Okaayyy!!! Allora. The day began with some avocado slices, dos scrambled huevos, a bowl of oatmeal, two slices of cheese, two slices of breakfast cake, two glasses of fresh squeezed orange juice (delicious!), and a cafe con leche. The food at LCO is very good and below are more pictures, for our respective mothers:
Some sort of meat and potato thing, asparagus, artichoke hearts, tomatoes, beets, and a glass of peach juiceChicken with yellow rice, salad with beets, bowl of fresh fruit with strawberry ice cream, and a glass of peach juice. Eat your heart out LBT!Meat empanada, marisco soup, bowl of fruit, and a glass of juice. Mmmm....
After breakfast, a view of the marine layer in the valley to the north awaited us at the telescope:
We arrived to an email from the crew from the previous night led by Laird and Povilas that told us they had managed to collimate the telescope to the seeing limit using the Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor: a 0.55-0.6″ image on a >0.5″ night. They then created a lookup/flexure table.
A 0.6 arcsec image taken with our wide-field guider probe after collimating the telescopeA guanaco by the side of the road
With that good news, the morning crew proceeded to the next step of mounting the Calibration Return Optic (CRO, now pronounced “crow”). The CRO is a retroreflecting parabola/return flat optic that is aligned to the near ellipsoidal conjugate of the adaptive secondary. Because Magellan’s Gregorian design uses a concave secondary, we can use the CRO to test the secondary off sky with a point source located at the Nasmyth focal plane. We can also use the CRO to run the entire AO system closed loop with an artificial source during the day. The CRO is in a small cup that mounts to a 5 axis remotely actuated piezo stage, which in turn mounts to its own truss structure. This truss structure was assembled and aligned during the tower tests in Italy in order to locate the CRO at the ASM conjugate to a mm or so (hopefully better). The truss is carefully passed through the secondary cage and bolted directly in front of the ASM.
Attempting to write warning labels in SpanishCarefully installing the CRO to the magnetic kinematic interface on the trussChecking the CRO alignment with the boresight gun laser. It's good!A magnified image of the CRO looking through the cage at the secondaryPato running some CRO cables along the structureJared and Pato high up in the scissor lift to run the CRO cables along the spider vanes.Armando putting a fiducial on the primary-facing side of the CRO truss, along the optical axisArmando setting up the crosshair fiducial at the Nasmyth focal plane. This fiducial allows us to align the optical axis of the secondary to the rotational axis of the Nasmyth rotator.Armando, Marco, and Jared going through the alignment procedureLooks pretty aligned to me!
Overhead at LCO today:
“Seven.” -Derek to Marco after counting the number of spoonfuls of sugar the PI added to his tea.
“I always lose count because he’s talking while he’s doing it.” -Armando, regarding the PI adding sugar to his tea.
“Derek, you seem a bit tired, perhaps you need some more sugar in your tea.” -Marco
“I would like a siesta, a wonderful Spanish invention.” -Alfio
“It’s temporary, but it may become permanent.” -Pato Jones. Was he talking about something in particular or MagAO in general?
Some lovely pictures of the telescopes opening last night at dusk:
Today was a busy day, and we began splitting MagAO’ers into day and night crew. See Derek’s awesome post for the bulk of the day’s tasks: aligning the CRO and ASM.
The next major happening was mounting Clio to the NAS. Even though we didn’t play the theme from Top Gunas we did it (sorry Phil!), it was an exciting moment. This is the first time our infrared camera officially met our optical camera and our AO system! They are together at the telescope at last!
Clio, VisAO, W-unit, Nas, ASM, Clay: So happy together!
Here’s how it happened:
Removing Clio from the support cart with the crane — under PI Phil's watchful careAttaching Clio to the NAS ring — under Phil's watchful careClio at the Nas, flanked by Phil and KatieLeft: Phil and Clio instrument. Right: Clio electronics rack and Phil.
Heave-ho: Shimming Clio to align the cold stopsHow's it look, Phil?
LCO crew were busy as always, making everything work smoothly for the run. Here, Mauricio brings up LN2 to fill Clio’s dewar, and Pato optimizes the PID loop that rotates the Nas while the telescope tracks and slews:
Mauricio brings up LN2 to the Nas platform to fill the Clio dewarPato feels for vibrations as he optimizes the PID loop tracking and slewing the Nas rotater
Quotes:
Alfio: “What is this mirror cover?”
Laird: “Oh you’re so cute Alfio.”
Phil: “I don’t lean on Clio.”
Phil: “Used to be, we only had 1 actuator.”
Povilas: “Can 14 mm be considered a shim? That’s more like a structural member.”
Simone has a key to Galileo's house.
Katie: “Hey Jared, how’s it going with the CRO?”
Jared: “I dunno. It’s all in Italian.”
Jared: “The number of Illuminati asking me questions is daunting.” (That would be Simone Esposito himself, as well as suspected members Laird, Phil, and Armando — see our paper for more info.)
Armandino
Jared: “I’m pretty sure I would throw myself off the catwalk if Armando thought it would help.“
Alan Uomoto has been teaching us about the power supply at LCO. Rather than calling it clean and dirty, the actual difference between the different circuitry is whether they go direct (white outlets) or through an un-interuptable power supply (UPS) (orange outlets). Alan, this one’s for you!
Before AlanAfter Alan
(And — despite how it looks from the outlets — we really are in Chile! The observatory is highly USA-compatible. I haven’t even used my plug adaptor yet!)
Update: And here is the MagAO-certified power protector I made to keep people from stepping on the plugs and cords above:
Power cords protector, standing around the plugs imaged above
Happy Thanksgiving! I am thankful for clear skies, low winds, and contactless continuous facesheets.
To celebrate thanksgiving I gave my family a virtual tour of the Clay control room. Meanwhile, the Arcetri team was busy taking interaction matrices.
We are employing fine Italian craftsmanship to obtain the interaction matrices for our AO system, using the “penina” internal light source (an artifical star) and the CRO retro-reflector. These are crucial calibrations for the feedback loop to create the desired shapes on the ASM.
Alfio gestures at the pupil images making up the interaction matricesLaird, Alfio, Simone, and Enrico contemplate our pupils.
There were a few issues having to do with the slaved actuators in the unilluminated part of the pupil, so we haven’t finished the interaction matrices yet — there’s more alignment that needs to be checked first.
We are looking carefully at the pupil to see if the CRO is aligned properly with the ASM. So let’s have a look at the pupil. The “lollipop” is the slot that was cut out to keep a crack in the ASM from spreading. You can see it in the lower center of the ASM in each picture in this collage. There is also bird poop on the tertiary — it’s the splotch in the upper right image, at about 8:00. More on the pupil images tomorrow.
The lollipop-shaped slot can be seen at lower center (6:00) of the ASM in each of these 4 images. Bird poop on the tertiary is at about 8:00 in the upper right image.
Heard at LCO today:
“We have three telescope operators? Just for Clay?” -Laird
“No. Just for you!” -Povilas
“If you don’t know which way is which, we’ll just drill two holes!” – Pato
“It’s the bird poop.” – Laird
“So we use the bird poop fiducial?” – Phil
(a helpful bird, which might actually live in the dome, gave us a nice way to figure out which way is up in our images)
“Alfio has a segmentation fault?” – Jared
“It’s not me, it’s IDL!” – Alfio
“A pupil only a mother could love.” – Laird
“In Italy we say, Every cockroach is loved by its mother.” – Alfio
“All the cockroaches are loved by their various mothers.” – Kids
There was no turkey today, but we tried to keep up some Thanksgiving traditions:
The Las Campanas Thanksgiving kids table. No grown ups allowed.
MagAO’s official food blogger (Derek) grabbed a shot of our turkey substitute:
We had a really good fish for dinner.
We are all thankful for the 4-course meals, 3 times a day… as well as the plethora of snacks found in every building!
I am thankful for the ubiquitous and well-organized snacks at LCO!It's a nightly ritual to watch the sunset from the catwalk that joins the telescopes. Unless you are busy aligning an AO system . . .Tonight's sunset.Today's Vizcacha
