Well, that went fast. Maggie and I are the first team members of the run to embark on the long journey down the mountain and trade the Atacama back for the Sonoran desert. But, before then, we had one last night to make the most of our time here at LCO.
After some daytime calibrations (and some very interesting hot dog-based pastries at dinner), we headed up the mountain for a full night of observing. Per tradition, we officially kicked things off with a sunset photo:
Isn’t Clay just so pretty?Logan joins us for sunset from La SerenaClouds? in MY Atacama Desert? It’s more likely than you think.
Now, don’t get me wrong: the clouds put on a gorgeous show for sunset, but they are not generally harbingers of good astronomy. Nevertheless, we were determined to get as much good science done as we possibly could, and we were pleasantly surprised; clouds passed, and we saw seeing hold steady below 0.5 (and even dip below 0.4) arcseconds for a good portion of the second half of the night.
Maggie, Laird, and Sebastiaan started things off with our dear friend the HDFS, performing some of the first phasing tests on-sky:
Look at those fringes. Beautiful.I’ve decided that astronomy is in fact a spectator sport
Unfortunately, the timing worked out so that Maggie and I will be coming down the mountain at the same time that Logan comes up, so we won’t get the chance to have the whole team here at the same time. Tonight Logan joined via Zoom to observe some of her targets, with a white dwarf companion making a very exciting appearance:
No feet pics, pleaseLook at that lil guy!
As the night went on, Laird and Jialin got their turn to conduct cutting-edge science in the control room. What was going on in the “kids room” downstairs, you might ask? Only the most important of shenanigans:
Yoga is good for the bodyAnd the soul.
This much science is exhausting for anyone, especially the PI of the project. Unfortunately for Jared, MaggieO-X saw the opportunity to usurp and seized it:
You heard her. She’s the PI now.
I’m about to follow the PI’s example and try and catch some sleep before Maggie and I head down. But, before I go, I’d like to share a bit of personal news in honor of my last night at LCO:
Hard to believe I’m back here! I was so convinced 2023A would be my last trip to Chile with the MagAO-X team that I tried to do all my tourist stuff in one go last year. In the past year, I’ve defended my dissertation, moved across the country, and begun a fellowship at the Center for Computational Astrophysics of the Flatiron Institute, a division of the Simons Foundation. (That is officially how we are supposed to refer to it, officially. Unofficially, it’s just “CCA.”)
Today’s lesson is that sometimes you try your best to sleep all day and just can’t manage it, even if you exhausted yourself working the longest day. Those of us with this problem were today’s accidental day crew: myself, Sebastiaan, Maggie, and Eden. We got up for lunch and did some daytime engineering on MagAO-X.
An HDFS introduced in the first act must go on-sky by the fifth.
Maggie and Sebastiaan prepared to test the Holographic Dispersed Fringe Sensor (patent pending?) on-sky, shoring up its credibility for inclusion in the Giant Magellan Telescope project’s plans. I helped Eden get started with fixr, my Python library to read the format for our images that have been extremely reordered. I did some work on packaging fixr as well as getting various guest observer software creature comforts working consistently once again.
We all met up at dinner (save Jialin, who had to attend a class online). Tuesday is turno day, where the crew that’s been working since last Tuesday gets replaced by all new staff fresh from their week off-duty. While I will miss Sr. Verdugo’s desserts, this turno‘s cooks are breaking new ground in LCO salad bar operations. Imagine, sliced strawberries in a salad! I’ve never seen the like here before.
Josh Liberman regaled us with tales of the risks of excess cheese and the good sense of always traveling with Strunk & White’s elements of style. Katie always carries nail clippers instead. (I’m not sure why either of those were needed at dinner, but it’s certainly preferable to be well-spoken and well-groomed than the opposite.)
Stylish.
Meanwhile, down at El Pino, Logan Pearce was enjoying the local wildlife and natural environment.
The viscachas look different in La Serena
Wait for the green flash
Today also saw the arrival of Jialin Li, who arrived on the mountain after a one-day delay not unlike my own. (Did you know LATAM has a ninety minute cutoff for accepting checked bags? Well, I do now.)
Jialin is not only Laird Close’s graduate student but is also a heuristic interactive algorithm for observer time scheduling. Each astronomer has certain targets, which rise and set at certain times, and a certain number of nights (or fractional nights) allocated by their institution. Balancing these constraints is hard, possibly even NP-hard. Unfortunately, Jialin was incommunicado in transit yesterday, and the schedule was pulled in all directions in her absence. Sebastiaan began compiling constraints based on when people would be ready for various engineering tasks, when they’d be arriving onsite, when they’d be leaving, and whatnot.
So, when she arrived, the schedule was still very much in flux. The control room at dusk was alive with furious multitasking. At one point Logan Pearce called in from the hotel in La Serena (where she is recuperating) to try and understand the scheduling spreadsheet, which was live updating rapidly before her very eyes. After much hemming and hawing and proverbial horse-trading, an acceptable schedule solution was reached—just as the sun set.
Figure 1: Ph.D. advisor elated that his student (center) survived her travel odyssey
For tonight’s scheduled performance, the role of Dr. Alycia Weinberger was played by the understudy, Jay Kueny. Jay acquired more data of some of Alycia’s favorite debris disk targets. MagAO-X can image shorter wavelengths than MagAO+Clio could, and produces better images than MagAO+VisAO did. This means the residual light from the star doesn’t spread out as far, making it easier to detect and characterize the parts of the disk closest to the star in our images.
The bad seeing conditions we had initially mellowed out to more typical 0.5–0.6” seeing after the sun had been down for a little while, and we got some good data on HD 61005 for Alycia. Alas, it could not last. Clouds began to gather on the horizon, and the wind picked up something fierce. The telescope can’t operate in high winds, so this kiboshed a lot of our plans for the evening.
You can see what happened on the plot below, most easily recognized by the big chunk of missing seeing data. Winds got above 35 mph average, which meant we had to shut down. Since there’s never any shortage of things to do, and MagAO-X has an internal “telescope simulator” source, we attempted to make the most of this time for engineering.
!!!!
While Jared continued polishing MagAO-X Halpha performance with internal calibrations, a few of us retired to the break room to audition songs for Song of the Day. There were a few rejected choices (too sad, too raunchy, contains swears, etc.) but I think I picked a good one.
Around 4:58, Sebastiaan popped his head outside and reported seeing “a ton of stars” so we all traipsed back upstairs bright-eyed and bushy-tailed… only to hear Jared say “don’t get excited.” Although a ton of stars were visible, the humidity was climbing fast, and threatening clouds were gathering in the North.
We all got less excited. As we got close to sunrise, humidity plateaued and the average wind speed stayed low long enough that our telescope operator (the incomparable Alberto Pastén) decided it was safe to reopen. At this point, science was off the menu: not only was engineering scheduled for the end of the night, but the conditions were too bad for any but the brightest targets anyhow.
The Chekhov’s HDFS introduced in the beginning of the blog post must go off by the end, so Sebastiaan quickly slotted it in to take some data under realistic 90th-percentile conditions. It was tough to keep things stable, and the dispersed fringes occasionally disappeared entirely, but we took some data of a double star and got to see all the fringes doubled. That’ll be fun to disentangle.
it’s like a dandelion!
After we finished, Sebastiaan and I stayed up for breakfast and were rewarded with this view of the valley filled with clouds trapped in the inversion.
Today’s song of the day expresses a desire for a counterfactual reality in which the clouds are absent and the seeing is always below half an arcsecond. I think that’s what they were singing about, anyway.
Do you have what it takes to be the next great AO operator? Well today is the day that tests your mettle. Starting as bright an early as our crane operators will let us, we do a little bit of everything this 24hr shift. We pack, we crane, we unpack, we unwrap, we level, we cable, and at the very end of it all we finally get to do a little bit of why we’re here: astronomy.
Careful cart alignment requires many positions.Aligning bolts on
The day started out with the projects greatest fiend, the cart. We build it around the table to help it roll from truck to the telescope. Every time we assemble and disassemble this 200lb or so beast, we grow closer as a team. And perhaps ever more resentful of it. The instrument and legs arrive separately at the telescope, after getting separated at this clean room lifting step. We make sure all these moves are safe by applying tension to big items to make them go slow.
Don’t stop pulling!Slowly loading with a come-alongKeeping MagAO-X safe, one arm workout at a time.
Next the PI takes a nice long walk with his million dollar baby up the hill. The rest of us know it’s best to let them have their space.
The not-IZUZU executing the turnJared walks up with the instrument.
While the flatbed makes its slow ascent, the rest of the team prepares the platform and tools to make ready for its arrival.
MagAO-X returns to Clay after almost exactly a year! (2023A finished on March 17th, and we brought it back on March 18th 2024)Wheeling the instrument to the scissor elevator. Going up!
Once the instrument is in the telescope dome, there’s a set of reverse craning and anti-cart activities that need to quickly happen. Good thing we’re getting good at this. As long as we follow Laird’s carefully labeled baggies, we don’t go too wrong.
De-carting is at least a 3 person activity.
Juan and the guys went back to get our electronics while Maggie lead the table team in the fine grained work of leveling a two ton floating table. Maggie might just need to be our Laird on the May run, and under her guidance we leveled the table in record time!
Using two perpendicular levels to check the table’s inclination. Final leg checks before the tabel starts floating.
The electronics rack gets its ride up, and is placed next to the table, and then we can start recabling all the things we unplugged just last night. It’s a big dejavu moment. By dinner, we have all but one DM connected. (We still eat fast though, because the less on sky time we waste, the better. )
Cabling, but this time, at even more altitude.
Meanwhile, our astronomer heavy contingent started to make their way out here. Out of three who were supposed to arrive today, only Jay made it, for a various calamitous reasons. Logan got all the way to La Serena, and will be joining us later this week. If all goes well, Jialin will make all the connections she needs and will be here by tomorrow.
Two more of us making it out of Tucson. Well look who finally showed up!Big XWCL family dinner!
Dinner was quick, and we all raced back up the mountain to finish the last little bits. Since it’s our observing night, we finally got to claim the observer-reserved speedy red automatic. Now that all our cars aren’t manual, we aren’t limited by who can drive stick. Happy to report that no one even screamed as I took my first drive up the mountain!
Two cozy cleanroom Vizzies we spotted on our way up!
The final mad dash of cabling and clean up wasn’t captured, but rest easy, we once again worked a small miracle and got the instrument science ready on the platform. We even got our first sunset picture on the catwalk with nearly the whole team.
The first catwalk sunset, nearly everyone made it. Logan might be in La Serena, but she did not miss the sunset.
Once the sun went down, we finally got to an open dome and down to science.
The team assembles for the excitement of the system getting online.
First up was commissioning some of the newest of our DM technology. These alignment patterns were made fairly recently by members of the lab to test our DM actuators on the light from the pupil.
After making sure everything was working, we returned to our old friend, pi Pup. This bright double star system is one of our favorites because it’s companion is bright enough to be seen as soon as we close the AO loop.
Z band, visible light, closed loop image on sky. The companion is on the left of the image, right next to one of the DM speckles. This image is about 0.74 Strehl.
We were lucky that in our first hours of engineering, we got solid and steady 0.5 arcsecond seeing. We were able to capture some great footage of MagAO-X in action. Below, you can see in real time how turning on the AO system gets us from a blob to a stellar PSF.
The Jared-cam, all four screens of our megadesk, closing the loop on pipup.
In another commissioning victory, we got FDPR working on sky with the NCPC DM. This technique probes phase and amplitude with defocus to reduce our non-common path errors. With our first round of testing, we were able to improve our SR from 0.77 to 0.86 with our rough calculations. (In case these numbers mean nothing to you, we were very pleased with our 0.63 last time, 0.77 got Jared smiling, and 0.86 nearly knocked our stinky socks off.)
And with those victories, it was on to science. Katie got an hour or so to test ADC algorithms with Sebastiaan, and Jared tested some binning code. Both projects need a little more debugging time, and so we’ll probably revisit them later this week. We got back on sky for Sebastiaan’s target just in time for the seeing to explode.
We went from a 0.5 as night to a 1.5 as one way too quickly…
Sadly, this weather isn’t the kind our instrument was made to operate in, so in the late hours of our very long day, we gave up on scince targets and I got to sneak in a few more engineering tests. (Things have to be pretty hopeless for the team to let me test optical gain unchecked.) The team trickled down the mountain in twos and threes as we finally ran out of steam from our very big, very hard, way too long day.
But don’t let the ending spoil the fact that we just managed a miracle. We got from a truck to a beautiful, record breaking PSF in less than 24 hours. We have only had one night, and are already proving the robustness of algorithms that we weren’t even sure were going to work on sky. Plus, two new group members, Josh and Katie, survived one of the hardest days we go through. Congratulations team!
Song of the day:
How could I not pick this song for the first night of the run?
First Light – Hoziera peaceful and unbothered Guanaco to end the day.
We are less than 24 hours from observing and it was crunch time today! We needed fuel so thankfully Sundays at LCO are empanada days!
Chef’s kiss
Laird and Jared were making bets on how long till we get a “grumpy cat”, ie an error message in our computer’s hardware tracking system, once we are on-sky. Laird bet Jared all of his empanadas for the rest of the run. In the words of our PI, “nothing is worth that.”
Another good omen for the observing to come was our observation of a jumping guanaco.
This was all Maggie got:
Come back!
Actually, a few moments later we captured this adorable moment (can you tell we miss our pets?!)
Look at him scratch his little head!
Now, we actually did work today too. Final calibrations were taken, iEFC alignment techniques were practiced a final time, we ensured our brand new Lyot LOWFS (LLOWFS – pronounced “yo-fus”) camera is functioning, and focused the acquisition camera.
The facetiming dream team
After a meeting with the LCO staff going over our commissioning procedure for tomorrow, the team de-cabled and wrapped up the instrument.
MagAO-X youths crushing it on their first clean room pack up
Today was an eventful day. Almost every blog post by me has mentioned VIS-X, the beautiful integral field spectrograph for MagAO-X. And, every run up to know had me doing optical alignment on the Nasmyth platform during morning shifts (after observing 🙁 ). This time the optical alignment finally did not drift during shipment! I only had to do some minor alignment of VIS-X to the MagAO-X output beam. Everything was aligned by the middle of the afternoon. No more mornings full of alignment for me!!!!
While I was doing the alignment on VIS-X, Laird was leading a small group to check on the MagAO ASM. The MagAO ASM is going back to Tucson after many years of living at LCO.
Cleaning the clean room before the ASM could be moved and inspected.Laird is very happy while showing off the ASM to everyone.One last look before it was put way again.
Laird invited everyone to have a last look at the ASM before it goes off to it’s new destination. Jared was not interested and tried to ignore the existence of the ASM. We now have MagAO-X which is a lot of fun! The MagAO-X OCAM2K was recently updated with new binning modes that should improve our performance on fainter targets. Jared was busy trying to figure out how the new binning modes could be calibrated. This was not straight forward.
Jared after dinner lamenting the bad performance of the new calibrations of the pyramid wavefront sensor.
The animal of today is Carlos and he showed up during dinner as a nice surprise.
After dinner, Eden took all the LCO first timers to see the other telescopes on the mountain top.
