team, the mask is aligned!
Here is the result: there are fringes on the camsci images indicating that light from the pinhole is interfering with the light that transmits through the Lyot stop. Neat! If I were a quasistatic speckle I’d sure be sweating right now.
We broke for lunch and afterwards, it was time to finish up other miscellaneous tasks such as some interior cable organization, reconfiguring the power pathways for the Zaber stages, and squashing some LED lights inside the instrument.
We were initially just assigned the Suzuki for Clay observers “Lil Red” for our daily needs but we quickly realized that our transportation needs weren’t being met. After an email or two, we got permission to use one of the Suzuki Jimnys a.k.a. one of the super cool, white Jurassic Park-looking cars. Score!
One of the smaller tasks of the day was installing a small cable tray inside MagAO-X to help tidy up some of the pico motor cabling we had installed last month during the engineering run. These plastic trays required some slight modifications, which required a trip to the machine shop in the ASB. It’s not often any of us find our way in here, so it was cool to see…!
We had some time after dinner to enjoy the fading of the evening sunlight. some of us drove, some walked, and one of us ran.
From the Rocky Theme Song. We were attempting to do some vizzy spotting on the north slope of the telescope summit with P. Johnson who suddenly looked like he saw a ghost after looking at his phone. We asked what was wrong since this caught all of our attention and he, with a slight mumble of “Jared wants me…!”, ran off into the setting sun. So, when you’re checking out the telescope summit and you get a Slack message from Jared saying it’s time to Zoom, you best start zooming son.
“
Trying hard now
It’s so hard now
Trying hard now
Getting strong now
Won’t be long now
Getting strong now
Gonna fly now
Flying high now
Gonna fly, fly, fly…
“
These summer sunsets are great. Hasta mañana.
