MagAO-X 2024B Day 6: Making Rainbows

Last night, after such quality science, and the night before with rapid fire engineering accomplished, tonight was set to be a good mix of the both. Jared engineering in the early eve and Sebastiaan reanimating the Vis-X visible spectrograph for the rest of the night.

Alas, the mountain had other ideas for how we should be entertained. But what’s a crisis to this elite team? What’s two? What’s three? We are robust, especially with a remote PI directing us like agents on chessboard. Today we survived a glycol booger, a power outage, and mysteriously missing vis-x camera software. Ultimately, it’s not a novel crisis that dampened the night, but our old enemy atmospheric seeing.

The strong, independent, folks keeping MagAO-X running. They don’t even have their PI on site.
The strong, independent telescope that keeps MagAO-X running. It doesn’t even have it’s TO on site.

Wakey, wakey, rise and shine, the computers are at 99 (deg C). Do not fear, the timely work of Parker and Jay before dinner, in which they had to squeeze the tubes and flush the filters and whatnot, halved the temperatures our control computers. Computers which we would prefer to not live at boiling temps.

Fig. 1. One should observe a sharp spike to 100 degrees, a gap as the computers went down for tube repairs, and then a much cooler system post fix.

The glycol team triumphantly entered the dining hall before service stopped, a real win considering how often we miss dinner for these kinds of things. The night was off to a good start with clear skies and decent seeing for the first few hours of engineering. By the time engineering wrapped up, things were looking very un-twinkly.

This DIMM number, for those who don’t live their life by them, is very, very good.

Next up, Sebastiaan. Which required half a postdoc professor in the instrument to shift the optics into a Vis-X configuration. Fingers in the blackbird pie, if you would. His spectrograph disperses visible light from 400-900nm in both low and high resolutions modes.

And then things got dark. Literally, the power went out for a good minute. It’s on again, off again, on again. But MagAO-X? It stayed on. A testament to ol’ reliable, the UPS’s. Almost simultaneously, Joseph sprinted to get camera software back where it should have been on ICC. No really, we should all be impressed and very grateful the whole thing didn’t fall apart. Take a bow, take a bow, take a bow.

Back in action, we were pumped to start seeing the spectra roll in:

Locking in on the first spectrograph target of the run.
The binary loud and clear on the spectrograph

But then we started to look more like this:

The face you don’t want to see sebastiaan make when the data comes in.

For no good reason, the seeing spiked. And when we say spike, we mean a dramatic 0.6″ to 1.7″ swing. And then we were looking at the DM struggling. The seeing was so unfriendly that even our backup backup engineering targets weren’t interested in the 6.5m telescope.

When the seeing gets above 1.5, MagAO-X starts to mock us.

This didn’t stop our tenacious dutchman from exposing till civil twilight.

See: The pink of pre-sunrise in the open door.

All things considered, it was a night. We’re still adjusting to the sleep schedule, and the people are sleepy. Enjoy some photos, and we’ll see you tomorrow. Hopefully we’ll get more of the 0.4″ nights and no more of this 1.2″ nonsense.

Bonus: inaccurate quoting

Thanks to Elena’s camera enthusiasm, we now have a little piece of midnight whimsy captured. For better or for worse. Hover for some choice quote picks that have been randomly assigned.

Thanks Elena! Thanks everyone for having no filter at 3am! or 3pm!

Song of the Day

As per the rules, lyrics from the song of the day can be found sprinkled throughout the blog.

Faust Arp by Radiohead