MAPS posts

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 ...

Tonight we worked with the Vis WFS and got up to 50 modes we think. We also made the pupils rounder: Left: “Centered Pupils” from a couple nights ago. Right: After new flattening and 50 modes tonight. And at the start of the night we took some darks for Suresh to figure out the IR WFS camera: Left: ...

We never opened the dome tonight, due to high winds. And in Yokohama it rained hard all day. Manny went down and Dan came up. Dan and Amali measured voltages on various pins of the SAPHIRA under Suresh’s guidance. Based on their measurement, the detector temperature matches what is observed by the cold head. So it ...

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, ...