MAPS posts

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 ...

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 ...