2015A – Page 4 – Extreme Wavefront Control Lab

2015A Day 30: Dr.* Vanessa P. Bailey

We got to open for a few hours tonight, when the winds were only 30 mph:

LBT eh? — T.J. got some science done tonight in the brief burst of sub-35-mph winds we had from around sunset to 11pm.

[Update at the end of the night]: Winds eventually came back down, and we got another 4 or 5 hours of science done. Hurray!

So instead of talking about the wind, let’s talk about our latest PhD*:
Vanessa Bailey, first discover-er of a new planet using MagAO, has successfully defended her PhD dissertation today in Arizona! Here is HD 106906 b discovered by Vanessa using Clio:

The first Bear Down Planet. — Discovery image of HD 106906 b in the thermal infrared (4µm wavelength) from MagAO/Clio2, processed to remove the bright light from its host star, HD 106906 A. The planet is more than 20 times farther away from HD 106906 A than Neptune is from our Sun.

Since so many of her friends and colleagues around the world wanted to watch it, she and Amali Vaz set up remote streaming of the talk. Her dissertation is titled: “Adaptive Optics for Directly Imaging Planetary Systems”, and Jared and I woke up in the middle of the day to watch it:

*planetary mass companion — Here are some screen grabs from Vanessa’s defense — Jared and I were watching from LCO and really enjoyed her excellent presentation. That’s her planet*, HD 106906 b, at bottom.

And here’s the video:

It looks like there was much rejoicing in Tucson:

Quote:
Jared: That’s a lot of pictures of Vanessa, especially since she refuses to come on MagAO runs lately (even if she does help remotely).

Here’s the song of the day for Dr. Vanessa P. Bailey:

Cover:

Note that Vanessa is the 2nd graduate of Brookings High School, South Dakota to earn a PhD from the University of Arizona Department of Astronomy using (in part) MagAO images of exoplanets. Article from the Brookings Register:

cosmic indeed — The 2 (so far) graduates of Brookings High School, South Dakota who have earned a PhD from the Unviersity of Arizona Department of Astronomy. Article by the Brookings Register.

*Pending submitting her revisions 🙂

2015A Day 29: NOW It’s Windy

“Maria makes the mountains sound like folks were up there dyin'”

We’ve already used up some of the best wind songs, and we’re just getting started. I saw at least one gust of 64 mph on our wind gage up here at Clay. The LCO weather page doesn’t go that high:

This ain't nuthin' — Winds at Magellan were off the chart (it only goes to 50) several times tonight.

Down at the 100″ DuPont telescope, they were getting hammered by high 60s (mph) for hours. We still haven’t reached the MagAO record. Maybe tomorrow.

This is getting windy — It was screaming at DuPont tonight. Mauricio called to check on them, and they had to put weights behind their doors to keep them shut.

I made this recording in the dome tonight while winds were over 50 (it’s not your computer, the lights were off).

kinda pretty though — The sky at sunset, as Katie was heading up to sit around and do nothing all night. Click for the full cloudiness.

yummy — Tonight’s dessert was Sopaipilla, which Mauricio says Chilean grandmothers make when it rains. It hasn’t rained yet . . .

2015A Day 28: Clio Field Stop/Start

OK, I’ve had enough winter. Look at all these clouds!

And the winds, and still the clouds!

Even Cerro Manqui gets weather sometimes — Cloudy and windy

So we didn’t even open tonight, at all, ever.

Well, at least that meant it was a good time to fix Clio. So I’ve been aligning the camera by hand lately, but not anymore!

and Jordan will be really happy to find out the spectroscopy works... again — Now TJ and I don’t have to align the pupil images by hand anymore

Here was us last week… Pato Pinto helped us by soldering a jumper to bypass the broken motor so that we could move the other ones with the gui from the warmth of the control room, and only had to go out to the platform to move the field stop:

Thanks Pato! — Pato Pinto last week soldering the jumper for the broken motor

Thanks to Jenny Greene who delivered the necessary tools to us today, Jared and I went out to the cold platform tonight to tear into Clio once more. We replaced the broken motor controller with a working one, including setting up the dip switches and adding thermal paste:

including setting the dip switches — Jared and I put the new motor controller in Clio

Before and after:

Think I hooked it up correctly — Left: Before / Right: After

So … now it works!

for Jordan... — Here it is working… see I can put in arbitrary field stops from the gui, such as the slit!

Good night!

See ... Clio is part of MagAO — Ahoy there

Song of the day:

Taylor Swift liked this song so much she did 2 covers — here’s a few people who followed suit:

2105A Day 27: The Wind Is Back

It was clear tonight, which was nice after last night. But seeing was pretty bad (for LCO), and the winds kicked up again. We’ve had a few days respite from these winter gusts coming from the NE, but now we are again huddling with our back to them, pointing to the SW.

this is my tail. — I saw the clean room vizzies on my way up. They look like they aren’t speaking.

Home of the GSMT — A nice panorama at sunrise. The sun is peaking around Baade, and that’s Las Campanas itself behind the lodge.

This seems appropriate.

2015A Day 26: A quiet night there are no disturbances

Today was T.J.’s first night, which means the start of good solid breaks for Jared and me. It was pretty cloudy which made for a quiet night with no disturbances:

There are no disturbances because the dome is closed — Cloudy clouds are clouding the stars

Since it was my first break in a long time, my brain was mainly up for a lot of youtubing of Namibian folk songs. If you are also spending your weekend waiting for the clouds to clear, enjoy this long playlist of beautiful music from Namibia:

First song of the day:
!Nosa !Oes Ge Nesa /translated “It’s a quiet night there are no disturbances”

Cover:

(Also stick around for the fun song “Sponono” at the end, I love that one!)

The person who posted this to Youtube claims it is also called Sponono, but it’s not the one (above) that I know as Sponono. It’s still a nice one. Perhaps our Nama-speaking readers can help us with the title of this one:

Third song of the day:
Tuaza Kokure

No covers to be found, and I listed long and hard — I love this one. The second song in the Tuaza Kokure video is a cover for the…