MAPS posts

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 ...

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 ...

Tonight we had great weather: low winds, moderate humidity, good seeing (0.6”–0.8”), and spent the whole night from civil dusk to civil dawn on bright stars near zenith! We stuck with the IR WFS and did calibrations and noise measurements all night long. For example, here is a Hadamard Matrix measurement using CACAO to look ...

Tonight felt a lot like whiplash, from tired to energized to tired to energized, from starry to humidity to starry, and from failure to fix to failure to fix! First of all the MAPS daytime/nighttime/whenevertime support crew (Oli, Grant, Dan) drove up this afternoon with the repaired (by Ken) bias board for the CCID-75 LittleJoe controller, ...

As a current resident of Arizona and a former resident of New Mexico, part of me must celebrate when water falls from the sky in these drought-stricken drylands or deserts. As an astroengineer and astrophysicist, it does make observing …difficult. Either way, it’s still beautiful: Afternoon at The Ridge. [Image description: A mountain scene straight outta ...