MAPS Jun. 2025A Night 2: Aligning CACAO

Tonight after some daytime work on the rotator we tried the rotational centering again. Alas Brian saw that the star was still jumping when he sent the command, and thus we still couldn’t find the chief ray. We moved on and attempted a curvature wavefront sensing test where we defocussed the hexapod and that helped us get as close as we could get with alignment.

From last night’s opening:

Next up was CACAO to start improving our AO modes. This took us a while to get set up, especially the IR WFS which we haven’t used for almost a year. By the end of the night we had a 3 modes loop and were attempting to move on but needed more help with the gains gui that was again not working. Tomorrow we’ll keep going!

Here is the MLAT with the IR WFS:

The song of the night is “Diggy Diggy Hole” by Wind Rose: