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!
AO calibrations — got a successful 20 modes loop, and discovered that a better SNR is needed for higher-order loops. SNR can be increased by raising the amplitude/stroke (but need to test where the linear range ends), and/or by increasing the number of iterations (we went from 500 to 2000). We also received wisdom on inverting the calibrations and making our own masks.
However, the partially-cloudy conditions made it impossible to actually take a long-enough running calibration to raise the SNR enough to go to 100 modes. So that awaits another night.
The song of the night is the sound of silence.