This will again be a short and sweet post. For those of you familiar with how the MagAO blog really works, I just want to say that this is not a cover for some major problem that we don’t want to talk about. We’re all just exhausted after the last week of getting the system ready. Seriously, everything is working really well.
Vizzy looks like we all feel.Gilles and I saw a nice green flash at sunset
Clio is finally mounted on the telescope. Katie might actually sleep now.
Here’s Katie hooking up cables on a freshly mounted Clio.Clio has never had enough LN2 to eat. It keeps demanding more and more.
Matt Kenworthy and Gilles Otten arrived from Leiden University today to help us commission the new vector apodizing phase plate (vAPP) coronagraphs. The big news from tonight is that they all survived cooldown, and appear to be working very very well. Congrats to Gilles, Frans, and Matt!
Matt Kenworthy, Gilles Otten, Laird, Katie, and Jared, pose with a beautiful pupil image through one of our new vAPPs. Hooray! They survived and appear to work well.
Tonight was pretty windy, and seeing wasn’t that great. It’s actually howling outside my room right now. Ordinarily this wouldn’t be a problem, but Laird is still here so we have to follow the rules.
We made it to a closed loop tonight. First we had to deal with a bad cable for the guider, and a failed hard drive in VisAO. I’m too tired to really say much about it. Here are some pictures.
The NAS getting lifted off the cartNelson guides the NAS onto its pins.The cart, with dust covers, heads back to the Aux. We won’t need it for more than a month.Katie fills Clio with liquid nitrogen. Clio is *almost* readyThis is what a computer failure looks like on the Nasmyth platform.Jared putting the finishing touches on VisAO after swapping out a failed disk.Povilas and Laird removed the protective cover and installed the wind monitor.Laird presents the MagAO eyepiece. More on this later.Johanna left us encouraging words. Laird did eat his night lunch. Including the onions.
This is how much distance is between MagAO and being on-sky in 2015.
We wanted to at least be testing the guider tonight, even if not closed-loop AO. But alas, we didn’t quite make it. The last thing we didn’t quite get accomplished was bolting the NAS to the telescope. It’s ready to go though, and we’ll be operating at the diffraction limit soon.
We, by which I mean Katie, did a little more last minute work on Clio today.
MagAO’s Instrument Scientist has been putting in endless hours in the cleanroom making sure Clio is ready to go.Here’s another shot of the instrument scientist instrument scientisting.
Perhaps the biggest news is that our adaptive secondary mirror (ASM) is alive and well. It was mounted on the telescope this morning and tonight we powered it up.
Here’s the ASM coming up to the dome floor yesterday.Look at the beautiful flat shell! The gap is 48-66 microns, unchanged since December. That means no contamination!You have no idea how good this feels. The shell survived and is ready to rock and roll.Let the record reflect: on this date the NAS mounting toolbox had a complete set of ball drivers in both metric and imperial units. Hands off Clio.There has been a minor problem with birds in the cleanroom. This is a reenactment.
Some quotes from today:
“After I’ve been here too long I get kinda giggly.” — Povilas
“The problem with Povilas is that he’s almost always right.” — Laird
“You see Laird, this is why I don’t trust you.” — Povilas
“No, I did NOT ask for double onions!!!!” — Laird
Katie set a new precedent yesterday by posting a cover as the song of the day, but satisfying the 2015 A Blog Rules by posting the song being covered as the cover. See how that works? Well I’m going to follow her lead and start with the covers.
This is a MagAO blog first: the song of the day is by a group of people who have MagAO access — who knows, maybe they have time this semester. Stick around at least through the 3rd solo starting at 3:00, she absolutely KILLS it.
Like any other truly great song, Madonna’s “Like a Prayer” is just as amazing in many very different styles. Here’s a sampling:
And for completeness, here’s the one and only original:
Laird and I buttoned up Clio and Gabriel and I started pumping it down.
Jared finished tuning the new X motor and installed it: Jared holds the old X-motor and points at the newly installed new, bigger & better X motor.
And Laird and Jared are testing the motors in the NAS: Here are Laird and Jared testing the motors in the NAS.
Johanna Teske is observing on Clay/MIKE tonight — see her blog post at Las Campanas Belles. It’s our turn, starting tomorrow night. Johanna Teske (UA PhD 2014) is observing on Clay tonight, with TO Hugo Rivera.
Quote of the day:
“I know what they’re saying, but I don’t actually understand the words. Mainly because I don’t speak Spanish.” –Laird, after the meeting to walk through the procedure for mounting the ASM (our adaptive secondary mirror) and NAS (our Nasmyth ring with VisAO and the AO system inside it and Clio outside it), which will happen tomorrow. The meeting was in Spanish (although the written procedure is in English, which Juan Gallardo was projecting on the screen for those of us who don’t speak Spanish).
Well I’m doing this a bit backwards, but this is the song of the day:
The Belles of Las Campanas, today. 🙂 Gwen Rudie, Jackie Faherty, Johanna Teske, Katie Morzinski
Our friends Jackie Faherty and Johanna Teske are observing on Clay tonight. We got to give them some various tours and they documented it on Twitter — follow the links of their names for their MagAO Tweets!
Long successful day. We finished all the Clio things. Thanks to all our support on email and Skype! Tomorrow we button Clio up and pump it down. Today involved a lot of good hard work by Laird, Jared, Manny, Juan, me… We inserted the new Brackett Gamma filter, removed some thermal mass from various parts of Clio, fit the APPs in, and documented lots of things. Here we go!
The filter wheels — we inserted the Br Gamma filter through the port (left), and put the blank in the open side in the wheel on the right.The new vector-apodizing phase plates (right) in the pupil wheel (left).
My animal sighting was a pack of mules, at lunchtime and after supper:
A herd of burros! They don’t seem to like the car, or the cell phone camera.I see you!Our first blogged full sunset of 2015A!
