We had some quality control stop by the remote operating room this evening. Though I wasn’t in attendance for the early shift, I did hear we passed with flying colors. Or flying animal crackers, as it were.
MagAO-X has been operating true to the golden rule “Having more things just means more things can go right.” Things going right, right in the nick of time, include our stagebs. This stage allows us choose what light to send to the WFS, either a percentage or a wavelength split (specifically H-alpha /IR). Without it, Jialin’s H-alpha observations would have had fewer photons of interest heading to the science camera. Cheers to Jared and the LCO crew for helping us sort it out before observations tonight.
We started the night observing for our highest tier MagAO-X loyalty member, Alycia Weinberger. Thankfully our seeing has returned to reasonable levels and was decent enough for a disk image (or four). A few weeks from now she’ll actually be in Chile observing on another instrument, and can give MagAO-X a good wave for us.
Jialin kept us on our toes in the wee hours of the morning with star hopping, a technique for reference differential imaging (RDI), as apposed to our more common angular differential imaging (ADI) approach. Rumor has it (because no one put it on the blog) that we’ve gone as fast as 39s in a hop between the target and reference star. Tonight we timed to 1m15s, which isn’t bad for a remote operation.
You could say we’ve gotten in the swing of things, hitting a standard of operation. See you next at the end of the month!
Color of the day:
I think in this marathon observing run the original rules still apply. So enjoy Oreo box blue, inspired by the true backbone of SO579.
