Comm2 Day 21: All packed up

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.

Jared starts up a bunch of jobs to back-up the computers and archive the data. Nice hard hat.

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.

We bring the ASM down from the telescopes to the Astronomer Support Building where the clean room is.
The ASM backing up to the ASB.
The P.I. supervises closely.

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.

I said goodbye to Vizzy.

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.

OK, this picture of Enrico and Alfio under the stars is by Enrico from
Nov. 25th Comm1, but I also didn’t have any good night-time pictures (with my cell phone).

Comm2 Day 22: See You When I See You

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!

Laird, Katie, TJ, and I left LCO today. This was our last view of the telescopes.

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.

The western valley below LCO. You can see the sunrise shadow of Magellan.
We made a pit stop at the offical MagAO watering hole, the Casino Enjoy in La Serena.
A cruise ship gets underway from La Serena. We’ll be back.

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