Tag: 2017A

Hi all you MagAO fans, last night we had some excitement (which as long time readers of the blog know — that means something broke). After a fairly routine night we had just settled into a nice rhythm at around 3AM. Then the telescope rotator decided to stop rotating — which wasn’t a big deal, but then the AO database got a bit confused since it thought we were rotating (but we were not) and odd things started to happen. To clear all this we went to zenith (always a good idea to troubleshoot) and then the ASM started acting very odd. It was fairly clear (after a while) that there were 8 sensors that were well out of range and the shell would not SET or even have it program loaded without going to its panic state (yes that is a thing). This was new for us and totally unrelated to the AO problem we were actually trying to fix. So it was a bit disappointing to try and fix one problem and 3 others pop up…

As you can see above there are a group of bad actuators that are red in color — that means they are jumping around and fooling the ASM mirror into thinking it has a piece of dust trapped under those actuators. So the ASM will not run in that condition. This was new for us and we called in ASM expert Marco Xompero from Arcetri and we located that there was a problem likely with the cable or DSP (like a computer) in ASM crate 4 board 9. We had just spent the last 10 months repairing the ASM so Jared and I had a pretty good idea of where DSP board 9 in crate 4 was.

So all we needed to do was wait until the next day and tip the telescope over to 2 degrees above the horizon and position a scissor lift under the ASM and start taking the ASM apart. In the above image you can see Jared doing surgery on the ASM. In the end we found it was not the cable but indeed there was something wrong with the DSP board.

Above you can see our bad DSP board. Once we replaced it with a spare today all was good and the AO was working again… Ya-lin was the AO operator tonight and things went very smoothly.

All and all it was a good fix, and Jared could get back to taking visible images (see below)

It was a 3-Sagan day:

We’ve had lots of good food this week:

And tonight at dinner Hector asked us why we hadn’t asked for empanadas in our night-lunch forms — well, we had forgotten it was Sunday! He sent up plenty of empanadas anyway — he takes good care of us! And Alexis made potato chips — what a treat!

We’re doing OK:

The clouds stayed away tonight, and we settled in to our normal habits — it’s been over a year since we did that! As usual when left to ourselves, we spent 4+ hours on one target and let the Sun open the loop.

Our friends were out enjoying the warm summer weather today.

It was cloudy and windy and foggy, so we stayed in the control room waiting for the clouds to go away. Laird felt bored at the beginning of the night, but he immediately realized the adaptive secondary mirror was in danger. The ASM is very delicate, and even a single raindrop can potentially destroy it. So, we need to build a giant umbrella.

The umbrella is just a big plastic sheet about the size of the HST primary mirror to cover the back of the ASM.

So the ASM was saved and we were happy. Time to have some girl scout cookies!

Although we built an umbrella, I hope we will never listen to the rhythm of the falling rain here at LCO.

I was told I should follow the rules for the song. The twisters in yesterday’s song remind me of this song from Jay Chou:

Like the groundhog, 2 vizcachas decided to appear today — I guess that means we have 6 more weeks of summer (? since we’re in the southern hemisphere). Actually, it meant that we had a nice welcome to our first night on the telescope in 2017.

We started with some guider engineering, then went on to VisAO engineering. (Clio isn’t mounted yet, but I’m monitoring its temperatures and bias voltage, etc.)

It’s like deja vu all over again… Trapezium! An oft-repeated target.

Alexis is a chef who joined the LCO staff in the past year. He is the one who has been carving the wonderful salad animals. Today he made this amazing ship!

The twisters in yesterday’s song of the day made me think of this song from the Twister soundtrack: