MagAO-X 2025B Day 2: Detecting spurious acceleration

Parker has been working on detecting vibrations within MagAO-X using some fancy accelerometers and a Raspberry Pi™ and a bucket with a hole in it.

Parker’s holey bucket. (Photo by Katie Twitchell)

Also, we all had a chance to employ our god-given accelerometers later that evening, as Vallenar had a little baby earthquake just for us.

I spent the day mucking about with computers, as usual.

This is it, this is the year of Linux on the Desktop! (Photo by Jared Males)

Laird and Katie went looking for the spatial filter in our wavefront sensing optics and instead found what may be a second, secret spatial filter. Further research is required.

To be honest I’m not sure what Laird and Katie are doing here, but they look real professional in that getup. (Photo by Miles Lucas)
The pyramid wavefront sensor, so mysterious yet so vital. (Photo by Laird Close or possibly Katie Twitchell.)

Note: We have no more details to share at this time, as we cannot comment on an ongoing investigation. If anyone has a verified sighting of the pyramid wavefront sensor to report, please call the Las Campanas Observatory tip line. You may remain anonymous.

Our first shipment of Europeans arrives this Monday, so I’m sure there will be someone who can write a blog post.

Matthijs Mars getting some quality time in with his glowing rectangle. (Not pictured, photographer Elena Tonnucci.)

Song of the Day

I’ve been on a folk / Southern Gothic kick recently. This man really captures the feeling of working hard at a real job—or so I assume, having only worked silly little computer jobs.

“Fingers to the Bone” by Brown Bird

Fun Fact

I learned that Las Campanas Observatory has a seismic sensor / accelerometer deployed on the mountain itself feeding data to the USGS earthquake network. They even have pictures of the site on their webpage.

Photo via USGS.

(I assume it looks a little different, 14 years later.)