Hey everyone, I realized I didn’t introduce myself properly in my last blog post, sorry about that. I am Krishna, 3rd year PhD candidate at ASU. I am working with Jenny and Katie to characterize MAPS AO performance 🙂
It was a night like any other except we started on a little bit of rough patch. There was a brief connectivity issue with the WFS. So, the citizens of AO nation (Amali, Lauren, Bianca) worked hard with Andrew to get it back on track. It was not just this but also the WiFi that was being a troublemaker today. While this WFS issue was being worked on, Alyssa and I took organized exposures of darks and sky backgrounds at different bands.
Eventually, after the WFS fix, it was realized that the pupil position was offset from yesterday, so we had to go to lower than 100 modes of AO correction like we did yesterday. Well, that’s a bummer.
Despite all the trouble, we were able to successfully observe 4 targets with varying R magnitudes at a constant(-ish) airmass. Hoping everything goes smoothly with the reduction, this would allows us to see Strehl as a function of magnitude (fingers crossed). We pushed as much as we can to the end of the night but clouds, once again, put a limit on our happiness.
Heavy cloud but no rain“
Song of the night: