MAPS posts

We started the night with a group photo featuring the stars of the show: the 6.5-meter primary and our beloved ASM watching over us from directly above our heads. It’s a good thing Ruby, Dan and the MMT day-crew gang ensured its secure installation. Courtesy of TO Ben Kunk. Peep Amali in her muppet coat! She’s just too cool for French fashion school.(no ...

Hello! I am a former MagAO-Xer cutting her teeth in the adaptive secondary world as a new member of the MAPS team. Last night, as winds hurdled through the dome, and I was crouched under the MIRAC mid-IR imager attached to the MAPS topbox (aka WFS unit), trying to see what knobs my fellow optical ...

Welcome to the last blog for the MAPS August 2024 observing run! The evening started off with Grant and Oli performing an LED strip test that would allow us to more clearly see out of focus images on our pupil lens and visible wavefront sensor. The LED light strip was placed in front of the ...

The duality of nature is something I’ll never stop wondering at: my first post came to you on a night so action-packed, I felt incapable of writing every detail down. Last night, however, we didn’t leave lightning shutdown. To bide the time in hopes of some sky-time, Amali guided me through the MAPS CACAO simulation; from ...

Hello! My name is Lauren. Similarly to Bianca (introduced in the last blog post), I am research staff for CAAO, and the second padawan under the great Amali Vaz. This is my sixth MAPS observing run, and I have been given the duty of making my first blog post! Since we are currently clouded over, ...

Howdy! I’m Bianca; formally I am research staff for CAAO, but you may have heard of me as one of the padawans under the tutelage of AO Jedi Knight Amali Vaz. This is my 5th MAPS observing run and my first blog post! Last night was the most action-packed night I’ve yet to experience, so let’s ...

Tonight we first took a bunch of ASM latency measurements with different tuning parameters for Jess — took about 3 hours to get 5 iterations, may do more tomorrow night. (Well, this was after being closed for clouds for the first couple hours of the night, same as last night.) Then we moved on to CACAO ...

Last night was the first night after the summer shutdown and despite the forecast we were open for most of the night! We’re using MIRAC as the PSF viewer and found the first star pretty fast! We aligned the pupil, tested the rotational centering, tried the -300mm and -250mm lenses in front of the VisWFS ...

Today was the last day of SPIE Astronomical Telescopes & Instrumentation 2024 and tonight was the last night of MAPS June 2024A. Joseph gave a nice talk (second-to-last of the conference) with MagAO-X data: Joseph Long giving a talk in the PSF reconstruction session. Meanwhile at the MMT we tested our previous CACAO calibration, took a new one ...

Today/tonight Dan and Amali went down, Dan and Oli came up, and Craig and Oli went down. Oli brought up six (6) new negative lenses ranging from f=-100 to -1000mm to test the Vis WFS pupil focus. We took another image set with the current lens (f=-300mm) and then swapped it out for each of ...