It feels a little strange to call this post Day 1 because by now we’re in the full swing of things in the cleanroom. Today, the big instrument alignment tasks revolved around the Atmospheric Dispersion Correctors, a.k.a. ADCs, which are somehow both my arch-nemeses as well as my best friends. Laird and I had to improvise a bit, but we successfully added in another wedged plate to undo some of the dispersion we see on the pyramid tip. It might not look like much, but hopefully it helps MagAO-X’s pyramid wavefront sensor to function better.
Not pictured is the progress Josh has made on aligning his visitor instrument in his own corner of the cleanroom – more on that in the coming days.
Speaking of corners of the cleanroom, there’s a spot where we keep all of our lab gear where, over the course of a few years, we have accumulated a fair number of lab coats. Call it hoarding or call it pragmatism, we seem to bring a few down every trip but are always reluctant to throw the old ones away. Well, today our excess of bunny suits came in handy. This afternoon a group of VIPs, hosted by GMT, came into the cleanroom to see a real-live adaptive optics demo. Naturally, we had to ensure that we all wore matching outfits (because dust has no respect for visitors):
And while the graduate students weren’t cool enough to get an invite to eat world-famous fried chicken with the bigwigs, we did get to piggyback on another treat for our visitors: eyepiece observing. Late last night we hiked it down to the 1-meter Henrietta Swope Telescope and looked at a few objects including a globular cluster, the Tarantula Nebula, and a familiar object that Parker was able to get a decent phone photo of:
Song of the Day
Unfortunately, the number of bugs up here seems to have super bloomed alongside the flowers: