Today, while waiting for my time to work in the cleanroom that – spoiler – never arrived, I have put my ornithologist and botanist cap on and embarked on a journey to explore the happy wildlife at this unusually green LCO. But first, the actual important bits of the day.
The cleanroom-ing
I did go to the cleanroom in the morning and installed new PIAACMC “with bias” masks whose simulated performance is crazy good, but actual performance is still unknown. I also re-installed an SCC “tilt” mask – Yes, we didn’t have an SCC mask in the instrument for more than a year! I removed it from the instrument for reasons I cannot remember (in my defense, I was extremely sleep deprived during 2025A), and Sebastiaan tried to look for it during 2026A without success (he gave real boy look, cause today I found it in like 5 seconds). Anyhow, I will align them and take some data tomorrow so stay tuned for updates on the new PIAACMC masks.
Katie and Laird have been doing real good work today, re-aligning the small prism after the ADCs to try and eliminate the dispersion on the camscis. Their plan was to also re-aligning the entire pyramid path, but rotating the prism did not deviate the beam as much as they thought it would, unfortunately. Finally, they re-aligned the dispersion compensator plate for camtip, which turned out to be not dispersive enough for their liking… but I think they still did a great job today.
In the meantime Josh, was assembling and aligning his Spatially-Clipped Self-Coherent Camera (SCSCC) experiment in the visitor port, with Sebastiaan’s support. Lots of beam gymnastics were required to comfortably fit it there, but they managed to obtain their first PSFs with their fancy, new high-speed CMOS camera on MagAO-X!
The bird-ing
As mentioned already in the first blog post of this run, LCO is exceptionally green these days. This means there are lots of flowers and and very happy birds hopping around and singing. Shout out to Leah from 2025B who made me discover the app Merlin and got me into birding. Hover or long press the pictures to discover fun facts and names of birds. I know nothing about plants, but enjoy the pretty pictures and try to spot the bee.
Song of the day
The song of the day is the jazz standard “Lullaby of Birdland”, in the version of Nikki Yanofsky. Many of you know I love singing and it’s about time you hear something by me. I used to sing this song when I was about 16 and was exploring a bit of jazz, although it’s not my strongest suit. Hope you still enjoy!
Ps. before someone complains that Birdland is not a creature, the lyrics talk about doves and Miles said it’s allowed. Cheers!