Tag: 2016A

Today was a 7am breakfast to 7am dawn kind of day. Mario Matteo and his team finished their M2FS run with some calibrations, Juan and the crew pulled M2FS and the f/11, Juan et al. installed our NAS and ASM, we cabled the ASM and NAS, and finally we went on sky, closed the loop, Povilas et al. tested the guider, and we tried out the eyepiece as well as VisAO extragalactic observations. It was a very good, very long day!

Here are Pato and the crew helping Laird and I cable the ASM — it involves laying cables in the tray along the spider — you can see it in the Clio pupil images, this spider is a bit thicker with all the electronics, communications, and cooling lines we have to run to our ASM:

The new VisAO field stop designed by UA/MagAO grad student Ya-Lin Wu has been deployed:

And here we are doing some extragalactic AO at 4am in the control room:

Song of the day:

I feel so much better after getting 8 hours of sleep in a bed! That red-eye is brutal. But now I’ve had a full day of good food after good sleep, Clio is chilling, and things are good. Today…

…I cooled Clio with Victor’s help:

…Jared and Laird worked on the NAS and Laird moved the ASM:

…Truly Nolen killed all the things:

…Jared plugged in the radios because now that we are here he has someone to talk to:

I’m really into this song:

Katie arrived safe and sound, just in time for dinner. During the day: more preparations, mostly working on our new toys. We installed the new field stop, but only after Laird drew all over it with a Sharpie.

Oscar helped us countersink some bolts, and Laird tested out the mount for our new camera.

I’ve been obsessing about read noise in our wavefront sensor camera. This isn’t a new thing, some of our most epic “sea stories” revolve around troubleshooting this camera. That was all solved a while ago, but now we are trying to get it running at 2000 Hz. So this song is about noise.

The fact that I can’t find a youtube entry of the album version of this song makes me feel “not fresh”.

Mark Phillips commented, upon seeing me at lunch, that us AOistas always look “so fresh when you get here.” That implies that he has seen me look “not fresh”. It’s fair.

Laird made it today, and Katie is in the air.

We’re hard at work getting ready. This time, we have also begun preparing for “MagAO-2K”. This is an NSF funded project which will improve performance of MagAO. You’ll be hearing lots more about it in the coming days, weeks, and months. For now, I’m working on getting our wavefront sensor camera tuned for running at 2000 frames per second. We’re also installing a new field stop stage for VisAO, and we have a new very high speed camera that we are going to use on this run to measure vibrations.

Here’s my first sunset picture of 2016A:

Today’s video is very astronomical, and even looks like it was filmed at a digital LCO. The coolest part, however, is the exploding GMT.

Yep, it’s that time again. If you’re thinking we just left, you’re right. We just barely had more time at home than we usually spend here.

The drive up:

Some work got done:

It’s my turn to set the rules. We’re going back to basics. The only requirement is that any Day X post must have a song of the day, no other rules.