Tag: 2024Ab

This is my seventh trip to Las Campanas Observatory (I think?) and the first time I’ve seen actual, bona-fide precipitation in the Atacama desert. I woke up at 2pm to the gentle patter of rain on my windows, and emerged blinking into daylight. I did try to document it with my phone, but in my sleep-addled state I apparently double-tapped the “record” button and ended up taking some neat videos of the ground.

Fortunately, the early shift was up and could take some pictures.

Vizzy Viscacha was wise to stay under cover as the storm rolled in. Even MagAO-X had to be tucked in safe and dry.

Then, it started really snowing.

Laird is the only one brave enough to venture forth from the lodge. He had to get MagAO (not -X) packed up for its international shipment.

After the snow, we got a snow-bow!

Unfortunately, our guest observers Gabriele Cugno from Michigan and Jensen Lawrence from MIT have had just about the worst weather I’ve ever seen here. In fact, this brief break in the clouds after dinner was when Gabriele got his best chance to observe:

Then the hailstorm started.

(Or maybe it was a graupelstorm?)

Today, by the numbers:

New SSH/VPN questions: 2
Spurious Python environments purged: 11
Night lunches recovered from shutdown: 4
Stars: 14 ish?
Hailstones and/or graupelstones: ≫14
Adaptive secondary mirrors: 1 (slightly used)

Best 15 Minutes of the Day

Probably the rainbow. I swear, natural phenomena here look just the way they are depicted in children’s book illustrations.

Song of the Day

This song of the day is not observer-approved.

Remarks overheard

“So, by the way, how does a pyramid wavefront sensor actually work?”
[rueful laughter in response]

“Whatever. I have no excuses, but I’m also not sorry.”

I was home in Tucson for about 5 minutes after the last run. So I only managed to get all of my laundry done all at once just in time to pack for this trip. Upon doing so, I discovered that I was missing some socks. This happens to all of us, dryers being constructed the way they are, and I normally don’t expend much energy on it.

However, this time one of the lost was a brand new wool sock I bought especially for LCO, and I knew I was headed into this:

So I was disappointed to lose my new sock that I’d gotten to wear once or twice on the last run (and an older one too), and worried about potential for cold feets.

But then I did my first round of laundry, and had the bright idea to look in the cupboards above the washing machine… AND I FOUND MY SOCKS YOU GUYS!!!!!

Thanks to whichever denizen of LCO took the time to stow my socks for me.

We had an impromptu birthday celebration for Logan tonight, organized by Eden. Singing, dancing, homemade card, and fruit snacks for all.

Laird has been busy packing up the venerable MagAO ASM, getting ready to send it on its way to its new life at the LBT. I booted up the old control computer for MagAO-C, and it came right back to life.

Being weathered out has some advantages. Olivier made us a new toy, which lets us look at the timing of our system in 3D. This movie shows the response of the MagAO-X wavefront sensor to a deformable mirror (DM) poke as a function of time. Key fun feature: the DM actuators move in a raster pattern, and it takes about 100 microseconds for the whole DM to move. You can see that in this movie.

Best 15 minutes of the day was plugging in the MagAO computers and remembering how it all worked, seeing them boot again, figuring out how to remember the password, and logging in to see an old friend.

There were new faces this time so I am going to introduce myself. I am Carla the youngest Magellan operator eh eh. For now at least.

My week with you guys started on Monday, when I realized you are at the mountain and thinking about the treat I am going to get you this time. So, just before going to El Pino I brought a couple of “dulces chilenos”. I see you like the alfajores and that’s a very typical Chilean dessert filled with the best sweet of all, manjar.

It was a week where we were closed almost all the time, the telescope was open only 22 hours! So that’s kind of a record for me. But it was a great opportunity for me to spend time with you and laugh at your very funny way of being. I appreciate your spirits.

Actually tonight you get the famous picture with the 6.5mts mirror, and I have to admit I can’t believe you didn’t have it before, so it was good. You have the best poses, so of course I copy one of them and get my own picture, thank you eh eh.

Then, we saw the auxiliar building where the mirror is aluminized and got the other instruments ready. It was fun to have this tour. We can repeat these pictures in the future with the other part of the team of course, if the weather allows us.

I get to know better about the work individually you are doing here, so for me it was a very informative week, and I want to congratulate all of you for your amazing and dazzling job you are doing for astronomy. Thank you very much for sharing this with me, you blow my mind.

I hope you have a good rest of the run and take good care of yourselves, especially on the cold nights that are coming.

My favorite 15 minutes of the week was going downstairs and tasting all of the new candy. My favorite was the chocolate eggs and the ones I couldn’t even try were the wasabi ones. I hope to bring you the real merkén next time.

The Song of the Day

A very old song but it is a good opportunity for you to get to know the great Cecilia, also it’s a song that will cheer you up during this very cloudy night.

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.