Tag: 2013A

MagAO won’t be back on the telescope for a year. That’s a long time. In the mean time, we have some amazing data to analyze, and we have some upgrades planned (which is why there’s such a long break). We’ll keep you posted as new results come out and our schedule progresses. The adventure isn’t over yet!

Thanks to everyone at LCO for helping us get where we are. The future of MagAO is bright, and we are going to do a lot of fantastic science here.

Some quotes:

“no, no, no.” — our waitress, wagging her finger at Laird. Apparently you can’t order beer before noon on Sunday in La Serena.

“No! The blog is over. I should be able to say whatever I want.” — Laird

Today Laird, Jared, and I packed everything up in preparation for departing… and possibly not coming back for almost a year.

Jared was in charge of backing up all of our computers and archiving the VisAO data. We have 5 computers on the mountain: The WFS supervisor, the ASM supervisor, the VisAO supervisor, the VisAO camera computer, and the Clio camera computer. It’s a good thing he knows what he’s doing.

Laird and I supervised the ASM’s journey from the top of the mountain to the clean room in the ASB. This always makes me a little nervous. We had to wait until the afternoon to do it, because in the morning there were winds up to 33 mph, a bit too windy for shipping around such delicate equipment. But it went very well and the ASM is now safely in the clean room.

Laird and Dave attached the new dust covers to the NAS.

Jared and I did an inventory of our supplies so that we can remember what we need to re-stock next time.

When I was walking down from the mountain tonight after doing a last sweep, I walked in the dark, and my eyes got adapted so that I could see my shadow by the crescent moon, and more and more stars appeared. The Magellanic Clouds really pop down here too.

Today we said goodbye to Alfio, Runa, Kate, and Alycia.

Then we removed the ASM, Clio, and the Nas from the telescope. It went well.

Exhausted though we may be, we will miss this place after we’re gone.

On our last night (last night) we had a spike of seeing up to 2” that gave our AO system a run for our money:

Well, today we are taking everything off the telescope, it’s been a good run!

Quotes:
“But anyone could go in there and delete it!” – Laird, about doing the AO user’s manual on google docs
“Well, OK, but I could throw your computer off the catwalk.” – Jared
“We should do the manual in IRAF” – Laird
“Ah but then it would be a seeing-limited manual” – Alfio

 

 

 

If you paid close (as the PI) attention to this blog, you probably understood that in AO you have to close (as the PI) the loop (as the PI did). The loop is a close (…) interaction between  a sensor, that reads something, and an object that does something in reaction. Here, the “thing” is a deformable mirror. The sensor sees, and ask the mirror to correct; the mirror corrects and the sensor sees something else; then bla bla bla from sunset to sunrise…

What if something goes wrong within this chain? Do you want to know it? Remain in this page. Don’t you want to know it? Look for the Middle Earth safety video on youtube…

A couple of days ago we experienced some very weird mirror stops: suddenly, one (or some, or all) of the internal protections of the fragile secondary mirror registered an error and forced the mirror to rest. Standard procedure. Sometimes, it is better to stop the observations than to clean the dome floor from the 1000 pieces of a broken mirror. Moreover, we are quite superstitious in Italy: “broken mirror, 7 years of pain”. Ask my grandmother (please, not in english), she will confirm….

So far, standard procedure. But which were the reasons for such sudden errors? We investigated deeply the issue….

First, let’s look at the last 1000 mirrors command (coming from the sensor). 1: nothing relevant, 2 nothing relevant, 3 nothing relevant, 4 nothing relevant…. 986 nothing relevant, 987 a huge bump on my poor little mirror. Picture below. Who is traitorously pushing 20 micron away the mirror?

Let’s make the sensor confess! Same procedure: let’s look at the last 1000 signals processed by the sensor. 1: nothing relevant, 2 nothing relevant, 3 nothing relevant, 4 nothing relevant…. 985 nothing relevant, 986 the sensor reads -150 instead of something about zero (picture below). So it will command at the step #987 something sensationally wrong to the mirror

 

This strange thing seems very likely due to a cosmic ray: an energetic particle coming from the sky. When it impacts on the sensor, this goes bananas. That’s the offender! A traitor cosmic ray.

Please, stop sending cosmic rays on the sensor. This is an old-fashioned, good family mirror, and deserves respect. Cosmic rays, didn’t you learn how to behave, when you were children??