This is my first blog post of the run even though I have already been here for nearly two weeks! It’s great to be back again at LCO. After being here for so many observing runs it is starting to feel like a second home. And it is almost time to go back because tonight was our second to last night of in person observing at LCO. As is tradition, we ensticken the instrument before we start observing. This is a tribute to please the weather gods and grant us good seeing. Due to some unspecified reason, we did not ensticken the instrument until last night. And miraculously, we had good seeing for the whole week! So to make certain we continue this streak, we finally added the 2026A sticker onto the instrument.
And how we hoped that the amazing seeing would continue. Yesterday was great again after the telescope was back on its feet after a brush with a motor. So, today what could happen? The instrument is performing really well. The telescope is back in action. Our team finally switched our biorhythms to the night schedule. We had great food. There was fun. There was excitement. And then the atmosphere took a big dump on us.
The night started off great. The seeing was dropping. Justin Homs was observing remotely. And he was for the first time getting amazing MagAO-X data for his exciting Roman vetting campaign. And then that happened. The seeing went officially off the charts. And that was not the end of it.
Throughout the night we had extremely variable seeing with patchy and thick clouds rolling over our observations. The atmosphere did try to convince us that it loved us. Look at the nice heart-shaped PSF we got from the atmosphere.
It was only between 2:00 and 3:00 (24h format FTW), that the seeing started to settle and give us a chance at correcting the atmosphere. And my dear readers, that is exactly the moment it switched to my observing time for the night. The second half of the night was used to do some new controls engineering. We had two exciting success stories. The first is that we finally got the ADC control to work robustly !!!
And the final excited result is that we got predictive tip/tilt control working! This has been a pet project of mine that I started working on in 2018 after reading Olivier Guyon’s paper on Empirical orthogonal functions. So, stay tuned and I will show some results soon at a conference near you.
Song of the day:
The color of today is red because of the atmosphere’s love for us. And therefore, the song of today is Be My Lover from La Bouche.