Tag: 2019B

MagAO-X 2019B Unpacking Day -2 (-1?): Santiago!

MagAO-X arrived in Santiago yesterday! There’s even a chance that it gets to LCO tomorrow. My plan has been to call “Day 0” the day it actually arrives, so maybe we have to reset the blog counter.

Alex v2 and Kyle arrive today. Other than Jared and Laird worrying about it, no MagAO-X work was done today.

So here’s another sunset panorama.

This one is from the back deck of the lodge.

The goats are a new thing for us. We always see them on the drive, but only lower down. They poop everywhere.

The last several days of being unable to get any information about where our precious cargo was has been pretty maddening. It’s 2019 … almost 2020! One expects to not go 5 days without a status update. Not to put too fine a point on it, but I knew that it had officially arrived from our friends here hours before they updated their system.

The song of the day is Gaga’s Telephone. The blog standards committee won’t let me post the official one, so hopefully this works for you.

MagAO-C 2019B Day 1: “The empanadas have been taken care of”

Today was Day 1 of the 2019B MagAO-Classic run. Emily and I cooled Clio all day, while Amali and Laird cleaned optics, and Jared moved motors. Amali, Emily, and I are also working on porting the Clio user manual to a new site, after the zero server died. Finally, I fired up the Clio computers, clio1 and clio2, to check how they are working…

Emily did a great job getting Clio from 280 to 77 K today while taking excellent notes and working to port the user manual to a new site. [Image description: Emily is wearing safety glasses and blue gloves, and is holding a metal hose that connects to a black cylindrical dewar. The hose goes into the dewar, and there is boiling nitrogen steam coming out of the dewar in a little smoke plume.]

Today we learned that Clio missed us very much while we were gone. The last time we were here was May 2018. Then I buttoned up Clio and left it in the small room in the Aux. I left the new “clio2” computer plugged in so that we could trouble-shoot some of the new software from Arizona. We did a bit of that, then left it alone for about a year. When I tried to turn it on and check it out today, I couldn’t even ping it or log in remotely. Special thanks to Gabriel Prieto who came over and trouble-shot the ethernet connections, monitors, and finally booted up clio2 in safe mode to discover that poor clio2 had written 30 GB of logs while we were gone. Every day Clio was looking for the AO server, not finding it online, and writing an error. Perhaps every Hertz it was doing this.
So I contacted our software engineer and learned how to stop the process writing those logs (note to future self: touch /tmp/noindi), and Amali verified which logs we could safely delete (since the new clio2 computer is on the same set-up as the LBTI computers), and Gabriel checked and deleted them by size. And we realized that every day, Clio has been here reaching out, saying, “Hey, I’m lonely, is there an AO system around here that can talk to me? No? Ok I’m going to blog about it in my system logs.”
“Dear diary, today the AO system wouldn’t talk to me.”
“Dear diary, today the AO system wouldn’t talk to me.”
“Dear diary, today the AO system wouldn’t talk to me.”

We moved the ASM from the clean room up to the Aux today. Emily and Amali pushed while Felix and Muriel pulled and Juan supervised. [Image description: Inside a warehouse-y looking large room with lots of metal panels and instruments, 2 people are pulling a cart directly towards the camera, while 2 other people are on the other side pushing it. The cart is metal and hold a round adaptive secondary mirror wrapped in green plastic to keep it clean.]

Laird took this video the other day of a Wild Vizcacha hopping about on the hill side near the Magellan telescopes:

[Video description: A rabbit-looking animal with a squirrel-looking tail hops like a kangaroo over some large sharp grey boulders.]

And besides the Wild Vizcacha Laird saw, here are two clean room Vizzies. Can you find both? [Image description: A stone-masonry exterior with wood paneling and a tile roof. A vizcacha sits on one of the wooden beams. Another Viz is there too but a little more hidden…]
There were goats by the Clay at Sunset! [Image description: A somewhat blurry photo of the support posts for the telescope with a small herd of brown goats lit up by the setting sun, with the Andean valley in the background, and mostly clear skies.]

Today was Empanada Sunday and it was delicious! Jared asked me to help him stash some empanadas for later. Don’t worry, Jared, “The empanadas have been taken care of”.
This is a reference to a Classic blog story. See the set-up here regarding a theft of food in the ASB kitchen. And see the reference here: “The problem has been dealt with”.

The song of the day is a classic Lady Gaga song: Bad Romance

MagAO-X 2019B Unpacking Day -3 (estimated): Still Waiting

MagAO-X is probably in Santiago.  But the shipper isn’t updating their website, so . . .

We unpacked some stuff that we shipped down to help with MagAO-X, so it wasn’t all MagAO-C.

Unpacking counts as work on a project.

Hopefully this stuff has a reason for being here.

Some horses are hanging around the lodge.

Sunset panorama from the lodge from last night.

The MagAO-X song of the day is Alive, by Pearl Jam:

MagAO-C 2019B Day 0: Nice to be back

Dear Reader, we shall try to be clear. Magellan Adaptive Optics a.k.a. MagAO shall now be referred to as MagAO-Classic or MagAO-C. This is due to the introduction of MagAO-eXtreme or MagAO-X on the scene. We are here at the same time for 2 different runs:

  1. MagAO-C 2019B Observing Run, and
  2. MagAO-X 2019B Unpacking Run

Welcome.

I arrived today with Amali Vaz and Emily Mailhot. You may remember Amali from such hits as her Award-Winning Blog Post (the award). Emily and her counterpart Jared Carlson are the new Steward AO Observing Specialists and Emily is here to be trained on MagAO-C while Jared C. is observing at LBTI in Tucson.

We wish our Chilean colleagues all the best in their efforts to organize better living conditions in this beautiful country. I haven’t been here for about a year and a half and it is nice to be back. The trip went smoothly, due to the airport staff in TUS, DFW, SCL, and LSC as well as the LCO staff at El Pino who arranged smooth door-to-door transport. Things were quiet in SCL but planes were flying on time and taxis and traffic in La Serena were pretty typical.

How I was greeted in SCL. [Image description: Katie’s Starbucks coffee cup is in the foreground, and it says “Katy <3" in hand-written black Sharpie. Emily is out of focus in the background, and the mountains around Santiago are even more out of focus and even more in the background.]
Jared getting a panorama of the sunset. [Image description: A back-lit scene of the orange sun setting in orange clouds with clouds and mountains on the distant horizon. Jared is seen in the foreground off to the side, in silhouette taking a picture with his phone.]

The MagAO-C 2019B Blog Rules:

  1. There must be 1 MagAO-C post per day.
  2. The post of the day must include a Classic song of the day.

The end.

Song of the day: This is a Classic (in fact, a MagAO-Classic) because it came out the day we left Tucson for the first full (non-commissioning) science run in 2014A, over 5 years ago. It’s also a Classic because my heart always sings Shakira when I’m in Latin America. Finally, as noted in the original blog post, it’s a Classic because it has an astronomical theme (which used to be a typical blog rule).

It’s Empire by Shakira (we should start writing the song names for those cases where YouTube takes down the video and we otherwise can’t tell what it is a few years from now).

MagAO-X 2019B Unpacking Day -4 (estimated): Waiting

Laird and I arrived back at LCO last night. It’s been 18 months since we were here. Lots of little changes, and some new faces around the mountain — but it’s mostly the same as it ever was.

We’re supposed to be unpacking our new instrument MagAO-X. But . . . our shipment has been delayed by the goings-on in Chile. We also have to get MagAO-Classic back up and running, so I guess that’s what we’re working on right now.

If you look hard enough, you’ll see Laird pointing at the sign for the domestic terminal security sign. All of the parts of Chile that we interacted with seem normal, if maybe a little less crowded due to the holiday weekend.

Our old friends, Clay and Baade. Looking good.

Our first LCO sunset in 18 months

A cleanroom vizcacha!

And another one!

We’ve been working on MagAO-X so much that MagAO-Classic seems just a little bit unfamiliar.  Now that we’ve spent a day getting the ole’ system back up and running, it’s easy to see how much of MagAO is in the new MagAO-X.

MagAO-X 2019B Unpacking: Blog Rules

The following rules will be followed on the MagAO-X unpacking run.  There is a MagAO-Classic run going on at the same time, which will have separate rules.

(1) There will be a blog post each day

(2) Each blog post will have a song of the day

(3) The MagAO-X song of the day must be related to the MagAO song of the day from the latest MagAO@LCO blog post.

The last time we were are LCO, we (Laird, Joseph, and I) had a extra arduous trip home.  We finally made it.  But now that we’re back at LCO, it’s like coming home the other way.