I really hope we never have to align these cubes again!
Laird Close, MagAO-X 2026A Day 7
Today Laird and I aligned the beamsplitter cubes again. This time we discovered a faulty clamp, which is a better explanation for our constantly having to re-align than “perhaps someone is hexing us.” We’re confident that the problem is fixed for real this time–but if it happens again, we might have to seriously question if we’ve accidentally triggered an ancient curse.
The last two nights have been entirely engineering blocks, so tonight was the first time we had dedicated science time. Thanks to our hard work during engineering, the new infrared camera was up and ready to go for Sebastiaan’s observations at the beginning of the night. After the appropriate amount of ooh-ing and ah-ing over the exquisite stability of the H-band images, we spent some time looking for little guys:
Sebastiaan being Sebastiaan, we also had another tech demo to do tonight. After a long and arduous FedEx journey, a new coronagraph mask arrived at the telescope a few days ago. This very special mask, fabricated by our friends at UCSB, is a metasurface: a material with tiny (think nanometer-scale) structures printed on it that make light behave in very strange ways. This specific part is designed to function as a coronagraph at one wavelength and as a wavefront sensor at a different wavelength. Tonight was the first time a metasurface has been used for high-contrast imaging on a real star!
Sadly, we hit a bit of a snag with the telescope hardware during the second half of the night. It’s always a huge bummer to miss out on telescope time, so here are some of today’s animal friends as a consolation prize:
The color of the day is golden-hour-culpeo:
