MAPS posts

As was stated in the Mary Poppins Movie “Winds in the east, mist coming in, /Like somethin’ is brewin’ and bout to begin. /Can’t put me finger on what lies in store, /But I fear what’s to happen all happened before.” For us it has been out of the South with max of 60 ...

Tonight is our first *official* night on the telescope schedule, as last night was originally scheduled as an MMTO M&E night (maintenance and engineering) that the telescope ended up not needing more than we did, so they let us have an extra night to focus on our alignment. Thank you MMTO! Craig and Dan came back ...

Hello Extreme Wavefront friends, I’m back! Tonight was the start of our first MAPS run after the summer shutdown and it’s the usual packed control room, multi-tasking team, full moon, and beautiful mountaintop observatory! [Image description: Gallery of photos showing the MMT Observatory at the top of Mount Hopkins, the telescope overlooking the valley, and the ...

Manny caught an unsuspecting grad student sunset-watching. Well, the fun had to end sometime. This post marks the official end of the MAPS 2023A run, after a weather-ful last two nights. One of the big perks of mountain observing in AZ, especially in June, is replacing the 100ºF highs of the valley with mountain temperatures of ...

After the previous night’s untimely clouds, we were fortunate to have clear skies and moderate-to-good seeing all night. The MIRAC-5 team continued work on their instrument, which the adaptive optics operator Eden found extremely useful for its fast video feed showing how (and if) our adaptive optics experiments were improving their images. I, however, mostly spent ...

After some berating from @jlong, here is my inaugural post! First, an obligatory observatory picture. The MMT at sunrise with the full moon on the horizon The MIRAC-5 team arrived Friday, June 2nd to prepare for installation of the latest iteration of the instrument. Originally conceived in 1988 by Bill Hoffmann at the University of Arizona, MIRAC ...

Hello. It is your local CACAO expert here, beaming to you directly from the beautiful peaks of the Santa Rita mountains. I am currently being not-paid to convince a wiggly mirror to un-twinkle stars from a four story building that rotates all night long. The whole experience feels like an internship at something between a ...

The night started off with clouds and the group had a nice and easy time getting to start their systems. Nothing like having time to catch up and get lunch together. CLOUDS, CLOUDS, CLOUDS CLOUDS,CLOUDS Lunch CACAO Station TopBox Station At midnight the weather decided to clear and we had high hopes of starting where we left off last night. ...

MAPS is The MMT Adaptive optics exoPlanet characterization System, an upgraded adaptive secondary AO system for MMT. For the next week or so, it is installed on the telescope and the team has important engineering and science to do. To this effort, the XWCL has contributed one CACAO expert on the ground (Eden McEwen) and ...