2016B Day1: Big Pete

My oldest brother Peter gave me this awesome bright flashlight as a gift. When at home in New Mexico we use it to look for coyotes in the canyon. Here at LCO it’s good for vizcacha hunting. It’s also so bright that it’s good for measuring the pyramid wavefront sensor CCD gains at 2000 Hertz. We decided to call it “Big Pete”. Jared attached it to a tripod, shone it through a diffusing screen to make more uniform illumination, and took CCD39 gain measurements all afternoon today:

Jared is using Big Pete to measure the CCD39 gains at 2 kHz.

And we saw some good wildlife already!

!Mira! Un guanaco!

The song of the day is by Janelle Monae, whose music was introduced to me by brother Peter:

2016B Engineering Only

Just a quick reminder for MagAO users who may be considering submitting a telescope proposal in the near future: MagAO will not be available for general use in the 2016B semester. The system will be on the telescope during the semester, but for engineering work only. This work includes recalibration, and installation of the MagAO-2K upgrades: more modes controlled, faster speed (up to 2000 Hz), and installation and commissioning of a new detector for Clio.