Tag: 2024A

Tonight was an oddball: we were off the telescope for another observer for the first half, then came up at 1:30 for the second half, which was solely Sebastiaan on VIS-X, our spectrograph. So we had half a Haffert night.

Various angles of Sebastiaan squinting at spectra

It also the last night of the run, so you know what that means: spending all day getting MagAO-X off the telescope and put away for the May run. Some of us slept for the first half of the night, including me. I went to bed after dinner and slept until 12:30am and it was glorious. At the end of night we will go up on the platform and de-cable the instrument. Then we head to bed and the morning crew, who went to bed around midnight or so, will get up and get ‘er off the platform with the LCO crew. We will join them again after lunch. Fortunately we don’t have to prepare for shipping this time and only have to button her down until May.

We ended up observing well into dawn so we got a late start on decable, the morning crew came up as we got started. Pics from decable crew:

And with that we retired to our room for a few hours while morning crew takes over.

And there is the 8am down-the-mountain transport picking up riders. That’ll be us tomorrow fam.

Anyway here is an assortment of pics for your viewing pleasure.

So milky. Credits to Sebastiaan (left) and Jialin (right)

Large and Small Magellenic (Milky?) Clouds, only visible from the southern hemisphere. Photo by Eden.

Keep a lookout for the upside-down Orion constellation to the left here. Proof the Earth is a sphere. Photo credit to Sebastiaan.

Eden got some incredible Carlos footage I felt wasn’t properly displayed here, so here’s some fox for you. (Not a true fox)

He is a look-don’t-touch friend.

Yesterday was April fools but on Day 19 we couldn’t get our act together to post something witty.

The day before was Easter Sunday. So here is a repost of the Easter Viz

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The song of the day is Break It Down Again by Tears for Fears.

Today was our second to last night and our last engineering night. We all woke up (or went to bed) with a happy surprise because today was Easter. We all got some chocolates and some unknown piece of candy.

The night itself went all over the place. We did a lot of coronagraph engineering and EFC tests. These went well for the conditions that we had to work in. And, we were able to squeeze in some time for on-sky testing of the Holographic Dispersed Fringe Sensor (TM). It is the sensor that we are developing to phase the segmented primary of the Giant Magellan Telescope.

After the HDFS engineering, we went to A Cen. One might think that this is Alpha Centauri but this is definitely not true! We observed A Cen and it was not Alpha Centauri, it was a random other bright star. We only realized this after aligning the whole system. The telescope operator was quickly given a new catalogue that contained only Alpha Cen so that we did not make the same mistake again. We stayed on Alpha Cen for almost the whole night. The night was wrapped up with some Baade’s Window and another accelerating star with a low-mass companion. All-in-all a pretty good night, even though we had some setbacks.

Today, Carlos was sneaking around the lodge. Eden was on the ball and shot some incredible pictures of Carlos. It is trying to sneak around and find food around the lodge. A little bit up the road to the telescope, Jared encountered a horse together with its baby horse.

Today was a good day for animal viewing. In a couple of months you will find our Andean wild life documentary on Netflix.

For today we are going with an astronomy themed song!

Another day of observing for the MagAO-X Team at LCO.

Even though the inmensity of the Pacific Ocean is not observed from Las Campanas, as the sun sets over the west the twin Magellan Telescopes get ready for a new night of work.

As always the local fauna provide their company to the daily(nightly) routines of the observers and staff at LCO. Here, portraiting a fox and a nice chinchilla(do not confuse it with its bigger cousin the vizcacha) chilling in the mountain

The night started with some alignment calibrations as we waited for the targeted to transit around midnight. Overall good weather and clear skies for most of the nigth, so hopefully there will be exciting images coming out from today.

A sequence of sources at the Chameleon constellation baptised the day as the Cha-Cha day

After a long night of observations, the team is ready to not start the day and go to bed at dawn 🙂

Song of the Day

Even though the night seemed promising to choose a Cha-cha-cha song as song of the day, we were one Cha short. So, as a token of appreciation of the sometimes exhausting and rough 2,400 meters of altitude where the LCO is located, the chosen song of the day is this instrumental song “Alturas”(Heights) by the chilean group Inti-Illimani, where Inti is the incain Sun god and Illimani from where the Sun rises.

Well, it’s nearly time to add another MagAO-X night under our belt and be greeted by the calls of the exceedingly uncommon black-billed shrike-tyrant (identified by Prof. Close!) from atop the lodge. I won’t be able to top the wonderful post by our skilled telescope operator, but the show must go on.

Tonight was an engineering/Sebastiaan night and our awesome Dutch postdoc is probably in full-on zombie mode as he has been up for nearly 24 hours getting the VIS-X instrument up to speed, which is a MagAO-X fed, visible wavelength, integral field spectrograph to the eXtreme. In addition to that, he and Josh have been hard at work commissioning implicit-Electric Field Conjugation, which is just a fancy term for “black magic speckle zapping”. Speckles are a type of noise in high-contrast imaging that are easily mistaken for planets or other point sources of interest, so it’s really important that they are suppressed as much as possible.

The above images demonstrate the power of iEFC coupled with our knife-edge coronagraph, which blocks the host star in the middle of the frame. See how speckles are actually very effective exoplanet interlopers (top right)? No bueno.

Let’s break for a moment to appreciate the various Equidae who take residence on the mountain. I would like to point out that these photos were shot by the wickedly-talented Jialin Li, who also demanded I stop the car I was driving us in halfway up the road to the telescopes take these pics. No biggie, just 6 complete stops on measly 50 degree incline while driving a stick-shift…!

I regret to inform our blog followers that a crime has been committed here at the Clay telescope. Josh was quickly apprehended as the prime suspect and soon confessed to accidentally taking a massive honkin’ bite out of the middle of the cheese block. The honorable Judge Logan made the remark “This is a public cheese. Everyone has to use this cheese.” before sentencing him to eat his mistake. Apparently everyone took pity on Josh and decided to help him carry out his punishment because this was a full block of cheese at the beginning of the night…!

We’ll end with a pretty picture of the burros during golden hour.

…aaaaand a sweet picture of Magellan Clay basking in the moonlight during prime time.

Song of the Day

We can all thank Josh for brieing cordial and introducing all of us to the GOAT, Ricardo Queso, who is sharply relevant today, may he rest in cheese. The original is a song some us might have gruyere up listening to or have fondue memories of, as it’s a gouda song, made beddar by the ripe wit of R. Cheese. Though good music is best spotted by the rind’s eye, it’s never a bleu day when the bad vibes are sliced off by creamy melody. After all, it just ain’t a party without havarti.

After a long time, MagAO-X has arrived at Las Campanas, bringing the full team and others partners. It is a crowd that keep you alert all night long. 

This past Summer 2024 we were visited by several “friends” coming from the valley and also from high mountains. Apart from burros, vizcachas, we had “crias de cóndor y guanaco”, also a solitaire zorro. 

They were flying over our heads and moving around us without caution as if they knew we were not going to hurt them.

The condors are young as you can notice, on the neck will became a thick white collar and the guanaco, more than five at that time, you can see the fur is curly, later it will became smooth keeping almost the same colour.

This zorro was looking for something to eat, I can imagine, far from his home.

As you can see on these pictures and videos, they look so magnificent living on their natural environment, clear blue skies, pure air.

Guanacos were protected by others adult guanacos. Condors, we did not see adults, those are rare to came down.

There were almost four months of warm days and pleasant nights. It would explain why so many “visitors” we received.

And we still can see all of them around the site !!!

Some of those are here:

I have you to enjoy the song of the day, which is of course, El cóndor pasa.

It is a well known song whose original version from 1963 belongs to Los Incas voices. Remind you the Andes mountains, here at South America, involves the whole latin america people at this side of the world.

EL CÓNDOR PASA (VERSIÓN ORIGINAL)- LOS INCAS