Tag: 2024Ab

This week could have gone better: Delayed and missed flights, fog, clouds, bad seeing, and I got a head cold. New at LCO this trip: no Covid test on arrival. In case you’re wondering, I brought my own, and I don’t have Covid.

Last night, I turned the super fancy MagAO-X system with its three deformable mirrors into a very expensive speckle camera. 30 years ago, when AO was in its infancy, I did my PhD thesis taking short exposures to “freeze” the seeing and a lot of Fourier transforms to recover high spatial resolution images. Well, in 1.3″ seeing, MagAO-X could still do some correction (miraculously) and the EM-CCDs in MagAO-X can run fast (I ran at about 60 ms, which is considerably longer than the normal coherence time at visible wavelengths). I can play some of those old speckle imaging tricks on images like this:

See the binary star? Of course you do. I select the best of the tens of thousands of images I took and average them up. Combined with other data I have, these images will let us measure masses of the stars.

Tonight, however, the seeing is finally down to median LCO conditions and the forecasted clouds have not yet arrives, so MagAO-X is weeping tears of joy:

I may be bummed about the weather, but it’s been fun to be back here and collaborating with the ever-growing team. People are working shifts, so we didn’t get a photo of everyone, but here’s an obligatory sunset selfie with clear skies above.

And, dear reader, as a devoted blog follower you undoubtedly know that as predictably as the approach of winter brings clouds, Sunday brings:

I saw a fox today too, but sorry, I didn’t get a picture.

Today’s best 15 minutes were spent finishing the Sunday NYTimes Crossword Puzzle with the band of Js (Joseph, Jay, and Josh) as we froze speckles.

Song of the Day

I almost went with Lady Sings the Blues, one of my favorites for bad observing weather combined with colds, but I don’t want to be a downer. So, I’m going with Freeze Tag by Suzanne Vega in honor of those fast images we took and the coming week’s temperature forecast.

The sun is fading fast
Upon the slides into the past…

Thank you for tuning in for “Eden’s screenshots of the firewalled LCO weather page.”

I have good news and I have bad news. The good news is that we are open! The bad news? The seeing is just on the edge of usable. And by “on the edge” I mean we’re getting something on the science cameras… but it’s the kind of data we dread to process. What a tease.

On top of that, the wind is whistling something fierce. Like living next door to a two-note pan-piper. Every 5 minutes, Maggie-O-X will announce that we’ve hit our wind limit, just for the wind to slink back down again. Like a threat that it could shut this whole operation down, clouds or not. We thank Carla for being a merciful TO, and we are planning on allocating portions of our empanada orders tomorrow to her, accordingly.

Did I forget to mention that I have worse news? In a novel first for this team, we are expecting rain. Yes, in the Atacama Desert, that gets an average rainfall of 15 mm a year. We found it, folks. The one day of rain a year. Stay tuned for the MagAO-X raincoat wrappings.

Weather like this could really get you down, but luckily we have a great team that keeps even these kinds of days full of laughs and good stories. Our night started with high hopes. Since the sky was clear and the winds were low, the walk to the telescopes was appealing for the first time in a week. Some of the team caught a crisp green flash on their way up.

As an early-shifter, I’m headed to bed, but I know the control room is staying merry with Alycia wisdom, Jared sea stories, Joseph whimsy, and Josh punchlines that are actually just events from his life. All as it should be.

Best 15 minutes of the day? Filling out the night lunch for 4 whole empanadas. Just like the boss ordered.

Overheard at LCO

“I struggled with the scissors unit in kindergarten”

won most improved on MagAO-X scissor duty

“As long as I’m not playing a sport I won’t get injured”
“Why would you say something like that”

someone who could definitely get injured in offseason

“I will be Clay’s Gollum”

someone with career ambitions

“Keep the icc data away from the tea.”
“How about you keep the tea away from the icc data.”

not all of us have Sebastiaan level tea charisma

“I wasn’t allowed near the model trains because I kept wanting to touch them”

still let near our picomotors as a trust exercise

Song of the day

This one isn’t my pick. It’s Clay’s.

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.