MAPS posts

Cell phone photo (!) by Suresh of the Milky Way over the MMTO last night. The nice thing about observing at the MMT rather than Magellan (even though they don’t haul food, meal prep, cook, nor ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...