Tonight both Clay and Baade belonged to astronomers from Steward Observatory. Bear down.
Over on the diffraction limited side, we had a great night. We observed some young low-mass companions to stars (later we can argue about labels like “brown dwarf” and “planet” – all I know for sure is that they were all bigger than Pluto). We can do this across a wide wavelength range, using Clio and VisAO simultaneously, letting us probe the atmospheres of these objects in a unique way. We’re all really excited about our results! Stay tuned.
Just after opening, the heart and soul of MagAO hangs in the sky.We did one of Laird’s targets tonight. Here he’s monitoring the data as it comes off Clio.The current MagAO team: Kate,TJ, Runa, Laird, Katie, Alfio, Vanessa, Jared.
Tonight was Vanessa’s last night. Safe travels, and go Bobcats.
Arizona’s Professor Nathan Smith (far right), who is observing on Baade, came across the catwalk for a chat.When we opened we still had the VisAO wollaston in. But that’s not why Katie managed to get two Vizcacha’s on her camera. There are actually two of them!Tonight’s sunset. No flash.
Some quotes from tonight:
“You know why we did it in z prime? Because we’re HOT in z prime.” — Laird (we’re learning to talk like optical astronomers)
“I THINK we are in closed loop” — Alfio (trust me, if he says that, we are)
“That was very heroic.” — Katie (after Alfio closed the loop with approximately 0 photons)
“Apart from the hardware bugs, it was only 3 buttons!” — Alfio
“You could make it say ‘T.J. is amazing’ and it would be the same thing” — T.J.
“If we hated you we wouldn’t make fun of you.” — Kate
“That’s what I keep telling myself.” — Laird
Today we saw snowflakes here at Magellan! Thankfully, the weather was beautiful without a cloud in the sky; the snowflakes were on Clio.
Snowflake-shaped image on Clio.
This is an image of a star. Although it looks distorted, this image is actually great. If our AO system is performing well, the image shape (the technical term is “point spread function”) will be very stable. Who says no two snowflakes are alike?
This image is using a technique called “non-redundant masking,” or NRM, to further improve the resolution of our telescope. With NRM, it’s possible to increase our already AO-enhanced resolution by another factor of ~2. This lets us see companion objects extremely close to their host stars, for example. However, nothing good comes for free; in order to achieve super-resolution, we have to throw away most of the light reaching our telescope (see image below). So this technique is only useful for very bright targets.
For a detailed explanation of the images below are showing, and of how to go from telescope pupils to images, see Katie’s previous post.
Bottom: Full telescope pupil and its corresponding image (PSF). This is “normal imaging” mode. Top: The non-redundant mask blocks most of the telescope aperture (the normal pupil would fill the circle), trading sensitivity for improved resolution. The NRM pupils’ corresponding PSF is in the upper right.
The beauty of the MagAO system is its simultaneous visible/infrared imaging. So while we were imaging with Clio, Kate was taking visible-light data of the same objects to study the properties of their circumstellar disks.
In other news, Laird, Jared, Kate, TJ, and I gave a Magellan virtual tour to a group of prospective U of A grad students over Skype. The intertubes were a bit clogged, so I’m not sure how well they could see us, but hopefully our enthusiasm for the project came through anyway!
Laird wows the prospectives with tales of MagAO.
Runa also gave a virtual tour, though perhaps a lower-stakes one…
Runa gives a tour, too.
Former Steward grad Derek Kopon sent us this neat pic today from Amsterdam:
Even the Dutch are fans of Clio.
And of course, I can’t forget Miss Viz…
Miss Viz was wide-eyed and bushy-tailed.
And finally, I gave a shout out…
Happy birthday, Dad! (Click to embiggen.)
“I don’t ever remember focusing at MMT. Not even once.” –TJ, “I’ve never had a grad student who said that.” –Laird
“Geeze, when are you going to stop nodding??” –Kate
This is my second post ever. I guess that makes me no longer a rookie…
Tonight went pretty smoothly. Most of the night was spent doing science observations of faint companions. Because we have two science cameras, we were able to obtain some pretty cool images on both cameras–simultaneously!
The AO continued to perform very well, aside from a few hiccups, some of which may be Clio’s fault. (But since Laird/VisAO are always blaming Clio, I’m gonna blame VisAO this time.)
Speaking of Clio, Vanessa and I have continued to make progress in automating the control software so that *YOU* can one day operate Clio by yourself. This is a long and slow process, but things are improving.
Here are some action shots from the night:
The crew hard at work
I spent most of the night here:
my work station for the night
What was I doing? Reading about TCL (pronounced “tickle”). This is because Clio’s software is written in this bizarre-but-very-popular-in-the-90s language. This is not fun reading, although Alfio, curious mad scientist that he is, has already started to read the textbook *for fun*.
A few quotes from the night:
“Why is there no light?? Ah! Because we are in the dark!” – Alfio
“Stop playing” – Alfio (sinisterly)
“My God, it’s full of stars!” – Me (mandatory sci-fi reference when doing Astronomy)
Laird: “Hey Clio”….Vanessa: “Yes?” (first time PI has addressed another human being by the name of instrument they work on…and the person has responded)
Tonight I saved over 73000 images on one target. That wore me out.
We had a good night – seeing was fairly good all night and we did some good engineering work in the first half. Clio’s prism spectrograph was aligned and focused, and we did some more photometric standard measurements with VisAO. Later we tried out some disk imaging with our wollaston and SDI filters. This required moving the rotator to various angles, which caused all kinds of excitement, including dumping the liquid nitrogen out of Clio’s dewar. That’s ok – the inner dewar stays solid and can last all night – but you have to be careful on the platform when it happens.
Later we did a long observations on a bright star, simultaneously at i’ (0.77 microns) and M’ (4.7 microns). Kind of cool to be doing science at such different wavelengths at the same time.
On the way down we had a close encounter with Vizzy.
We saw vizzy drinking out of a sprinkler hose, and then she hopped up the hill to watch us go by.Tonights sunset was leaning towards green until the last minute.
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“There’s nothing left to dump out of Clio now. I’m coming back in.” — Laird
We started off the night trying to track down the mysterious source of a perfectly symmetrical spider (literally a spider!) that kept popping up in the Clio viewer (see Jared’s post from earlier today for more details). Luckily, Povilas was working on the pointing model at the time, so we were able to indulge in tracking down the source of the April Fool’s joke. It turned out to be none other than Clio PI and advisor for half of the observing team, Phil Hinz. Nice one, Phil!
The new Clio “spider”
Shortly thereafter, I spotted this guy in the bathroom downstairs. Some squabbling ensued about what to do with him. He was eventually removed from the bathroom, and was not harmed in the process.
Tarantula-esque spider that at first was thought to be part of the April fool’s joke. Turned out it was real.
It took the first half of the night to finish the pointing model tests, and then we spent some time doing engineering calibrations. Clio did more focusing and tested the prism, nodding and image quality. By the way, Clio has real “spiders” all the time, not just on April Fool’s. See image below.
The four telescope spiders and two cold stop spiders make some gorgeous diffraction spikes (the long lines extending out from the stars) on Clio. (The bright star is saturated pretty far out, but you can see some beautiful Airy rings on the faint 4” companion.)
Meanwhile, VisAO did some spectrophotometric standards and tested the symmetry of the coronagraph.
Towards the end of the night, we were also able to do a little bit of engineering/science by looking at a nice bright disk with both cameras. We’re particularly eager to characterize how well we can image extended objects with VisAO, so we’ll report back on this.
We said goodbye to Marco and Povilas tonight. Thank you both for all of your hard work! Before Marco left, we managed to take one picture of the full commissioning team.
From left: Marco, Alfio, TJ, Laird, Jared, Katie, Vanessa and Kate
“Believe me, we aren’t hiring friendly people.” — Laird
“Guys, I have bad news. We are out of cheese.” — Marco
“I do not like spiders. I don’t like them.” — Vanessa
“It’s so rare that I can teach a student something that has to do with computers.”– Laird
