MAPS posts

Tonight we worked more on alignment of the WFS pupils (both WFS’s). At the start of the night we attached a cardboard “knife edge” to the ASM so that we could compare the primary mirror and secondary mirror images. MMT ASM hanging in the pre-twilight sky with a cardboard “knife edge” attached to posts. Here’s the resulting ...

Today was the first day of the conference and my talk: “Commissioning MAPS, the MMT AO exoPlanet characterization System.” It went pretty well and it’s also nice to be done with that right at the start of the week! There were a few MAPS-ers in the audience and here’s a photo by one of them, ...

I’m going to write nightly updates like last run, even though this time I’m observing remotely from the SPIE Astronomical Telescopes & Instrumentation conference in Yokohama, Japan! Luckily Manny, Jenny, Craig, Grant, Dan, Amali, Bianca, Lauren, and Jorge are there to run things locally. (Night 1 was 2024/06/14-15th but I’m writing this a little late, ...

A good final night to an excellent run! Tonight was our last night this run. I’m really happy with all the progress we made! It was definitely helped by the fact that this is our best-weather run ever, with the highest percentage of useable time: We were open for 5.6/6 nights, or 93% efficiency! We observed Arcturus ...

Our science cameras image the star in the focal plane, and our wavefront sensors image the star in the pupil plane. A conjugate plane is where your alignment needs to be in order to get those images in focus. After tonight we are wondering whether our VisWFS pupils are conjugate to the telescope pupil. Summed VisWFS ...

We made a lot of AO progress tonight! We switched over to the VisWFS and CACAO, and started with measuring latency (mlat). Jared and Olivier joined us on Zoom and helped debug some settings that were causing us to think our hardware latency was noisy and to suspect timing issues or simlinking the slopes instead ...

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 ...