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 of the pupils, but now we think it was actually just a normalization. Here is a nice mlat we got:
After the mlat’s, we closed the loop on the first 3 modes with our best response matrix from March. It worked!! But we couldn’t do higher-order modes — probably because the pupil and alignments had changed. So we moved on to take a new response matrix, but closing on the first 3 modes using the March matrix. We also tested tip/tilt offloading to the mount. And after some investigation of why some of the modes looked noisy or didn’t have much power in them via plotting self response matrices (selfRM), we continued and took a 50-modes calibration. We closed the loop with it and (even though we had to put tiny gains on modes 37-50), it was actually correcting and improved the PSF!
It was cloudy this afternoon and there were a few patchy clouds at sunset, but pretty soon it cleared up and we had a nice night with seeing around 1-1.3”. Earlier in the day Jarron opened the warmed-up BLINC and removed the baffle that was vignetting his pupil, so tonight we all had good pupils for the first time and we were able to get some nice looking PSFs!
When Jared and Olivier went to bed it was time to end our time with CACAO for tonight, and switch to Jacob and Suresh’s project with DO-CRIME and the IR WFS. We finally ended at dawn, a very full and useful night!
The best 15 minutes of the day were trying to watch the green flash at sunset with Amali, Lauren, and Bianca. (We didn’t see it though, but we used the trick Gill taught us.)
The song of the night is “Toxic” by Britney Spears (2004)