Tag: 2017A

MagAO is all ready to go on the telescope. ASM is in the dome, NAS is packed up, and Clio is cold (enough). Here are a couple of standard day before pics.

A new feature at LCO is a crosswalk at the occasionally busy saddle intersection. Such things usually occur for a reason. I suspect that Alycia was involved . . .

We had our first Gary Galileo Guanaco visit of the run.

And we watched a nice sunset.

I recommend playing the song of the day on the loudest sound system you have access too.

The 2017A MagAO team made it to LCO! It’s beautiful here on the mountain. Hector cooked us a delicious dinner of fish, potatoes, soup, salad, and pudding. I checked on Clio’s vacuum (which Victor started for me on Sunday) and it’s at $10^{-6}$ so it’s looking good to start liquid nitrogen cooling first thing tomorrow morning. Time to catch up on some zzz’s!

Ya-Lin is in the old-but-refurbished “astronomer” dorms. Laird, Jared, and I are in the newer-but-very-far-away dorms with limited wi-fi. These are the dorms that forced Jared to pick the infamous “Dee-ner Dee-ner Dee-ner” song as the song-of-the-day once due to very weak wi-fi. (The difference today is my laptop is doing OK finding a signal but not my phone.) I put my phone outside on the retaining wall because it sees a very small wi-fi signal outside — I’m hoping it will upload the photos I took today to Dropbox so I can download them onto my laptop so I can post them for you in this blog post! So far… so bad. 🙁

Maybe you can imagine the pictures. One is a picture of Jared at the Santiago airport Starbucks (the old one, just around the corner from the new one) with his coffee that says something kind of close to his name on it. Then I took a few pictures of the flowers, ocean, and pine tree at El Pino where we waited for 3 hours in La Serena for the transport up the mountain. Finally, I tried a couple pix of the sunset tonight — very red through a thick haze on the horizon, which is pretty unusual — we’ll see if they turned out.

Well, while we’re waiting for that, here is the song of the day, which is related to yesterday’s song as per the rules:

Well, here we go. Laird, Katie, Jared, and Ya-Lin are on our way to LCO. We’ve already not seen our first green flash.

I’m a bit worried though. We’re not even a day into the run and Laird is already exhausted.

So we’re bringing back the old “Telephone Game” rules. As usual, every day must have at least one post, each post-of-the-day must use the 2017A Day X: [title] format, and each of these must include a song of the day. During 2017A each song of the day must be related to the day before’s song. We leave it up to our carefully vetted team of bloggers to decide whether they explicitly state the relationship. There are no other rules (we call this the Hernán rule).