It’s day 13 – we’ve been here almost 2 weeks out of 6 now – so we’re almost a third of the way through. I think of it like running a 5k (3.1 miles) where the first mile is the phase where you try to get out ahead of the pack, and the second mile is where you settle in to your pace. That’s where we are now, we’re settling in. Here’s a little bit about what that looks like.
Jared is starting up at the beginning of the night.
I’ve been monitoring the temperatures on Clio. Last week we hooked up the new pump, which is stronger than the old pump, and I was worried that the temperature wasn’t settling quickly enough. Clio temperature monitor, plotted as a function of # of hours since we started cool-down this run. Top: The temperature of the Clio optics in Kelvin (77 K). Center: The temperature of the Clio detector in K. Bottom: The percent the heater is turned on. Each spike in temperature of the detector is when the Clio dewars are filled with 77-K liquid nitrogen, which melts the solid nitrogen and warms it up. Then the pump starts pumping away and lowers the pressure so that the nitrogen freezes and solidifies. The temperature keeps dropping, but we want to keep it stable, so when the temperature drops below the set point (53.3 K), the heater engages and tries to keep it at a stable temperature.
But take a closer look at just the detector temperature. I don’t think it’s quite as stable as it could be. I will think about this some more and possibly throttle the pump, crank up the heater, or go back to the old pump. Take a closer look at just the detector temperature (bottom plot here). It isn’t quite stabilizing at the tenth-of-a-Kelvin level. I have to examine the darks to see how much it affects us. Also, the new set-point means I had to adjust the bias voltage, which means there is going to be a new linearity correction this run. Stay tuned.
Finally, some LCO lifestyle pix as we are settling in: Sunrise from the summit
Dos huevos fritos por favor con aguacate, oatmeal, and fresh-squeezed orange juiceLife at LCO – breakfast then bed (please do not disturb)
Now that we have 3.3V where we’re supposed to have 3.3V, and we’re using good fiber cables, everything is easy. It was also a nice night, with stable (if not always good) seeing. This is much more relaxing than some earlier nights. It also means there isn’t much to write about.
I pretended to be Yuri tonight.T. J. closed the loop for himself.
These next two pictures were taken about 10 minutes apart.
The other day we said we were back to normal… the clouds had gone away and we had a great night on-sky with a good AO correction, doing fun science. However, some not-so-normal problems cropped up again, and we just got through a bit of a stressful time. We were losing communication with our slope computer, and having other strange symptoms. In the end, we managed to get ahold of our Italian friends, who helped us trouble-shoot.
The project spent a lot of time in Florence and some in Bolzano, and we are so grateful for our friends and colleagues who show such great interest in our project and in helping to keep it running! Here is Arcetri where Laird and Jared built the system with Alfio, Simone, Armando, Runa, Marco, Enrico, Luca, and more:
We contacted our friends in Firenze and Bolzano, Italy. Here is Arcetri Observatory in Florence.
Alfio has been following our progress this run, our first run without him. Here’s Alfio with Jared last summer: Jared and Alfio in Firenze, summer 2013. With the Arno and the Ponte Vecchio
And here is Laird, Jared, and me with Galileo in Florence: Jared, Laird, and me with Galileo
So after Laird went home, we talked to Alfio, Roberto, and Mario, and got some ideas on what to check. So Jared, Pato, and I adjusted the voltage in the BCU and also switched to the spare fibers.
Jared is testing the voltage at the BCUJared is about to adjust the voltage in the BCUPato and Jared connect the BCU back up
And…success! Slopes were being sent, slopes were being received, and nary a divide-by-zero error to be seen!
Yay! It’s alive! Slopes are being sent & received!
We celebrated by replacing the batteries in the wind monitor, getting on sky, and closing the loop!
Here I am hooking up the wind monitor. We replaced its batteries … but there was no wind tonight!Laird left me in charge. I let TJ point to the North tonight — there was no wind!
At the end of a night of good hard work, we were rewarded with the sunrise, a vizcacha, and a herd of burros:
Sunrise and the trucks of LCOA burro runs away from JaredBurros at dawnA wild vizcacha… or is it Grumpy on his morning perch?
Tonight was Laird’s last night for the first part of this run — he goes down later today to return home for a couple weeks, then he’ll be back again for the last couple weeks of the run. Jared and I will be taking care of everything while he’s gone. We were also talking to our friends at Mt. Graham, Arizona and Subaru Telescope, Mauna Kea about their respective pyramid WFS observing runs.
Before tonight, I was busy with Clio engineering and science, so I didn’t have a chance to run the AO system much last week. But tonight was TJ & Alycia’s first night and since TJ can run Clio just fine, I was running AO with bits of advice from Laird on what he’s learned operating the system this week. So there was a lot going on, and we didn’t have the best seeing, so I didn’t get much in the way of pictures. However, I have a couple pictures from the previous night, which was my science night looking at brown dwarf and planetary-mass companions to stars. Here are a few pretty pix from Clio:
Clio 3.3um Airy pattern. Beautiful.Brown dwarf companion with Clio
Speaking of brown dwarfs and planetary-mass companions…
I went to a meeting last summer called Exoplanets and Brown Dwarfs: Mind the Gap, focusing on the overlap between the fields and how studying one kind of substellar object enriches the study of the other. It was a great conference and StartorialistEmily Rice led us in making a fun video about brown dwarfs, which I hope you enjoy watching as much as we enjoyed filming:
Well things finally got back to normal tonight at LCO. Not a cloud in the sky, seeing was 0.5 arcseconds most of the night, T.J. fell asleep in the control room, and most importantly – our good friend Miss Viz was hanging out at the clean room today! We haven’t seen any Viscachas on their usual roosts, but one was there today.
Miss Viz, one of the clean room Viscachas was spotted for the first time on this run.
As I said, tonight we got the absolutely perfect observing conditions we’ve come to expect from LCO.
Finally, a cloud-less sunset.The ASM as we opened for what turned out to be an amazing night.
The great conditions have led to some really nice results. Here’s a 47% Strehl ratio image at z’ (that means it’s really good).
We took these images tonight. At left is with an ND filter to prevent saturating. At right is a no-ND deep exposure, where you can see the spider arms and other high-contrast details. The junk in the center is CCD bleeding. Click for more pixels.
We also did some work at H-alpha. Here’s a nice H-alpha jet coming from a young binary star system. FWHM in this image is 30 milli-arcseconds. That’s from stacking 15 second exposures.
An H-alpha jet imaged with MagAO’s VisAO camera in SDI mode. Click for more pixels.
At the end of a great night, we saw a gorgeous sunrise over the Andes. Here’s a shot of the MagAO ASM, Clay, and Baade right before we closed up.
A sunrise shot of the MagAO secondary at the top of Cerro Manqui. Anna, you can click for the high-res version.
I don’t think these have been on the blog yet this run.
Some more nice flowers,
So, the last week has been pretty rough from an observing perspective. The clouds and bad seeing means a lot of stress and frustration. I think this video captures what it’s like sometimes in the control room during nights like we’ve had up until now.
Here’s the song of the day. I’m guessing this is going to be a staple at McKale center this year.
