Home of MagAO and MagAO-X.
Just before starting our science observations tonight, we discovered a major bug in the Clio software.
Well played, Professor Hinz. Well played.
“That looks like a spider.” — TJ
“You can see the bad pixels through the spider.” — Laird
“This is the most in-focus image I’ve seen on Clio.” — Alfio
Postedit:
The fun continued… the culprits are our LBTI friends!
Oh, and speaking of our LBTI friends, check out the LBTI Exozodi-Exoplanet Common Hunt’s new website.
On November 26th, 2012, we closed the loop for the first time on-sky here at Magellan. A multitude of cameras and video recorders were there to document the moment. Here we present a three-dimensional tomographic reconstruction of the first-light Magellan adaptive optics controllers.
We input these images into our FPGA reconstructor, to obtain the following 3-d tomographic reconstruction of the MagAO controllers:
The control room appears to be less crowded on our current commissioning run, but a full 3-d tomographic observation is needed to be sure.
Tonight was our second night on-sky this run, and we have been accomplishing many engineering tasks. With the AO system, we have been testing and optimizing our AO parameters. Here is a PSF from yesterday, with only ~100 nm phase rms WFE:
With VisAO, we are calibrating our photometric system. With Clio, we are focusing and testing the pupil masks. And Vanessa has finished adding the AO and TCS keywords to the FITS headers, and it turned out to be very useful! Thanks, Vanessa!
Here are some images in M’ from Clio with the apodized-phase plate (APP) coronagraph:
Look at all those beautiful Airy rings! It’s a pretty great way to do coronagraphy on a binary star, because the APP is a phase mask placed in the pupil plane, so it attenuates the PSF of both stars.
Well, these nights are long since it’s getting to be winter, and so I’m really tired… let’s finish with some more pretty pictures:
Some quotes from today:
“You’re not doing astronomy if you don’t have to do everything twice” — Dave Osip
“I’m not going to give you any more quotes for the blog” — Povilas
“Do you know the ratio of the ghost?” — Laird
“Which one?” — Clio team, in unison
“I know my Astronomy!” — Vanessa
“Hold on. Let’s talk about what’s really important. Did everyone get
empanadas for their night lunch?” — TJ, interrupting discussions of
observing logs.
Under certain conditions, such as high winds or observing faint stars, it is advantageous to use the shortest exposure times (~20 msec) of the VisAO camera and perform Lucky imaging. This technique is based on first selecting only the best images in a sequence of short exposures, and then shifting-and-adding (SAA) the results. This process can be computationaly intensive. As such, we have implemented a pipeline for the VisAO camera which is based on Google’s Youtube service. First a sequence of frames is uploaded to YouTube. If SAA can be beneficial, YouTube will offer to fix it, stating that the video is “shaky”. Here we present a comparative analysis of this pipeline.
Before:
After:
As you can see, significant improvement is achieved!
Future work:
The next phase of implementing this data reduction pipeline will include direct framegrabber-to-Google uploading, preventing any need for local storage. This will be helpful in limiting the need for MagAO project personnel to cause so many problems at LCO.
Tonight we closed the loop on-sky, on Kate and T.J.’s first night here this run.
We were able to use the new pupils we calibrated over the last few days, and Marco’s new interaction matrix, to close the AO loop with 378 modes. This was a big step forward! The wavefront error was close to 100 nm rms in 0.5-0.7″ seeing. This is our best correction yet!
