Tag: 2019B

MagAO-X 2019B Unpacking Day 3: Cabling

Well it was another long but successful day for MagAO-X. We fully integrated the electronics rack with the instrument and began the optical alignment! Impressively, the optical alignment looked almost exactly the way we left it in Tucson. After all that MagAO-X has been through on its way to Chile, we were worried that the inside of MagAO-X would be a mess. However this was not the case, and we were more than pleased by it. We are confident that we will complete the realignment tomorrow and close the loop!

We started the day with our walk up to the “halfway house” at 9:00 am. In the picture below, you can see Jared joined by a friendly goat. Then there’s Kyle catching up, and me not far behind taking the picture.

A typical walk up the hill at Las Campanas Observatory

After some final glycol testing, we started cabling the system. The cables run from the instrument to the electronics rack to power all of our electronics (deformable mirrors, cameras, stages, actuators, etc.).

  • Laird plugging in the cables
  • Laird and Jared plugging in cables

We completed all of the cabling except for our “Tweeter” deformable mirror (DM), so Laird and I were able to start on the optical alignment.

Laird working on the optical alignment
Looking good!

Here’s a picture of me with the instrument (front view):

Me and MagAO-X from the front

Here’s a picture of Laird with the instrument (back view). From this point of view it sort of looks like a “dollhouse” of optics. That makes it sound a lot simpler than it looks!

Laird and MagAO-X from the back

Finally, we began cabling the 2,048 actuator DM. This is the part that took us the longest, since cabling 2,000 wires is no easy task. This took multiple iterations in order to make sure all of the pins were aligned with the Samtec Connectors.

Kyle mounting the DM cables to the Samtec Connectors
El completo!
The fully cabled MagAO-X system

And so that marks the end of a long day for MagAO-X. Tomorrow we may finally close the loop for the first time in Chile!

Just another beautiful sunset at Las Campanas Observatory

The song of the day is going to be Moonlight Serenade, by Glenn Miller:

MagAO-C 2019B Day 6: Back in the Saddle Again

I’m working on telescope domination this week. I started at Clay using MIKE (well, not really, I got clouded out). I moved to duPont using CAPSCam, I had a night off to visit with the MagAO team, and now I’m back at Clay using MagAO. Tomorrow I’m off to Baade with MagE. Have a telescope or instrument, I’m there!

It’s been a while, so I took last night to get reacquainted with my old friend Clio. It’s like riding a bike (or maybe like being back in the saddle again, though I wouldn’t really know), it turns out. I think I might even have muscle memory for the Camera Control GUI.

Last night was great, but tonight, well, we have some problems. The Clio pupil mask was out of place, though it was fine last night and no one should have touched the motor. Then, the MagAO systems stopped communicating with each other correctly. But by 1 AM, we were back in the saddle again.

So, let’s talk about the weather, animals, and classic songs instead. The sunset was beautiful.

Clouds make for lovely sunsets, and I’m fine with these on-the-horizon beauties as long as they don’t come overhead. If you look very carefully (at least, I could see them on my phone screen), you can see Venus, Jupiter and Saturn along the ecliptic. Yes, our planets seem to have formed in a disk.

We have a big group up here, possibly larger than I’ve seen since my first MagAO runs up here in 2013 or 2014. I love the number of women we’ve got working here. Last night there were none of those beautiful clouds at all, when we gathered on the catwalk at sunset:

a whole lot of AO operators and astronomers
Sunset with the whole gang: Logan, Me, Jared, Katie, Amali, Elisabeth, and Emily

This week, I’ve seen a fox, more than a dozen burros, a herd of goats, and at least three vizcachas, so I’m only missing a guanaco to get LCO animal bingo. I have never seen a vizcacha sunning him(her?)self like this before.

A vizcacha sunning itself on the wall next to the Astronomer Support Building this afternoon.

I am using the classic Gene Autry, “Back in the Saddle Again” as my song tonight.

I’m back in the saddle again
Out where a friend is a friend [here’s looking at you Katie, Jared, MagAO and Clio]
Where the longhorn burro cattle feed
On the lowly gypsum weed [or whatever those plants are outside]
Back in the saddle again

Ridin’ the range sky once more
Totin’ my old .44 wavefront sensor
Where you sleep out every night day
And the only law is right sky is fey
Back in the saddle again

Gene Autry – Back in the Saddle Again

MagAO-X 2019B Unpacking Day 2: MagAO-X Does Bongs

Unpacking Day 2 marks the 3rd day of MagAO-X unpacking activities, which only makes sense if you’re a computer scientist or you just try not to think about it too much.

Alex and Laird began the day by removing the teflon bars that had been installed in front of particularly expensive optics for protection during shipping.

Laird and Alex hard at work in the clean room

Meanwhile, Jared pressure-tested the electronics rack coolant system while I set up the AO Operator Computer.

  • The PI at work
  • Mega Desk II: Not Quite Mega Yet (But It Will Be Once We Get That Missing Monitor Bracket)

We filled the instrument coolant lines with glycol and hooked the table to air, giving MagAO-X its first breath and drink at LCO.

The instrument table’s first breath of mountain air
Fresh glycol adds a much-needed splash of color to the instrument.

After passing its pressure test, the electronics rack coolant system joined in on the activities. Things got a little out of hand when Jared fashioned a makeshift bong and started passing out mixed drinks (glycol and distilled water — not recommended for human consumption).

  • Jared and Alex fill the liquid-liquid exchanger with the titular bong
  • The glycol forest in the underbelly of the electronics rack

And, most importantly, the goats made another appearance.

Alex visited with goats during an afternoon stroll.

I present the MagAO-X song of the day: “Always Something There to Remind Me” by Naked Eyes (related to the most recent MagAO-C song by its year of release—a tenuous but legal connection) .

MagAO-C 2019B Day 5: Alycia and the Baysides

Tonight was Alycia’s first night. I told Emily it would be more relaxed than last night with all Jayne’s weird rotations because Alycia’s observations are more in MagAO’s wheelhouse — Alycia is searching for faint companions; keeping the rotator off for ADI mode; and is a Clio and general observational expert. But… hah.

So on the first Pre-set of the night, the Bayside-X stage decided to not work. There are 3 “Bayside” stages — they are the motors that move the AO system around so that the star is always on the tip of the pyramid WFS even when the star needs to be nodded around the detector on Clio for sky subtraction. We have replaced the X and Y stages with higher-power versions after we had observers who wanted to keep the rotator on and tracking, which caused the stages to overheat and fail. So I wonder if it’s a coincidence that we spent all last night with the rotator on, putting weight on the X-stage, and then tonight the X-stage refused to move…

Laird and Jared are now on pseudo-day schedules (see Alex’s great MagAO-X post about the unpacking today!) but this happened at the start of the night so Laird was still at the summit and Jared was down in the clean room with MagAO-X but he came up to help post-mortem. Laird went out to the platform with a walkie-talkie and we did the usual dance of moving the motors from the control room and Laird telling us what he saw or heard in the Nas. The current would spike but the motor wouldn’t move. Small movements and homing didn’t work; eventually we power-cycled them and in the end the X-stage did start responding again.

WFS hardware GUI, on the Bayside Stages tab. Each stage can be moved manually here, and the position is reported in mm and current in amps. The Bayside X and Y stages nod in Y and X on Clio, respectively, and the Bayside Z stage moves the W-unit towards or away from Clio, effectively producing a focus movement for Clio. Amali edited the code to enable “Control always active” on the X-stage after a nod rather than “Stage” (brakes). [Image description: A GUI on a Linux computer with status and function boxes and buttons.]

But Laird heard a noise that made him think there was some friction affecting the motion of the X-stage. Since the stage worked normally after the power-cycle, we started thinking about all the work we have done on the Baysides over the years. Originally we used the setting “Control always active” as that would position them precisely to the micron. But this was thought to contribute to the over-heating problem when we had high currents at strange rotator angles with all the weight of the instrument on the Y-stage. So we swapped the original out for the higher-power version, but we also started applying the brakes and turning off the active control after each move (“Stage” check box). But now we are thinking… maybe the brakes themselves are starting to fail, and the friction was the X-stage rubbing along its own brake. So tonight, Amali went into the code and reverted the procedure for the X-stage to now enable “Control always active” rather than enabling “Stage” (applying the brakes) after each move. And all stages worked perfectly for the rest of the night.

This is the “Board GUI” that shows the current state of the various subsystems on the W-unit, which includes the WFS (left) and VisAO (right). The rectangle at the bottom shows the current position of the pyramid with respect to the telescope center. The Bayside X, Y, and Z positions are listed. The entire W-unit is moved relative to Clio when we move the Bayside motors. [Image description: An optical diagram of the WFS and VisAO. Light from the telescope comes in from the top center, goes through the ADCs, and then is split by the selectable beamsplitter such that some portion goes to the right to VisAO and some portion goes to the left to the WFS. The WFS arm includes a rerotator that keeps the pupils aligned to the actuators, and a camera lens that keeps the pupils registered to the pixels on the CCD39. The VisAO arm includes science filters. Below the optical diagram is a rectangle with cross-hairs and a red dot showing the relative position of the pyramid.]

After Jared and Laird went to bed, at one point our TO Alberto went down to get some coffee, and I snapped this pic of the all-women control room. What a big difference from when I was the “Only Girl In the World” at LCO!

Astronomers hard at work. From left: Alycia, Logan, Emily, Amali. [Image description: Alycia is on her phone (don’t worry, Clio and VisAO are actively taking data). Logan is analyzing some data on her laptop. Emily is studying the telescope system to make sure she understands the big picture of MagAO. Amali is on her laptop debugging MagAO software, probably the FITS headers of Clio that aren’t being fully populated with the correct AO parameters.]
Vizzy by the library on my way up to the top. [Image description: A Vizcacha sits on a window ledge in the diffuse glow of pre-sunset.]
  • Clay top-ring in Moonlight
  • Clay top-ring at Dawn
The Clay telescope at sunrise. [Image description: Photo taken from slightly downhill of Clay, the dome is to the side glinting in the sunrise while the sky has a beautiful stripey glow.]
Walking back to the village at dawn. [Image description: A cluster of terracotta-roofed buildings down a slope with a winding road. Beautiful mountains and hills. Quiet and still.]
The telescope ridges at dawn. [Image description: A stripey glow on the horizon. A mountain peak and a ridge are both covered in telescopes that are closed up to sleep for the day.]

Classic MagAO song from Day 40 of the super long cold winter run with so many technical problems and such long nights that I actually worked, really worked, 112 hours a week (trouble-shooting all afternoon, observing all night, and choosing each day either a shower or dinner): This Must Be the Place/ Naive Melody by the Talking Heads:

MagAO-X 2019B Unpacking Day 1: The Unpackening

So it’s finally time to write my first blog post! My name is Alex Hedglen and I’m a 3rd year Optical Sciences PhD student at the University of Arizona! I’ve been involved with MagAO-X for the past couple of years, mainly helping Laird with the optomechanical design and alignment of the instrument. My first year project was to design a compact K-mirror (A.K.A. “derotator”) for MagAO-X, which you may see a blog post for in the future!

This is my first time here at LCO, and so far I am loving it. Clear skies every day, mountains as far as the eye can see, telescopes, amazing food, and fellow astronomers to geek out with…you really could not find a better place to do astronomy. It’s “astronomy wonderland” up here.

Today we unpacked MagAO-X, and it went very well. All that engineering and planning really came into effect today. We started the day with a group meeting at 9:00am, with PI Jared Males going over the unpacking procedures for the day.

PI Jared Males going over the unpacking procedures with the LCO mechanics.

The first step of the day was to unpack the electronics rack, which we brought inside the unpacking room yesterday. Immediately after we started lifting the box, the crane broke down! But luckily the LCO mechanics fixed it within the hour, so we were right back on track.

The electronics rack was left in this position when the crane broke!
The electronics rack was successfully lifted upright after the crane was fixed!
LCO mechanics removing the electronics rack from the box.
PI Jared Males is happy to see his electronics arrive safely to LCO.
Electronics rack stored safely in the clean room to give space for MagAO-X.

Once the electronics rack was safely unpacked, it was time to bring in MagAO-X! The instrument was left outside overnight, so once the electronics rack was out of the way, MagAO-X was brought inside.

MagAO-X entering the unpacking room.
The front box panel was unmounted first.
The instrument was rotated and the box was lifted onto 4 dollies.
The MagAO-X cart was assembled around the instrument.
The cart was used to lift the instrument off of the wire-rope-isolators.
The legs were rolled under MagAO-X.
  • MagAO-X was placed onto the legs.
  • We used Laird’s guide pin invention to align MagAO-X to the legs
The cart was disassembled and taken away from MagAO-X.
  • MagAO-X was brought into the clean room!
  • Saran wrap cut off
Welcome to LCO MagAO-X!

With MagAO-X unpacked by 5:00pm and no optical damage noticed, everyone is feeling pretty good. PI Jared Males will sleep well tonight! Tomorrow we will start getting MagAO-X up to speed. Kyle and Jared will work on the electronics while Laird and I work on the optomechanics.

Another beautiful sunset with the MagAO-X shipping crates.
Viscacha also watching the sunset.

Since the song of the day has to relate to the previous blog post’s song of the day, we’re gonna hit it one more time with Britney Spears: