[TYPING] “combustion… point… cardboard…”
The 26A run is well and truly moving along now. We had our first sunburn, a visit to a fellow Clay instrument (Lightspeed) and some more of the team (Katie, Parker and Tiffany) joining today.
On our first and second day of work, Sebastiaan and I targeted the vibes of the instrument – tip/tilt dominated residuals that limit what we can do at our science plane. These aberrations could come from several sources – heat differences from warm motors/cameras causing convection, turbulence from fans/the blower and/or vibrations on the bench. The hunch from the team was more on the former, but we named the tests about the latter since the name sounded cooler. Sebastiaan and I came here armed with some high tech equipment to try and reduce these effects – about €20 of poster tubes and some old posts.
So read on to learn more about what could be the most bang-for-buck improvement to MagAO-X…
Back to kindergarten…
Yesterday we did arts & crafts. This involved measuring distances, sharpy-ing hole locations and opening/closing the instrument many times. Every time we made a significant change we took some data for later analysis to see if things actually improve rather than doing rms-by-eye.
In the theme of going back to primary school, we also had a petting zoo visit after dinner.
Bench seeing results
Today I did the analysis of the data. TLDR: We found a 6x reduction of the bench seeing effects with just a few pieces of cardboard! This translates to a ~50x improvement in raw contrast for a second order chronograph.
Each column is a different direction. Top row is the power spectrum density, bottom row is the cumulative standard deviation (square root of integral of PSD up to frequency). Units are in mas assuming 5.98 mas/px. Blue: using or not using FLOWFS doesn’t change much when there is bench seeing (no FLOWFS case not shown for clarity). green/red/orange: both the tubes and the blower status seem to matter, consistent with the blower being the next most dominant turbulence source after area covered by tubes.
Color of the Day
“Woodland Hearth” a.k.a Cardboard brown a.k.a Burrow fur
Song of the Day
Sticking with the theme of the anti-vibes tubes, I present Paint Tape it black (the Westworld instrumental since I slightly prefer it!)