Tag: 2024A

Greetings from the downstairs lounge, where you can see exactly as many stars as upstairs. That’s right: it’s another cloudy evening here at Las Campanas Observatory, but one ray of bright starshine has broken through: Dr. Alycia Weinberger! She had to spend a night in Miami, and another night in Santiago, but she has finally arrived!

We all forgot to document her arrival for the blog, so have a condor instead.

Since the clouds stubbornly remained at sunset, we went on an expedition beneath the Magellans.

There was a fad in the 90s for two-for-one telescope deals, along with vague plans for interferometers (some realized). True to form, the two Magellans are connected by a tunnel.

We also explored the maze of twisty passages.

We descended into the oubliette.

There are removable floor grates to confound your enemies.

Here’s a view upwards through the central core where all the wires and hoses snake up to the telescope platform, eventually entering a cable wrap.

There is a two meter thermal exhaust port:

Evidence of researcher enthusiasm underneath 100 tons of telescope.

Maggie Kautz bid a fond farewell to MagAO-X, as she will be leaving in the morning. Maggie has graduated, which means she probably needs to defend her dissertation soon.

Then she came back and replaced a picomotor that had gone on strike due to the cold conditions.

Once she finishes up her doctorate, she will be starting a new job… as a staff engineer at Steward Observatory, home of MagAO-X! (And some other stuff I guess.)

After we bid our actual farewell to Maggie-O-X, it was time for Josh to drive. We found that all of Sebastiaan’s notebooks were still on the old ICC data drives, so some surgery was required to get them back into place on the new and improved SSD array.

As I write, there’s some serious disk pic analysis happening in the lounge, so maybe this night won’t be a complete bust…

Highlight of the Day

Per 2024Ab rules, the best part of the day… might be the underground Magellan tour, actually! So, you already read all about it.

Song of the Day

(Technically a waxing gibbous, but I can’t see shit.)

Our semi-occasional recurring feature: “Overheard at LCO”

“We’re just roadies for a metal band called MagAO-X.”

“At least on the internal source I can’t break anything.”
“Why would you say that?!“

“It’s a dissertation. It doesn’t have to be perfect.”

Like that classic painting, LCO took on some majesty and wonder today as the valley filled with clouds to compliment the cloud-covered skies.

Which gave way to another great sunset

Which gave way to another set of sad astronomers. Jay was eager to hit his disk target right away, but clouds are opaque to dreams and starlight alike.

This run, since the nights are so long, we’ve broken them into shifts with shift turnover around 1am ish. It’s 1 am now and the first shift is done for the night, I’m going to bed. There are faint whispers of hope in the cloud trend, but I suspect it is futile. Trust not to hope, it has abandoned these lands.

The best 15 mins of my day I guess was sending the first draft of my dissertation (minus a chapter) to Jared. Oh and then I played Untitled Goose Game with Joseph for an hour.

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The song of the day is Sad Songs by Elton John.

For the first time ever, an adaptive optics system at Las Campanas Observatory was installed without the guidance of Professor Laird Close! Laird is back in Tucson supporting his daughter at her high school graduation (congrats Annabel!) This means I got to fill in for my advisor as optomechanical lead on MagAO-X, and align the instrument to the telescope. It’s not as easy as it sounds!

To be honest, our smaller group of grad students really stepped up to the plate today to get this install done quickly, efficiently, and correctly. I guess we have good teachers or something….

One of the most important items I was tasked with today was not forgetting to remove the window covering on the back of the instrument (you know, so the starlight can actually get inside MagAO-X).

One of the more challenging sections of the alignment process is leveling the legs. Each of the four legs has four jack screws that are driven into corresponding metal casters placed on the floor. This raises the instrument to a particular height and does a preliminary leveling of the table before we turn on air flow to float the table. For some reason Josh got the pesky leg and we had to adjust it several times to get that lovely “0.0 degrees” on our digital level.

Other antics today: Our beloved postdoc, Dr. Sebastiaan Haffert, left the US today to return to his home country to become a professor at Leiden University in the Netherlands. We know he is going to accomplish amazing things! Too bad he’s leaving behind this group of jokesters (see our clown car).

Once we got the table leveled, and confirmed the ability to float and stay level, it was time to cable the instrument to the electronics rack.

Cabling went smoothly and all the DM actuators were live on the first try! Woot! After that, most of the team went to the early dinner while Kian and I stayed back and installed the worst part of our instrument: the bumpers. Below are some photos. Each leg of the instrument gets a bumper. Notice in the picture the rubber is not quite touching the instrument. That is intentional. When the telescope slews (rotates) our instrument mounted on the nasmyth platform rotates right along with it. If there was an emergency stop, and the telescope abruptly stopped moving, our floating table’s momentum would cause it to continue to move right off of its legs and go flying like a frisbee. Thus we have four bumpers attached to the legs to bump the instrument back onto the legs in case of such an event. While these are a necessary safety precaution, they are no walk in the park. They’re heavy and unwieldy, and if you recognize that clam looking piece of metal, that is because it has to be uninstalled from the cart we use to wheel MagAO-X around, then reinstalled onto the legs with the bumper hardware.

Nonetheless, Kian and I persevered. We installed all four bumpers plus some earthquake bars and we were ready to observe! But not before some sunset shots!

Now I am sitting in the control room, writing this blog, as Jared works on calibrating, Eden is taking logs, Logan works on her dissertation, Kian is modeling some coronagraph, and Joseph tries to fix our never-ending computer problems. Josh and Jay are hopefully peacefully asleep, as they are taking over the second half of this 14 hour observing night. The dome is currently closed due to clouds. Before we closed though, Jared managed to close the loop at 3000 Hz for the first time on-sky!

The best fifteen minutes of my day was really just a few seconds. As soon as Jared confirmed that the system was aligned and a star was incident on our cameras, just as well as the March run, I felt a huge weight leave my shoulders. I have done well by my advisor and I can rest easy knowing I handed off MagAO-X in a usable state.

Song of the Day:

Your song of the day is paying homage to the worst 15 minutes of my day.

As the first observation night rapidly approaches, it was time to truck MagAO-X up the hill to the observatory. But first, Joseph furiously tried to solve the software woes and the rest of the crew suited up to decable MagAO-X.

With an average of 5 people in the clean tent at a time, decabling went smoothly (no incident with any DM cables whatsoever). Maggie and I removed some old ALPAO cables from within the instrument, which were precariously routed through about 1000 other cables and in between optics. Eden, Logan, and Josh removed all cables from the electronics rack .

Prior to lunch, we got a great look at MagAO-X in its final form before wrapping it up for its journey. On their way to lunch, Eden and Logan got the first glimpse of a Gary on this run.

After lunch, all returned to seal up MagAO-X. As part of the newcomer ritual, I was hazed by being forced into cart construction duty. Luckily, plenty of experienced hands were available to help.

With our package prepared, the LCO crew arrived to ship it up the hill!

With MagAO-X resting in the observatory storage area till the next day, we had some time to enjoy the beautiful views and the exceptional sunset.

After dinner, Eden pulled out some games to confuse us. While convoluted, they certainly resulted in some great moments and memorable blunders.

The best 15 minutes of the day, or more like the most strange 15 minutes, was trying a cup of the notorious Boldo tea. As a wiseman described it, “it kind of tastes like a car.” While I am glad to have experienced it once, I will never do it again.

Song of the day:

As Maggie and I precariously removed unused cables in MagAO-X while hovering over OAPs, this is the song I had playing in my head. I think it also suits all those moments when MagAO-X was being pushed, lifted, and driven to its resting place for the night.

Mission Impossible Theme (Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen Jr’s version performed in 1996)

Guess who’s made it to Chile? Everyone else! You know it’s almost time to put the instrument on the telescope because the brawn has arrived en masse. We were luckier than last run 5/5 of the expected graduates / Postdocs made it to Santiago unharmed and on time.

On our way from the La Serena, we all jammed into the mini van, with just the cubic feet needed to fit all of us and our luggage. It was the hardest jenga our sleep deprived brains could probably have accomplished at that point. Fortunately it was just for the quick jump to the halfway house for astronomers, the Pine on the hill. We had to wait here for a bit before our larger, more official van shepherded us the 2 hours to the telescopes.

Meanwhile, our compatriots up the hill were enjoying a luxurious empenada lunch, after a hard mornings work of calibration tests and computer construction. Some of us travelers were lucky enough to be visited by the masked empenada fairy, delivering the delicacy to our unoccupied rooms.

The travel crew arrived, some well napped, others full of podcast, to a chilly mountain top that feels a little more like home every time. After some necessary rest and recovery in our rooms, we finally joined the mountain team for a big dinner. We’ll be back to big work tomorrow, but for now we get to rest (on real beds, not half naps van or airplane seats). The clouds weren’t looking promising, but they sure did make for a pretty sunset:

The best 15 minutes of the day was getting to see a friendly face from the past! Casey Lam, who was once upon a time a grad student working with Jessica Lu when I was a mere undergrad, just so happened to be the observers before us on Clay. She’s now a postdoc with Carnegie in Pasadena! With the buffer day we need to get the instrument on the telescope, I got to spend a good 15+ minutes catching up before Casey observes her last night and heads back down. Have clear skies and safe travels, Casey!

Song of the Day

To be completely honest, you’re getting a blog post from a pretty tired kid, just maybe the least tired and least busy. See you tomorrow where we’ll be a little more alive!