Tag: 2023A

Recently, a tragic event occurred on the mountain and I am here to tell the tale of the “Empocalypse.” It all began with a hungry astronomer who walked into the kitchen, ready to heat up the favorite meal of the crowd… Upon opening up the fridge that was supposed to be filled with a mound of carefully wrapped empanadas, the astronomer discovered a fridge devoid of empanadas. As the news went around the telescope, the cries of the grieving observers filled the rooms. The empanadas are one of the few things that hold value within the MagAO-X group while we are at LCO, and their sudden disappearance almost started a riot. The dissatisfaction has been reported to telescope officials and hopefully, it will be taken seriously. On the brighter side of things, since the calamity, the snack selection has increased, one of which being a miniature version of the hangry astronomer’s favorite.

On the contrary, we have been treated well on the science side, some might even say spoiled. The seeing read by Dimm dropped below 0.3″, which is a rare occurrence. The TO even called his buddy over to witness such an event. Just when we thought the night would continue to have spectacular seeing and a smooth sail, the seeing doubled by midnight. However, great spectral data were still taken with VIS-X.

Per the title of the blog post, I feel obligated to continue to share other moments of this run that embodies similar energy. Well, truth be told, I am feeling like an ExAO, thus, I am writing a blog post full of content that is deserving of some love and attention (according to me, BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!)

We have our second special visitor in the telescope. This bird scared me more than the occasional “Chicken Nugget.” In addition to almost giving me a heart attack, it brought a special gift of bird dropping. It was our unsung hero, Jay, who cleaned up after the surprise visitor.

As we are nearing the end of this observing run, it would not be proper to think the kids can still be considered “normal.” Ok, maybe I should only speak for myself, but I do have some evidence of abnormal behaviors.

Regular Animal Spotting

Song of the Day

During my last visit here in December, my music app of choice sent me a recap of my 2022 music journey. My top album was “Bad Mode” by Japanese Artist Hikaru Utada and its title track is my chosen song of the day. I first discovered them a decade ago through my older cousin’s iPod playlist, and ever since, their songs have been on my playlist. As they have risen to fame and become less active way before I was a fan, I have not been able to catch their live performance. It is, however, on my bucket list to be at their live performance at least once.

There are a few hiccups to expect on a night-to-night basis, but in general at this point we’re pretty fine-tuned to the MagAO-X workflow. This means there has been more opportunities to enjoy the finer details of #LifeatLCO before and after our shifts. From going viscacha family spotting on the rocky ridge next to the Magellan telescopes…

…to taking neat synthwave/outrun inspired photos at sunset and twilight. Being my first time here at LCO, it’s a pleasant surprise that this place isn’t *just* a bunch of old telescopes in an extremely arid desert. Actually, not only are the accommodations really nice but the food is also pretty memorable too. If you missed it, check out Eden’s food blog post here. But apart from the nice rooms and good food, I’m happy to see some thought put into various amenities to make life here a lot more bearable.

For instance, there’s plenty of space to exercise and even a well-equipped gym near our rooms to help offset the sedentary nature of astronomizing. I also probably speak for the students among us still taking demanding optics and astro classes when I say that the lodge and astronomer support buildings have super nice libraries and areas to study/read/work.

But back to the telescopes! We were all sad to say our farewells tonight to Dr. Alycia Weinberger (it was nice to finally meet you in person, btw!) because she, in addition to bringing us many tasty snacks, brought a great aura to the control room and we all enjoyed hearing about her colorful experiences over the years here at LCO. She also graciously brought the interested among us to tour the Irénée du Pont and Swope telescope installations. Jialin, Noah and I were captivated by the rich history contained within these buildings and got to see some seriously cool old school machines, astro almanacs, and photographic plates. Thanks again, Alycia!

Of course, nothing beats the Magellan telescopes in terms of splendor but it was still really cool to see how smaller, older telescopes still contribute significantly to science. One evening, seeing estimates from the DIMM and our sister telescope the Baade varied significantly which prompted the idea to go straight to the Baade telescope control system and look for ourselves to see if the online reports were accurate. It then dawned on me and Eden was that we had never seen what is was like in our sister telescope…! So, utilizing the cover of night, we executed a bit of a spy mission to see if the grass was greener or not. Dude, they have a full size fridge, bookshelves filled with actual books, and their living room is way cozier with barely-used furniture, what’s up with that?

I also can’t ignore the times when we have the opportunity to take a break and let MagAO-X do all the heavy lifting for a bit. Although this may come off as us being lazy, rest assured it’s a sign that things are going incredibly well for science.

Song of the Day

Back when I was just a crouton in a wide-open baguette world, I went for glory cooking professionally for a few years before deciding to go back to college and pursue a more technical career. Back then, one summerly tradition was to go with a large group of Arizona chefs to cook for a 3-week long event at a resort deep in the NorCal redwoods for members of the infamous and secretive Bohemian Grove. We Arizonan chefs went to chase those California wages and sweet overtime pay (…aaaand that juicy double-overtime pay for the inevitable 12+ hour days) so in a way, our long hours of observing and the remoteness here at LCO reminds me of my Grove days. Every year, we joined a literal army of chefs in a huge kitchen cooking daily, near Michelin Star quality breakfast and dinner for about 2000 members. This sounds grueling, but actually looking back I really only remember the fun times of the 7 years I returned as a chef at the Grove. (Ehhh, for the most part, at least… well, there *was* a particularly bad year with a couple of very, very catastrophic mishaps concerning 200 pounds of beets and 15 gallons of garden pea coulis that I’m convinced gave me PTSD for a couple of months afterwards, and I to this day STILL get occasional nightmares about this, but we’ll save that for another blog post.)

The song of the day has special meaning to me and my good friend Big Mike. One tradition at the Grove is an employee-only talent show held during the last weekend of the event. Historically, it was ALWAYS a server, or bartender, or valet driver or something who won every year; never any kitchen staff. I guess it was natural that chefs never competed, because we were always exhausted and generally always had too much to do to really find the time to rehearse. But one year Big Mike and I set out to with a plan to finally change that. That morning, I remember bringing my guitar with me to the kitchen and safely stashing it in the dry storage area upstairs during breakfast service. Then, during the small afternoon lull before dinner service where everyone was either putting the final touches on that night’s dinner prep or prepping for next day’s breakfast, we snuck out of the kitchen and went to a quiet corner of the redwood-shaded outdoor dining circle, acoustic guitar and hastily drawn-up lyrics in hand, and did a cold rehearsal for no more than 30 minutes still in our chef whites and aprons. I don’t remember much between practicing and actually performing our skit being that this was back in 2014, but I’ll never forget the assistant general manager on the mic during the employee dinner announcing the winners of that years talent show to hundreds: “And the winners for this years talent show… for the first time in Bohemian Grove history…. are from the kitchen!”

So the song of the day is House of the Rising Sun by The Animals, because this is the song we had performed (in this style) almost impromptu in front of the entire Grove workforce and somehow did it well enough to win the talent show that year. It wasn’t the original lyrics though, we had modified lyrics to describe that year’s experience of being a couple of sleep-deprived cooks surviving in that insane kitchen. I think it actually came out pretty funny, which probably helped our performance out a whole lot. I’m sure those lyrics are still in one of Big Mike’s old notebooks, I really should find the time to ask him to find those pages again when we return back home.

MagAO-X threw a bit of a tantrum today, but Jared got it calmed down before sunset. Ever since Eden gave it a swift zapatazo, the operator workstation has been moody and fractious. Compounding our difficulties, one of the rack computers was on the fritz at the same time.

Jared says that in the world of Navy nuclear power, you don’t conduct drills for two simultaneous faults. That means what happened today is simply not allowed in the Navy, which should reassure us all. (I have informed our instrument computers that we will be adopting this same policy going forward.)

Tonight Alycia Weinberger, the forever young Las Campanas Frequent Flyer, is obtaining more disk imagery. Conditions have been passable, though I hear past midnight things started getting good. Stay tuned.

At this point even the newest graduate students have become adept at driving the AO system. Still, they mustn’t get complacent, because we continue to add more complexity in order that more things may go right.

For example, I am hiding in the rec room trying to refactor Lookyloo, the “quicklook” script that has grown additional responsibilities. Not coincidentally, I’m going through my headache meds faster than the chocolate-covered espresso beans. (Does anyone know what Excedrin is sold as in Chile?)

The goal is to bundle up the relevant image archives and system telemetry files that encompass an ‘observation’ and stuff them into a single unit for uploading to the CyVerse Data Store back in North America. CyVerse operates scientific computing infrastructure in connection with the University of Arizona, meaning we have a hotline to their head honcho for our data hoarding. The idea here is that our highly compressed data formats will use the limited bandwidth between continents more efficiently, allowing us to “rehydrate” the observations into more conventional formats upon demand.

Fortunately, CyVerse has no relation to Facebook’s Metaverse, and we will not be issuing NFTs of our observations. (For archive-browsing readers of the future: NFTs were a bubble/pump-and-dump scam of the early 2020s, with JPEGs taking the role of tulips.)

In further news from the software side, we ran our first all-Python MagAO-X device last night! My PurePyINDI2 library successfully allowed us to command Sebastiaan’s VIS-X camera from the same interfaces we use for scripting and interacting with the rest of MagAO-X.

Of course, that doesn’t look like anything, so here is a picture of a guanaco:

Technically, it was our second PurePyINDI2 device, as Maggie-o-X had already been taunting the observers through Jared’s add-on speaker for the operator workstation. Its repertoire includes:

• “Beep boop bop” when activating Low Order Wavefront Sensing, with or without Ms. Lowfs in attendance.
• “Gaan met die banaan” when taking exposures with VIS-X, our most Dutch camera.
• “P.I. is asleep. I am the P.I. now.” (among other choices) when nothing alert-worthy happens for 15 minutes.

It alerts on more useful criteria, as well, like changing targets and AO loop events. But those messages are strictly business.

Being out of the critical path for operations tonight means I have taken the chance to do some (lower-tech) astrophotography. It turns out that the image processing on an iPhone can wring detail out of moonless nights, as long as you have a tripod and some patience.

I have speculated that “computational photography” boffins will eventually forward-model the whole sky and paint the stars in after the fact. Recently, it was revealed that Samsung has taken this conspiracy theory as a product suggestion for their latest phones.

Once our image processing is allowed to make up details that aren’t there, I predict we’re going to find loads of planets.

Song of the Day

There were never any ‘good old days’. They are today, they are tomorrow! It’s a stupid thing we say, cursing tomorrow with sorrow.

The world’s foremost Gypsy Punks were also my first ever show as a wee teenager in Atlanta, Georgia. I didn’t know much about live music, but a Ukrainian dude capering around the stage and emptying a bottle of red wine on the pit seemed pretty punk rock to me.

Lead singer Eugene Hütz also had a starring role as Alex in the movie adaptation of Everything is Illuminated. They even worked the band in in this one scene:

It’s been more than two weeks since the run began and the team’s mood clearly shows a bit tired today, with less jokes and also, less people (thats surprisingly). I am Carla and will tell you about my days with you.

After my very long-awaited vacations I came back to the mountain with zero desire to work, but I was notified I will be with MagAOX team for the entire week. This news made me happy, and I started to think about the chilean sweet treat I was going to bring them. My favorite is ‘CHOKITA’ (a hard biscuit filled with vanilla cream dipped in chocolate) soooooo that’s a fully yes, even if you find it too sweet I hope you enjoyed it. This time I tried to find the very chilean ‘alfajor’, I hope you liked them because it’s a very traditional kind of cake we ate and prepared for the national holidays we have in september. I hope to be here next time you are here to bring more chilean sweets.

I had to admit I still get a bit nervous every time I had to operate a no-daily instrument, and MagAOX is one of them, specially this time because Jorge Araya wrote new notes in our procedures file. So I came early the first night – with all of the sandwich that I have to carry in two trips from my car to the kitchen – to go over all the “super long” procedure I have to follow for the night. As I am used to be physically alone most of the time at the control room, I was hoping to read quiet this webpage. But for my surprised you were all here, and you help me carry out the food. It was a nice surprised.

Apparently you are always 10 people team and this time there were new faces I didn’t recognized from before … it was very nice to meet you. And now my no-desire-to-work mood it turned in a very crowded office but fun week. We began with the “XKID_blablabla.cat” catalog which makes me laugh, XKID sounds like a child channel in the tv, but I didn’t ask. Also the very new procedure was we can’t go inside the dome with cellphones, weird but you said something about the instrument would received signal from it. Again, I didn’t ask to much. Just today you explained to me that it was a new camera that you used this week and today it was packaged off the telescope. Amazing techonoly you are working on!!! I fill super privileged to know you!!!!

I am also very thankfull for your kindess and for saving me from the very big tarantula. I am sorry if I scared you with my scream, I can not avoid it. But we are finishing the summer here at LCO and the spiders are all over the place. I am suffering with my aracnophobia … so thank you very much to put it back where it belongs … outside.

I have to admit that operate the telescope for MagAOX feels like I am useless, you do almost all the work. But I enjoy your company, hearing your stories and jokes, I loved we had time for night pictures (thaank you!!!) … also I enjoy your snacks.

Thank you for allowing me to witness the new technological generation for astronomy.

Song of the day

Here is my song, I hope you enjoy every instrument.

Los Jaivas are a group born 60 years ago, they perform this year at the “Festival Internacional de la Canción de Viña del Mar 2023” to celebrate their trajectory doing music from Latin American roots and their unic way of making sounds of ancestral instruments. Mira Niñita is song about a father talking to his daugther. I have never listening alive but the musical instruments lifts you into a cloud of emotions. Also my father always sings it to me. Try to listen to this group, is a very iconic chilean gruop.

See you nex time!

We don’t want anyone reading at home (Katie) to think we’re slackers here. OK, actually, I’ve never actually found Slack useful except here. Basically, MagAO-X has just precipitated my mid-life crisis. First, having joined the observing remotely in 2022A, and maybe it was the effect of all these young people, I decided I wasn’t too old to learn a new programming language. Sure, I thought, I’ll just write a whole new pipeline for a new type of data in a new language (Python). After years of telling everyone that the best programming language is the one you already know, I’ll prove that I’m actually a hip, young programmer. I tell my husband that he should be happy this is the form my midlife crisis took. I didn’t go out an buy the Ford Mustang of my dreams (red, convertible). No, I wrote Python. I didn’t quit my job as an astronomer to vagabond across the world. No, I wrote Python. And yes, starting with being here in person last Fall, I also joined the MagAO-X Slack channels. Because that’s what hip young astronomers do, right?

What would my post be without a tarantula photo of the day? It’s ok team, you don’t have to look away, I won’t post it. I don’t want to precipitate a different type of crisis (arachna-crisis?). Instead, I’ll post Jared’s sunset selfie that I got from Slack (see, I can use it!).

Alright, song of the day. It has to be Forever Young, because that’s what Python and Slack are evidently doing for me. Alphaville’s album came out in 1984, but I associate the song with my freshman year of college in 1987, because my roommate had the album on tape and played it a lot (for those not alive in the 1980s and therefore not yet ready for a mid-life crisis, tapes are a magnetic medium used to store information, in this case analog music). Somehow the song became an anthem of sorts for my then boyfriend, now husband of nearly 25 years, and me. The song is pretty emblematic of 80s youth: fear of nuclear war and suspicion of one’s elders. Each generation has its own angst.

Sometime in college, I bought him his own copy of the album on tape. At some point, I got the CD (for those not alive in the 1990s, CDs were a medium used to store digital information). Some years later when a my grad school office-mate figured out how to rip CDs, I used the IR astronomy group’s Sun Sparcstation and our CD writer (this was hot stuff back then!) to make “mix tape” CD of songs for the then still boyfriend, including, of course, Forever Young. When we finally got married, we asked the band to learn it for our wedding reception. There are some lyrics we have had wrong for so many years that we just keep singing along with ours even though we’ve looked up the words (I can’t hear them sing “perish like a fading horse” and I think “perish like a sea house” makes as much sense and fits the meter and rhyme scheme better).