I’m baaaaaack. My last post on April 23 promised that if I got to come in person, I’d bring goodies. I tried to make good, but bad weather makes for a lot of snacking need.
Not shown: chocolate covered pretzels
The daytime weather has been lovely, for the viscachas and humans who happen to be awake then. After a couple hours of data taking, the dome started dripping tonight. Maybe our Vizzy friends are taking showers under it.
I like to think of this as “Dad and teen viscachas fend for themselves while mom viscacha observes.” I think they just went out to dinner.
Logan’s Vizzy Viddy of the day.
In case you were wondering, KLIP is an algorithm we use for reducing our MagAO-X data, so we’d rather be KLIPping than Dripping.
I got a taste of sunshine today when I got up early to get my get-out-of-bubble Covid test (negative, yay!) and then treated myself to a cheese empanada by going to lunch. Eden has provided this view of our dome’s “empanada empire.”
Don’t think we only have 18 empanadas; the cheese are two to a packet. There should have been 28 total since Jared made us all order 4 each.
Is it really possible that no one has used Train’s “Drops of Jupiter” as song of the day before? Drops of starlight are, alas, falling on the ground and not the mirrors tonight as drops of water fall from the dome.
So the last two nights have followed the same pattern: decent seeing and good images until about midnight-1am, then seeing creeps up and up and up and blows past the top of the chart, and we all slump around the control room and lounge in a funk. But tonight there is an added bonus of a storm rolling in!
As I write this here is the current weather conditions:
Education break: “seeing” is how astronomers quantify how sharp or blurry a star image is. Basically if the seeing is 1 arcsecond, then a star’s image will span about 1 arcsecond on the sky. So a large seeing value means more smeared out images. MagAO-X really needs low seeing to function well – 1 arcsecond is difficult for us to work in. 2 arcseconds is unheard of!! Until the last few nights that is.
The bad seeing blues
The best data we’ve gotten the last few days is VIZZIES!!!!!
BABY VIZZIES by Eden
VIZZIE SNACK TIME by me
With bonus tiny dust bath
More pics from today
Sandwich for Alvaro Ncleod?Hoping in vain for a green flash
Some quotes:
You know your greed for empanadas is not one of your better qualities
Tomorrow is empanada Sunday after all
You know what they say. Dry hands at night astronomer’s delight.
Tonight started of quite well. We finally had average conditions, which much better than the 2 arcseconds seeing from before! The first target of the night is one from Logan. She is searching for white dwarf companions around main sequence stars. Stellar evolution tells us that there should be more white dwarfs than we can see. These white dwarfs could be hidden as companions close by brighter stars, which make it difficult to see them. MagAO-X is an ideal instrument to search for faint things next to bright things. We use coronagraphs to block the starlight of the primary to search for faint companions. Below is a video showing MagAO-X running at full steam trying to get maximum performance.
Sadly, we had to stop again around midnight. The seeing went through the roof.
Proof that the seeing went through the roof!
The seeing became so bad that we just gave up trying to get science data and we switched to sparkle engineering. This also allowed us to explore the more important things in life. Such as tasting all the different types of milk that LCO has to offer. The reviews and commentary are outside the scope of this blog post and will be part of later work.
The MagAO-X PI enjoying some milk.
At the end of the night the seeing became a bit better and Logan could take over again to search for her white dwarf companions. Somehow it looked like all stars we looked at were binary stars. After seeing 5 binary systems we realized that it was the system itself that created the binary components!
And during the lows of the night we also lost our dear friend Vizzy. As if the night had not been bad enough.
And here is the demise of Vizzy: “WHY IS THE VISCACHA BACK ON THE DESKTOP!?”Here we are having fun with Vizzies
After the night ended I continued to work on some daytime engineering to get the new integrated coronagraph/wavefront sensor to work. This has been manufactured by the local manufacturista Avalon McLeod. Yesterday night we commissioned the coronagraph part of this optic. And today we did the lab tests of the wavefront sensor side. Now we only need to get the wavefront sensor on sky!
Here it is ladies and gentleman, the amazing Zernike Wavefront Sensor!
The last week has been though weather wise. So here we are hoping for better skies in the next couple of nights.
Tonight we experienced seeing values that made certain lab members say “Oh lord!”, or “I thought we were taking darks”.
Seeing is -quite literally- off the charts
Unfortunately for tonight’s observers, we had to close the telescope early. Not only was seeing making it quite impossible to produce any useful data, but the TO went outside at about 4am and noticed condensation on the sides of the building.
Nonetheless, the night was not a waste as we got to squeeze in a bit of Engineering and were able to use our lab source to continue testing after the dome had closed. Dr. Sebastiaan Haffert and I have been working on a knife edge Lyot coronagraph (inspired by him and fabricated by me), and we got to take our first on-sky data with this earlier in the night. Not only was it exciting to see my handy work in action, but I even got to close a tip/tilt control loop on the reflected psf!
Etched, coated, and lithography doted!
Before the night began, we got to enjoy our last sunset with SO PhD student Jailin (she heads back to the States this morning) and our first sunset with Dr. Alycia Weinberger.
Always candid!I swear there was actually a green flash this time…
Shortly after sundown, P.I. Dr. Males was able to capture a pretty cool shot of the Clay primary as it was aiming low on the horizon.
Those stars are a reflection off of the 6.5m primary mirror. The telescope isn’t usually pointed so low as to where you can capture a viewing like this.
Thank you for reading my short and sweet update. We leave you, as always, with the song of the day!
Hello! It me, back on the mountain finally. As stated yesterday, I arrived finally yesterday afternoon (after high-fiving the departing Warren and Joseph at the La Serena airport through the window). I managed to stay up for sunset, then quickly went to bed after sleeping not a wink on the plane the night before. I slept all through the night and all through the day, finally rising for good at around 4pm. (note: this was partially on purpose so I could switch onto a night schedule, but my body did not object).
One thing that is super nice compared to our last run is that the nights are much shorter and we have a good amount of time after dinner before the sun sets around 9pm. Last run the sunset was basically during dinner, so we had no time to enjoy it before the work began.
We begun this evening with a vizzy hunt. We have yet to see any clean room vizzies, which is disappointing, but we can climb down a smidge from the telescope to a vizzy wonderland in the rocks below. Tonight was epic vizzy spotting, with a vizzy family and a little vizzy baby!
We love vizz“I love how they just go into 3d kangaroo mode when bouncing away”double vizz
Laird caught an awesome video of the vizzy family! We decided the one is the mom and the little one is her baby.
You’re welcome for the audio btw.
But the fun didn’t stop there. We went to see the dome opening, and the TO was kind enough to put on a little show for us!
Eden filmed the time-lapse videos, I put ’em together. If you watch closely you can spot a little Jialin below the telescope. Note to whom it may concern: she went slowly and carefully, she didn’t jump and bounce like it looks in the time-lapse!Can you spy Jialin in the secondary“Damn she thicc” – Anonymous
But the fun doesn’t stop there. After it got dark Jared and Laird took us to the spoooooky tunnel under the telescope:
MagAO’s old plumbingFan tunnel SPOOPYInterferometry tunnel that never interferometriedLookin’ at the cable wrapCable wrapA feet pic?Checking out how it floats and rotatesSuction cups used to grab and transport the primary mirror for recoating
“Avalon there is a statistically significant number of pictures with your eyes closed that exceed what it should be for random chance.”
And Laird visited an old friend:
The MagAO cooling pump is still alive with some air pressure, eternally hoping in vain for another chance to live out its purpose.
Last night we did a little surgery on VIS-X. It seems that manufacturers think that it’s mandatory to put a blinking or blaring LED on your tech. One of the science cameras in MagAO-X has a bright green LED on the back that shines right into VIS-X’s optics. It was giving ~700 counts just from the LED alone! Bad for science. So we activated VIS-X’s ghost mode:
Problem solved!
Now onto some science. Sebastiaan spent the first half with VIS-X, the integral field unit (IFU) spectrograph. He observed the huge and close giant star R Doradus. This guy is sooo big and soooo close that we are able to spatially resolve the star. That means that we can observe the surface of the star, instead of just a point source like pretty much every other star!
A spatially resolved R Dor. The full-width-half-maximum, which is the size of a typical point source on the image, is shown by the green circle. R Dor is so big!!And there she is on VIS-X. Sebastiaan happy. “Damn she thicc” – anonymousA close up of the VIS-X images. The red on the right is R Dor, the blue on the left is a hot B-type star taken earlier that is not resolved. You can clearly see the difference! In the background is a published paper of earlier R Dor observations; the red arrow is pointing to a star spot they observed. When we squint we can convince ourselves we see it too! Marked with the red arrow again.
Unfortunately the seeing is terrible tonight and the wind is HOWLING. Bad for science! Jialin and Laird took over around midnight, and we spent the next many hours fighting the seeing and getting terrible AO corrections.
But it wasn’t quite bad enough to foil VIS-X, our champion for the night. Sebastiaan hopped on and did another spatially-resolved star, Betelgeuse! He has now gotten 3 of the 4 spatially-resolved stars with VIS-X. Soon he’ll be first kid on the block to collect the whole set!
Look at all the science.
Despite our vizzy-blessed night, Jared once again banished our lucky vizz from the desktop. Hope that doesn’t bode ill for our observations.
BeforeAfter
#ripvizzy
But wait! There’s more! In a moment of triumph, Avalon got her much-labored-over low-order wavefront sensor closed and controlling 16 modes!! WOOO! She can now use past-tense in her phd applications and finish up her masters thesis.
Woozah it works!
Let’s end with some sunset telescope + Jupiter pics
Some quotes:
Damn she thicc
On several things tonight…
I had the flipaqc in again! It’s flipping me out!
On flipping out the flip mirror
There’s nothing like a pack of wild dogs to ruin your day at the beach
There sure isn’t.
I should have watched Super Troopers between the last run and now so I’d be briefed up on my quotes.
On inside jokes on runs.
We had nubbins. Now we don’t even have subnubbins.
On the poor seeing and it’s effect on our observations.
Observing runs are fueled by coke.
For legal purposes this is clearly about coca cola.
“<slightly judgementally>How long do you want to be on this target Laird?</slightly judgementally>”
“It was your dumb idea to go to it Sebastiaan”
Difficult seeing makes for strained interpersonal relationships.
