Tag: 2024B

It’s time to finally call off the searches everyone. Tie up your bloodhounds, turn off those spotlights, and park your helicopters. That’s right, the mountain’s most infamous instrument has been located after eons of searching high and low.

There were fears that MagAO’s near-IR camera, Clio, had been sentenced to the boneyard to peacefully decay as the many instruments before it. However, despite being undoubtedly still weary from her travels, Alycia generously gave the students a nice tour of the DuPont telescope (a.k.a., the 100″) just down the road from the Magellans where they found our Clio and drew collective sighs of relief from all who were around during the golden MagAO days.

And here it is! The Great Clio! Ready to be born again on another 6.5-meter telescope…!

A special thanks to Prof. Ewan Douglas of Steward Obseratory’s UASAL who was a critical part of Clio’s rediscovery. No need to be humble, Ewan.

Yeah, man. So, after the tour, some of the group decided to make use of some extra time before dinner to prepare for the MagAO-X telescope removal. This Chilean iron is extra dense, I’ll you what. But this dry air will make you soft, so we push on.

After dinner, Laird, Alycia, and received a nice tour from the LLAMAS team who showed us how the instrument was mounted and talked a little bit about how it all the various systems and mounting fixtures work. 1700 kgs of pure instrumental awesomeness.

Some of us got heartier meals for our night lunches than others. Parker’s Pro Tip of the Day is write “extra everything, times ten” on the comment section of your night lunch form to get the homie hookup from the kitchen.

A major milestone in MagAO-X’s career as an extreme AO instrument, Sebastiaan et al. have successfully implemented wavefront sensing and control using a neural network on-sky…! We’ve been learned, people.

In other engineering news, Jared and Eden and I got a 5kHz LOWFS loop locked on one of Sebastiaan’s target for some kick-ass vibration control. Whatcha know ’bout jitter?

Ok, there was actually a lot more that went on tonight, such as Team Jaylycia getting some pro-level data on an edge-on disk. Again, testing the altitude limits of the telescope and the instrument. And probably even more to report on, but we’re pretty…

…sleepy. However, I’ve got one more moment to highlight, as it was the sweetest gesture and gift I’ve received as a direct result of being peanutted. Yeah, somehow peanuts got into my tuna + rice tonight (it was literally just some rice and tuna/shrimp in a white cream sauce) and I took a nasty hit to my health bar. However, one Zyrtec and a bunch of crackers and soda helped me recover enough HP to make it through the rest of the night. Because of this experience, Johnson “The Hook” Johnson crocheted me a “J” protection charm to wear to commemorate my survival. Thanks, man. I owe you some milk.

Song of the Day

I’ve been really into this song during this run. This one really deserves a listen, not only because you all need to see that Warren’s long lost twin brother is a guitar virtuoso, but this guy also pairs one of my favorite music genres (percussive fingerstyle guitar) with a killer voice. Some lyrics found in the body of the post above.

I could feel it from the start: This night was going to be a success. Despite the haze that we could see in the horizon during sunset, the night gifted us a stable seeing and what was cloudy now is clear, baby. Can you believe we are only already at half of the observation run!? Me neither, in fact days and nights are starting to merge in my head by now, and time has turned into a meaningless, fleeting concept. What’s more is that we are really close to a full Moon. Might not be a blue Moon, but the light it reflects still allows for more vitamin D in my body than the one I would get in the Netherlands at this time of the year. Moon, you’re the light that I needed.

Before starting our observations, the pneumatic seal on the secondary mirror had to be fixed, so we had to lower the telescope to 1 degree of altitude to reseal it. You don’t see a telescope do such a big tilt every day!

Tonight was again all about Laird and Jialin and their observations. The driver of tonight was mainly Parker, who was tutored by the more experienced grad students.

During the first half of the night we looked for young planets that still have residual formation heat in the iz band. Afterwards, we focused on protoplanets that are still accreting in H alpha. In the meantime, some other folks were working (or testing launch trajectories) on their laptops downstairs.

Finally, I want to acknowledge and thank one of our most affectionate blog readers. Your message really warmed up our hearts today. As a gift, I will show everyone a new animal I spotted today: Carlos!

And you, dear reader, if you are enjoying this blog, spread the word: tell your mother, your brother, your sister, and your friends, don’t let them lose the chance to discover our new song of the day every day.

With us finally getting used to working on the night shift, it sure feels like we have been racking up the overtime hours. However, we still find time to get our daily Vizzy content. I have decided to start this blog post by giving the people what they want…Viscacha’s and behind the scenes footage.

After capturing the cutest photos of those little guys, we continued our content creation with some beautiful photos of Clay. Thank you Jialin for taking this timelapse!

Prior to making our way up the mountain we spent some time pondering the great science advancements we are all going to make.

Alright, now onto the actual science. Tonight was dedicated to Laird and Jialin. The setup went smoothly, and we were quickly ready to start collecting data. The primary science goal for the first half of the night was to search for binary stars and planets in the i and z bands. We began with a target that has been indirectly observed to host a ~5 Jupiter-mass planet. With this data set, we hope Jialin will be able to confirm its existence.

The second half of the night transitioned into H-alpha science targets. This allows us to observe specific emission of ionized hydrogen (around 656nm). This is particularly interesting as it provides valuable insight into accretion activity in binaries or planetary systems.

While we captured some excellent observations, the highlight of the night was pushing the telescope’s limits. As morning approached, we continued observing a target star as it reached an altitude below 23 degrees—remarkably low, considering our telescope operator had previously noted that the scope is not designed to operate below 21 degrees.

Song of the Day

We had an all-Laird, all-Hα night. With everything working so well, the most exciting thing going on instrument-wise was the initial setup, which I was able to get in on.

From our control workstation, I dutifully applied the “F-test” (which displays the letter “R”, for reasons lost to history), applied the “J-test” (works as advertised), performed the 253-click process to satisfy the prerequisites for the automated alignment loop, and then performed the other remaining steps when the automated alignment loop ran away. (“Apparently it’s shy and only works when it’s just me and the instrument” — Jared)

Then, we went to look at a star, and instead found two!

Visible near α Eri at almost 12 o’clock, the companion (star, not planet) lies at about 0.25″ separation. Without an adaptive optics system and a decent-sized telescope, you’d have a hard time seeing it at all. With the AO correction, we get diffraction rings around the stars in the scene. That means we can’t get any sharper—or resolve any more details—without a bigger telescope.

Speaking of binaries, we also imaged Mira (ο Ceti), a red giant star with a companion star.

Hmm, one star has a nice core and diffraction ring, but Mira (in the center) does not look as sharp. Why does the scene look so different from the first binary? Baby, don’t you go over-analyze. No need to theorize; I can put your doubts to rest.

Mira is 400x size of the sun but approximately the same mass. So, a big puffball. But the reason for the fuzzy image is not (just) that the star is a puffball. It has to be a nearby puffball for our system to resolve it. We can actually measure half a dozen pixels across the star, though our choice of filter and telescope means that’s only two “resolution elements”. (That’s just physics saying you can use as many pixels as you like but you ain’t getting any more information.)

I regret to inform you that on this night, there were no viscacha observations recorded. But worry not, gentle reader: many graduate students have gone on to have perfectly good careers using only archival viscacha data.

So, instead, I’ll share some computer stuff.

(Yeah, I know, I know. Just shut your eyes and scroll really fast to get to the song.)

It’s not entirely new this run, but I’ve been doing some shaking-out of the data pipeline feeding our dashboards (among other things). This is what a “normal” night looks like: most of the time we’re open, we’re saving data (that’s the “observing” row on the Observations chart). Since it’s a Laird night, it’s all Hα imaging, and everything’s colored red for our filters and beamsplitters.

Before an astronomer takes exception to me calling this a “normal” night when the seeing was hovering around 0.75 arcseconds, I should clarify that ≤0.5″ nights are the only ones worth seeing, the only place worth being.

Song of the Day

Bonus Literary Interlude

—No multipliques los misterios —le dijo—. Estos deben ser simples.
Recuerda la carta robada de Poe, recuerda el cuarto cerrado de Zangwill.

—O complejos —replicó Dunraven—.
Recuerda el universo.

“Abenjacán el Bojarí, muerto en su laberinto” by Jorge Luis Borges (1949)

In English:

“Don’t go on multiplying the mysteries,” he said. “They
should be kept simple. Bear in mind Poe’s purloined letter,
bear in mind Zangwill’s locked room.”

“Or made complex,” replied Dunraven. “Bear in mind
the universe.”

“Ibn Hakkan al-Bokhari, Dead in His Labyrinth” by Jorge Luis Borges (1949)

Empanada Sunday is always hard to follow, but today started off on a really strong note: an adult and a baby vizzy graced us with their presence just before sunset. Viscachas are notoriously jumpy creatures (in both senses of the word), so there was a National Geographic-esque effort to get some decent shots. Fortunately, our efforts paid off. I now present to you some full-resolution images of the cutest little guys known to mankind:

And some slightly-less-cute behind-the-scenes footage:

After the sun went down and vizzy-viewing was over, we got straight to work. Jay and I first fiddled with some cables on the platform to diagnose a shutter issue, and before we knew it, we were on-sky. The seeing started off a little rough at >1 arcsecond, but after a little patience and a little tweaking the AO system, we started to produce some good images for our collaborators at Michigan/MIT.

(quick aside: if you don’t know what we mean by “seeing,” this blog post by Logan offers a quick and easy explanation).

The last few hours of the night were for engineering. We started off with a game of telephone: Laird went onto the telescope platform to do some alignment with Jialin acting as chief flashlight-holder and walkie-talkie user. I sat in the driver’s seat in the telescope control room with the other walkie-talkie and Jared on Zoom. To get our mirror aligned, I relayed communication from Jared over the walkie-talkie to Jialin, who then relayed the message to Laird. Then Laird would tweak the alignment and tell Jialin, who radioed the message to me where it was finally heard by Jared. Thankfully it only took us a couple of iterations, and nothing got too garbled as the message made its way from Point A to Point B.

After alignment we continued with more engineering tasks, mostly trying to use our low-order wavefront sensor to get vibrations under control. I also got some time to experiment with the ADCs (atmospheric dispersion controllers). Unbeknownst to me, as I tinkered with speckle fitting and prism angles, the other two first-year grad students on the mountain (with the help of the talented Jialin Li) were taking portraits that would make any astronomy aficionado burn with envy:

Oh well. There are many nights yet to come. In honor of finally (sort of) getting into the rhythm of a night schedule, the song of the day:

Don’t wake me with so much
. . .
My bed is pulling me, gravity

Michael Stipe (and also me)