It’s cold. But, at least it isn’t windy anymore. A good omen has revealed itself this night and it’s that the domes are actually open at sunset.
Good night, sunshine. Orion says hello!
In terms of flashy #blontent, today was pretty sparse. But this is perhaps ideal for lab calibration days! For instance, yesterday was ripe with #blontent in comparison which meant we were tearing apart cabinets, peeling out of parking lots, searching the trunks of random cars all over the observatory to try and find our ESD kit for the DM cabling. It actually ended up being in one of our shipping crates in the clean room receiving area all along. So, it’s good that Jared has been able to focus on getting good calibrations and figuring out new ways to align our most critical components for the run, which is approaching at the speed of light seemingly.
Jared hard at work working on better alignment procedures and quality of life improvements for all the future AO operators.
I got a chance to briefly work on giving old ICC new life using some new computer parts Jared ordered. However we ran into a compatibility issue with the CPU cooler and it won’t fasten to the mobo without special adapters. Apparently this company quietly deemed these to be special order items sometime in last September instead of including them in the box like they have been doing. What the hay…!
Thankfully Eden was able to make an emergency stop at the lab back in Tucson to grab said adapters. Thanks Eden!
Old ICC is getting resurrected! It just requires some parts that are undergoing overnight international shipping from Tucson.
This past afternoon we were delighted to officially welcome UASAL’s Kian M. to the 2024Ab run.
Sorry, I forgot to get photographic evidence of Kian’s arrival.
The best 15 minutes of today was welcoming Kian to LCO and giving him a brief tour of MagAO-X in lab state, the ASB, and the lodge. Also stating the do’s and don’ts for the experience here. Like, DO max out your empanada order on Sundays. And DON’T desecrate the public cheese. Tomorrow we will probably get a chance to hike up to the telescopes and go swashbuckling or something. Anyone else remember their first time on the mountain?
We’re eager to meet most of the rest of the team tomorrow afternoon, safe travels!!!!
When the door to the Babcock lodge is held open by wind blowing through, you know the domes aren’t open. (that’s a day time pic, but you know what I mean)
Luckily Jay and I were snug in the cleanroom almost all day, getting MagAO-X setup for some alignment and calibration work. We started right after breakfast with Juan and Felix and Miguel, and got MagAO-X craned onto its air legs. We then spent the rest of the day connecting stuff.
View from asternAll the cables are cabledShortly after dinner we had a fully cabled and working instrument
At the end of the day we had the loop closed and the nice PSFs. Tomorrow we get to work on repeatable alignment procedures and more robust calibrations.
My favorite 15 minutes was after connecting the last cable for the 2K DM, and running the tests to verify that each actuator was functioning, and having it work on the first try – no re-cabling needed. The 1K worked on the first try too, but it always does.
The song of the day is “Act of Approach” by The Dead South.
“You’re back again, so soon…!” Said Hernan as we passed by him walking to the MagAO storage crate to retrieve some steel toe boots for tomorrow. Here’s a quick play-by-play of travel and arrival day for the first wave of the 2024Ab crew:
The traditional pre-flight “Lizzie’s Luggage” at TUS. Left: Sad-which from 2024Aa Right: Good-which from 2024Ab. Some sandwich artists care more than others apparently.Flying over Safford we got to wave to LBT and the rest of Mount Graham Intl. Observatory.Picking up groceries at the SCL Starbucks Now on our way to La Serena! It’s starting to get kinda cold out here…‘Merica gave us a ride up today!
Well after the ride up we got right to work!
At the end of the last run we ran into an issue with one of the screw jacks in the legs. It became stuck to the point that any more torque applied to the bolt probably would have snapped the Allen wrench, but we managed to get the bottom of the bolt ~1 mm off the ground before it stopped moving completely. We then limped the legs back into the corner of the cleanroom, and here we are now with MagAO-X needing to be re-legged tomorrow morning which can’t be done in case the screw drags on the floor. Thankfully, Juan and his crew came to rescue and with a few squirts of some delicious WD-40 and with some TLC were able to remove the bolt! They even chased the threads with a die and tap to clean them up and applied some grease for good measure.
Unfortunately it wasn’t all W’s in the cleanroom today. We found out that one out of the two fancy new curved monitors meant for the observer station suffered some damage sometime during transit to the cleanroom.
Can this even be returned at this point?Gotta get the sunset shot!Glad it’s not us tonight….
2024Ab blog rules
We’ll stick to keeping it simple this time ’round for the blog rules, so, Song of the Day still applies (all posts must end with a YouTube embed of a song) *and* all posts must include a description of the best 15 minutes of that day/night. The description can include as much or as little detail as needed, and is subjective.
The best 15 minutes of Day 0 was probably meeting up with Juan’s crew in the cleanroom and freeing the stuck screw jack on one corner of MagAO-X’s legs. Having built and daily driven a 1973 VW Bug in my youthen years, I’ve lost many nights of sleep over stuck nuts and bolts. Seeing that bolt finally come free after fighting so hard with it at the end of 2023Aa was honestly a genuine feeling of relief. You had to be there, I guess.
Song of the Day
Folks, it’s cold up here on the mountain. Please bring some of the Tucson warmth with you, we’re gonna need it.
P.S. congrats to Logan, Maggie, and Katie (XWCL) as well as Jaren (UASAL) for going through commencement today!
First sighting of a large water body since early March.
Like any triumphant victory, the champions must eventually turn homeward. After an amazing few weeks of scientific discoveries, engineering miracles, and accidental binary friends, we packed up our many multi-terabyte hardrives and headed down all 8000 ft back down on our way home.
The pine that makes the lodge el Pino.Traveler above a sea of fog, colorized, 2024A dreamy model GMT, bigger than the ones we have back home.
We had an early morning bus filled with some napping, clear skies and a view of the bay. Post drive we got a quick break at El Pino, enjoyed the sights, touched grass, and confirmed that there was still that weird vizzy people were calling a rabbit. After a brief respite of healthier snacks and preferred beverages, we all packed back in the van and left for the La Serena airport. All except for Josh, who by a cruel twist of fate was the only lab member who got completely rebooked with a separate itinerary back to Tucson. We miss him to this day.
Last known photo of Josh Liberman.
And then the whirlwind of luggage hauling, TSA searches, elite lounge scouring, airplane sitting, more TSA, and sleep-deprived airport navigation began. Despite the 36 hours in transit, we did make time for the important traditions.
Cervezas and papas fritas pre Las Serena TSA. Post-TSA Jay, plane watching.Inducting the uninitiated into the SCL Terminal E Ruby Tuesdays Pisco sour fanclub.
But just like that, or maybe “after all that”, we finally emerged blinking in the Tucson sun. After clunky suitcases were retrieved, goodbyes were brief. It’s hard to be sentimental on dubious amounts of red-eye sleep and to people you have just spent three weeks secluded mountain top, stepping on their toes.
One of the many attractions of Chile includes some friends, the Gemini telescope.
But like any epic tale, why not tell it twice? Your favorite AO squad couldn’t resist the encore to such a successful run, and we will be back in May for 24Ab. In the meantime we will be catching up on our sleep debt, hugging our loved ones, and quickly putting in a load of laundry.
Offloading is a major, but sometimes under-appreciated, part of an AO system. It makes sense when you really think about what we’re doing. The moving part of the Magellan Clay Telescope weighs more than 100 tons (I don’t know the exact number, but that is the OOM that has stuck in my head from somebody telling me that once). But what we actually do for a living is wiggle tiny little pieces of silicon with a few atoms of gold or silver on top, in response to massless particles streaming through the atmosphere, all in a quest to achieve nanometer or better control over the universe. Over time the little wiggles turn into big wiggles, and we have to send them to the next bigger thing. We call this offloading, and in MagAO-X there’s a whole chain of it from our coronagaph deformable mirror to our pyramid+tweeter DM system (where the real magic happens) to our woofer, and from there to the telescope itself. Inside those main control loops there are other control loops that are adding steps to the dance. Loops on loops. There’s a certain absurdity to our little concerns getting dumped onto the majestic Clay telescope and pushing it around.
A way to analogize offloading: imagine flying to the other side of the world to a remote mountain top, being given a bunch of urgent tasks (some of which are impossible but nobody knew that until you failed), then suddenly switching to a night schedule, sleeping for 4 or 5 hrs a day (not night) for two weeks straight, and then suddenly switching to a day schedule so you can undo everything you spent the last two weeks doing. You can imagine that you’ll build up a little … stress… that’s hard to hold and you need to … offload it. Well it’s time to hit the ol’ dump button. You might not hear from us for a while.
Maybe as long as six weeks.
The last sunset.
So that’s it. MagAO-X is off the telescope after a truly amazing run. We’ve really hit our stride as a productive scientific instrument. I lost track of how many new things about the universe we discovered on this run, and #nospoilers anyway. At the same time I am leaving, as always, a little frustrated by the ways in which MagAO-X isn’t yet perfect, not yet meeting my expectations. Every new discovery comes with a lesson for how to do it better next time.
An image of Crux and Alpha & Beta Centauri rising over the Babcock Lodge at Las Campanas Observatory
Without a doubt the best thing about this project is that it is fun. The fun started with MagAO, and a long running tradition on this blog is the “quotes of the day”. It comes and goes, even during this run. Back “in the day” it became a problem because we realized people were just saying things hoping to get famous. Later on, it got us kicked of the Steward front page (still banned AFAICT, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯). As a reader, you should know that some fraction of the quotes have always been just straight made up. The lessons are that the quote log can be used for good, for evil, and sometimes it gets things done. Well, so anyway, here’s a PI-curated selection of quotes from this run. #overheard
“The control room is likely to be completely overrun. Keep calm and make sure you have a chair”
“take that speckles”
“This is a public cheese. Everyone has to use this cheese.”
“Who is Jahlishus?”
“Blog ops is completely unrecognizable. All it is is fucking penguins and Dall-E viscachas.”
“Which is almost a triggering thing for Jared… I’m kind of disappointed he’s not here to hear that”
“Let’s see if I can install zoom before the sun sets”
“Oh. My. God. We’re over 2 arcseconds.” “We’re going to need a bigger plot.” “This is just all sadness…” “I don’t want to go up there to the sadness party”
“When conditions are like this, it feels like nothing works… because nothing works.”
“I have way too many laptops”
“I spent my whole postdoc finishing my Ph.D.”
“If you’re okay I’m going to take a break … for breakfast … what time is it?”
“the units are ‘play around and find out’” (Ed: shortly thereafter the SI unit FAFO was coined)
“We had everything wrong”
“g band is horrible. I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy”
“We deserve strehls better than 20%”
“I’m not doing science, I’m doing AO”
“But I thought AO was easier in the visible?!”
“You see that?” “THAT?!“ “I know.”
“what’s that second speckle???” “…. OH that’s Pi Pup B!”
“Who knew it would actually work?”
“You cannot hit the grad students”
“that is a really large blueberry”
“… ah this is the 4th time I’ve heard about ‘The little guy’, Can I see what you’re talking about?”
“I stared at him and thought ‘Why are you not making my salad’ “
“oh that tingled. oh wait I am electrocuting myself.”
“So the only thing misaligned in your system was the cardboard?”
“except that it imploded during shipping, it works really well!”
“You don’t do that with geese but I didn’t know that at the time”
“I’m stealing fruit for my next couple days of breakfasts. I’ve been stealing a little bit every day. I have a little pile of fruit in my room.”
“Zernike polynomials, you’re my bitch now”
“I found our nuts at Baade! Those Bastards!”
“I appreciate that you’re always working on bullshit when you’re here”
“I love it here”
“I’ll bet you all your empanadas for the rest of the run” “… nothing is worth that”
“More people will read your blog than your PhD”
“Go ahead and take a dump.”
I love stories about a crew. LOTR, Firefly, The Expanse. I found this song through Yellowstone, which on its surface appears to be about one dude/family but I think is more properly understood as a crew story. The song itself sort of captures my mood about our ongoing attempt to achieve the fundamental limits of wavefront control. If it wasn’t hard, it wouldn’t be worth doing. We have a good crew, so we’ll get there.
