Tag: 2015B

Regular readers of this blog have been hearing claims this entire run that the weather has been suboptimal and that the poor team has barely been able to take any data. I’m pretty sure this is just laziness on their part, because I’ve barely seen a cloud over the two nights I’ve been here:

Tonight the seeing was great all night, the winds were low, and we got a lot of excellent data.

Maybe the universe just wants more M dwarfs to be observed! If you’re serving on a time allocation committee any time soon, keep this in mind.

Really, this has been a great run for us (well-timed to coincide with nice weather). Katie, Jared, and Amali were very helpful, as usual, with setting up the systems and keeping them running the whole time.

I did find something a little suspicious downstairs below the Clay control room:

This seems like it would make transit photometry pretty easy, just spray a little on your instrument and get rid of all those pesky photons! Flux: removed.

Yesterday’s song was a Frozen/Passenger mashup, so we’re continuing the winter theme tonight with a song from the Decemberists.

We give thanks for the stars coming out and the wind dropping down a bit, enough to get Trapezium in the North:

And my first Thanksgiving dinner was a few weeks ago when my folks were visiting:

Thankful astronomers:

I really hope all those papi’s let JLo go:

Now that our engineering time is over — without us getting to do any engineering — it of course was a fairly clear night. Still some clouds blowing around, but the kind we can burn through with a 6.5 m telescope. Since we haven’t had much time to shake down MagAO, our first group of visiting observers had to put up with some bugs and some calibrations.

Laird left, on his way back to Tucson. But he’s been replaced by Amali Vaz from UA, who is a very experienced AO operator and all around big help. She’s here for the next week to help us run the system, and also to foster some cross-team knowledge between MagAO and LBTI.

The next two pictures were taken at the same time.

Last night Michael Franti was shouting to his Papa. Tonight, J-Lo sings about her Papi.

Well another night like last night. Amali got here today and she started up AO and also learned how to operate Clio. And then we sat here like this:

And this:

Sadly this means we didn’t get much of our engineering done. Oh El Nino…

Another song dancing in the streets: This one to cheer you up after seeing all those clouds and high winds:

Open for less than 1/2 an hour tonight. I can’t work like this.

Since we had a flash mob last night, here’s a song about people dancing in the streets. It also describes our cloud problem.