Tag: 2024A

It appears precedent has been set by An astronomer’s guide to Valparaíso and Bonus Feature: Santiago de Chile. So here is the chronicle of Katie’s and my traipse through La Serena, Chile on our way back to Tucson.

First and foremost we hit the beach! Just like California on the other side of the equator, the Pacific Ocean is not warm, but majestic as always.

We went to the historic shopping center and craft market, La Recova. Great food, great souvenirs, great sleepy pups. Knowing full well we would be missing the 2nd empanada Sunday at LCO, we took advantage of our time in proximity to Chilean restaurants.

The most exciting part of our trip was undoubtedly our tour of the Pingüino de Humboldt National Reserve. The folks at El Pino Lodge (Carnegie’s base camp in La Serena) were able to set us up with an amazing bilingual tour.

In case any future astronomers would like to attempt this expedition, I will lay it out. First, you drive about 1.5 hours north of La Serena to Punta de Choros where you will board a boat. Katie and I don’t really know what we were expecting, but we weren’t expecting this:

You begin by cruising around Isla Gaviota in hopes of maybe seeing a whale or dolphin. We didn’t have that luck but we were not in for disappointment. The main part of the tour is slowly taking the boat around Isla Choros and taking in all the wildlife and crazy rock formations. The only people allowed on Isla Choros are biologists studying the animals. However, several sea lions popped into the water to study our boat!

Did we get to see the bell of the ball? The South American Humboldt Penguin? You betcha.

In the final portion of the tour, you get off the boat and wander around Isla Damas and take in the unique flora and fauna.

Finally, on our way out of the city we had to take a look at Faro Monumental de La Serena, the distinctive lighthouse 25 meters high (hey that’s how big GMT will be!).

Song of the Day:

Around sunset, two of our finest graduate student AO operators took time lapses of the dome opening. Jay covered the inside of the dome, providing us with a view of the primary mirror cover opening. Eden on the other hand, set her phone on the tripod outside the dome and managed to get a video of the telescope turning, louvers opening, and also DIMM opening. If you spotted the abnormal blockage of the telescope view in the beginning of the video, you have witnessed the little bird that delivered a surprised gift for Eden – its guano. Thank you for your sacrifice, Eden’s phone.

And of course, the blog doesn’t quite feel complete without photos of viscachas.

The night started off with 3 hours of engineering lead by Sebastiaan and Jared, and there are no photo evidence of such event because a majority of us were too amused by the newest entertainment channel at Clay: the window into the supporting astronomer room. As the engineering block ends, the telescope is then handed over to the observers of the night, Logan and Jay. The seeing conditions were non-ideal, but they are still hopeful of their data.

The rest of us spent the night reducing some of the data we have obtained from the past few nights. We are all excited about the science yield in disk and substellar companion imaging. So keep your eye out for our papers on astro-ph and/or ADS!

And I am bring back a segment of the blog that I enjoy every much: quotes of the day! Enjoy the selected anonymous quotes.

“Oh, its so good to have Maggie back”

“Sebastiaan likes his cars like he likes his AO loop closing: operated at unsafe speeds”

“No. It’s not yellow. It’s just a golden hour butt.”

Song of the Day

For the song of the day, I, with the assistance of Eden, have selected a song that well fits with the weather of the night: wispy clouds.

Every MagAO-X morning begins with a hearty breakfast.

Following a scrumptious meal and a full night of observing, I entered hibernation.

…

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Zzzzzzzzzzzz

While I was in my state of low activity, the other group members observed a wild horse and some Vizzies.

…

ZZZzzzzZZZ

…

I emerged from a long day’s slumber just in time for dinner. Unfortunately there were no food action shots this time.

Eden had an opportunity to experience the LCO flora and fauna before heading back up to the telescope.

Tonight’s observing run got off to a bit of a dramatic start when the operator discovered a strong amount of coma on the telescope. Although I forgot to collect photographic evidence of the events that immediately followed, I constructed an artistic depiction for everyone’s benefit.

After we recovered from the early evening drama, the night progressed very smoothly. In fact, things were going so well that Jared began regaling some MagAO-Xers with tales from his seafaring youth.

And then…a happy accident occurred! Twins!!!!!

To close out this fine day (or evening…I have lost all sense of time), I have included a song by my high school band (per Jialin’s request) that I feel is aptly named.

Song of the Day:

We finally had an all-night good night. Started with what we call engineering, which means testing new ways of operating the instrument. The big news is that Sebastiaan got his “implicit Electric Field Conjugation” algorithm to work on-sky. This brings MagAO-X almost to its as-planned fully capability. Here’s what that looks like to one of our highly trained operators:

Why would one want to conjugate an electric field? Let’s let Sebastiaan explain:

After the instrument-science experiments, we spent the rest of the night hunting planets. Tonight was almost one of those legendary Cerro Manqui nights that keeps us coming back over and over again. It was essentially 0.5″ seeing all night, but we were plagued by our version of the low-wind effect. However instead of Mickey Mouse, we get the Bouncey House: when the wind drops to 0.0 the telescope gets bored and starts to bounce. It makes our control loop more or less impossible to optimize.

We have been conjugating other things too.

The song:

If you’ve been around this blog a time or two you’ve probably heard our woes with respect to seeing — the measurement of just how twinkly the stars are. Twinkling is bad for science, and our instrument can’t operate well if the seeing is too high.

We started this run with some pretty good seeing! In fact, two nights ago was the first night for my program and the seeing was excellent! I was able to observe a lot of my targets and get great images. You might have seen that last night was less spectacular, and I’m sad to see tonight is no different.

Before we closed for wind and more engineering, Jialin got to drive some and I took some maybe-useable data.

Some animals and nice shots from the day.

Some of Eden’s lovely telescope night shots

BUT WAIT! The night’s not over yet. Immediately after my time was up and I left the control room, seeing tanked just in time for Jay’s disk observations

The night ended strong with Jay riding out his target until sunrise.

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Some of you may have clocked that I arrived a bit late to the mountain this time. Well here is the quick story time.

In May last year I had a foot surgery that through many ups and downs has still not fully healed today (that’s a story for another time). I haven’t been able to bear weight on my left foot since May, approximately 10 months of not using my foot. About three weeks ago I got the go ahead to start walking on it again, and I was slowly and carefully transitioning back to bearing weight. But even though I was mostly walking, I couldn’t walk long distances, so I decided to bring my knee scooter to get around the airports easily.

In Santiago customs I got selected for an extra security scan and as I was hauling my luggage around I lost balance and fell over the front of the scooter, which severely messed up my left first metatarsil bone (the main bone through your foot leading to each toe). I couldn’t put any weight even on my heel or move or touch or even put my croc shoe on my foot. So I decided to stay in La Serena and see a doctor to be sure it wasn’t broken. It wasn’t. But the long period of disuse makes it incredibly lucky that it wasn’t! I saw the dr again a few days later, then headed up on Thursday.

I’m doing a lot better now! Still not walking, I’ve got crutches now to get around the site. But definitely better. At this trajectory I might be able to walk some by the time we leave.

So that’s the story!

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The song of the day is The Calamity Song by The Decemberists