- 2024-05-19
Katie Morzinski
Conditions were great tonight — clear, not too windy, and seeing around 0.8” (definitely usable).
Also I updated yesterday’s post with some pictures and a song of the day.
Tonight was the second MIRAC night and the instrument had finished cooling and was nice and cold, so Jarron got to taking data! Unfortunately he had a vignetted ...
- 2024-05-18
Katie Morzinski
The first two nights of this run are for MIRAC (PI: Leisenring), while the last 4 are for AO (PI: Morzinski). Therefore I decided this was my chance to come up in the morning to see the installation of MAPS. See, usually I try and sleep in on the morning before a MAPS run, to ...
- 2024-03-24
Katie Morzinski
Night 5 started out with Manny and Dan cooking a delicious pancake/egg/sausage/bacon breakfast for the whole crew! Dan came up just to help Manny out, and a great time was had by all.
Post-breakfast, pre-sunset game of pool.
At sunset we were closed due to high winds, then the thick clouds rolled in. It looked like the ...
- 2024-03-23
Katie Morzinski
Despite the partly cloudy night, we fixed several issues and made a lot of progress!
MIRAC pupil alignment — an errant detent was corrected and the ellipsoidal mirror internal to MIRAC solved the mystery of co-aligning telescope, AO, + MIRAC pupils!
AO camera lens loop — finally got it calibrated, and working beautifully on-sky!
Pupils tracking and 20 ...
- 2024-03-22
Katie Morzinski
A much better night!
Sunset from the Bowl
So we were joined by our CACAO friends in Chile and Hawaii to take AO calibrations:
But we learned the camera lens loop was still a hold up so we spent a good long while trying to get it working as well:
The song of the night is the sound of ...
- 2024-03-21
Katie Morzinski
Tonight started cloudy and even with a little precipitation! (Which we just can’t bring ourselves to actually complain about, being children of the drought-stricket desert southwest.)
Image description: A closed telescope dome in front of thick clouds on a rocky mountain peak, with snow amongst the rocks and fluffy-looking pine trees in the foreground.
Image decription: Same ...
- 2024-03-20
Katie Morzinski
While the MagAO-X run is going on in Chile, your friendly neighborhood MAPS/MIRAC team has just summited Mt. Hopkins to run CACAO and take data on this side of the planet. We spent a lot of time trying to align our pupil planes and focal planes and WFS and science camera.
TopBox GUIs with ZWO pupil ...
- 2024-01-21
Katie Morzinski
Tonight we sought refuge from the snow at the Ridge and then in Tucson.
Here’s what we woke up to:
Photo by Bianca. Image description: Telescopes at the ridge in heavy fog.
Staying cozy in the ridge. Photo by Bianca. Image description: A view from inside of a window bay, a bit of a comfy recliner, and a ...
- 2024-01-21
Katie Morzinski
Weather tonight
We didn’t open tonight due to thick clouds. The MIRAC team took a lot of darks and dome “skies” to assess their QE and background noise. It started snowing around 2am and we left the dome ...
- 2024-01-20
Katie Morzinski
It’s a MAPS/MIRAC run! The semester is still 2023B but the year is 2024 and we are back commissioning again, this time the 10 micron Geosnap-enabled instrument MIRAC. Tonight we spent a lot of time on alignment, as we have changed pretty much everything post-telescope, from the dichroic to the detector placement! Pointing and centering ...