Welcome to the first blog post of this run from the Leiden team! It’s great to be back up at LCO. Matthijs and I are starting to feel the seasonal depression leaving our bodies thanks to the good old vitamin D we are soaking up these days. Incredible what such a small thing is capable of. Speaking of which, today we talk about many small things that make a huge difference: From optics to spiders. There must have been some confusion lately… Sometimes even small details can change everything! For every picture of today’s blog post there is something right or wrong. Check hover text for the solution.
Many new additions to MagAO-X today. Last night, after a long journey and before going to sleep, I have installed my new PIAACMC masks. I am very proud of my cute little babies, and I hope I will show you some nice results in the next nights of observations. Katie and Laird have worked relentlessly today and brought important improvements to the instrument! First, they have installed a brand new periscope mirror (ttmperi) that is now much smaller and has a much higher stroke. Katie designed a stage plate so that our beloved heroes, Sebastiaan and Laird, won’t have to walk up the platform anymore between observations to pull in or out a mirror to use VIS-X: Now this can be done automatically with a stage that moves up and down! They have also added an old telsim aperture stop (that re-creates the Magellan aperture) and rotated it so that the lab and on-sky alignment are much more similar and consistent. Finally, they have put in a new mount, new filter, and the shutter for LLOWFS (Lyot low order wavefront sensor) with an extra contribution from Parker. What to say, team… Excellent work!
We have also found some small friends (but not the ones y’all were hoping for) around the observatory today. Let’s review them together.
And now we can really say it, Katie has become the queen of the 2025B MagAO-X upgrades. Really bopping to the top.
At the end of the day, Miles and Matthijs also took lots of flat field data (Miles is still working as I am writing).
All the many recent “small” changes to the instrument added up, leading us to have to refocus the science cameras on the coronagraph masks, so tomorrow we will have to work on that. We only have a few more hours before we start packing up the instrument and move it up the mountain top. Stay tuned for the next blog post to see MagAO-X bop to the top as well together with Katie!
Fun fact of the day
Before being an astronomer I was an aerospace engineer. Before I was an aerospace engineer I studied languages about 16 hours per week in high school (yeah, I changed my mind quite a few times in my life). This means I know random facts about literature from different countries. So, today I’m gonna share with you my favorite literature+sciencey fun fact: The etymology of the term “quark”! It comes from one of my favorite writers of all time, James Joyce. In his book Finnegans Wake (which, by the way, still keeps professors and translators awake at night after more than a century!!) he writes:
"Three quarks for Muster Mark!
Sure he hasn't got much of a bark
And sure any he has it's all beside the mark."
This book is full of puzzles, jokes, puns, words spelled wrong, and words literally invented by Joyce that he doesn’t bother to explain – sometimes they can be understood from the context. This is why this book is very difficult to understand or translate. Again, very in line with the theme of my blog post today…
The discoverer of quarks found this term in the book and decided to use it to name his newly-found particles, since you need three quarks to make a proton or a neutron!
Song of the day
I have recently seen Radiohead live, and I must confess this song was my inspiration for the theme of the blog today. But for my elite Radiohead fans, I must also say something like Daydreaming (gorgeous song, among my absolute favs) or Fake Plastic Trees, could also do with today’s theme.