MagAO-X 2025A Day 13: Stick with it

I have an unfortunate secret to reveal: we have been operating MagAO-X in 2024B mode this whole time.

When the team first arrived, a wizened mystic emerged from the Room Behind the Kitchens and croaked out a prophecy:

Hasta que enstiques el instrumento tendras visión astronómica de baja calidad.

Unfortunately, nobody in the advance guard understood Spanish. Indeed, it was only in the post-mortem retrospective of this operational anomaly that the prophecy was even mentioned.

With the aid of hypnosis-based memory retrieval techniques and a team of Spanish-to-English translators, we were able to decipher the above as:

Until you ensticken the instrument, you will have poor quality seeing

This is a curse most dire to wish upon an astronomer, as it means their starlight will go every which way (instead of down into the pixels where it belongs). Fortunately, the mystic provided the remedy as well: ensticken the instrument.

The ritual had been delayed out of deference to our patch designer, Dr. Logan Pearce of the University of Michigan, who was not present for our first on-sky nights. Indeed, it was only performed today, on her—and my—last night on the mountain.

Logan Pearce, Emi Reith, and yours truly (Joseph Long)

At sunset, we ascended to the East platform and watched Logan ensticken.

The results speak for themselves:

Finally, some good ••••ing conditions

Yesterday, we were bumping up against the high-wind-shutdown speed limit until sunrise. We were looking at the wind speed graph saying “wow, that escalated quickly!” Today, the atmosphere has been much better-behaved.

We used the time to revisit some old favorites for Alycia and Sebastiaan. Alycia has already left, so Logan was pinch-hitting this evening. To image debris disks, reference star data is more useful than getting more sky rotation. Unfortunately, getting contemporaneous reference star data is impossible with an extreme AO instrument: you can’t lock on two stars at once.

This means a lot of switching back and forth to collect data on both the target and reference (i.e. star-hopping). Loud cheering erupted from the control room when they got the target-switching overhead under two minutes. This means our operators are top notch, naturally, but also that Alycia chose really good reference stars.

Note how the gaps in the top row get smaller and smaller.

The latter part of the night was devoted to VIS-Xing. By dispersing the light in each spaxel (spectral pixel), VIS-X enables spectral differential imaging with many samples in wavelength space. On the other hand, when we perform SDI with MagAO-X’s main science cameras, we have only two different wavelengths to work with. Looking forward to seeing what Sebastiaan pulls out of this dataset! (PDS 70 d? …e?)

This afternoon, telescope operator Jorge Araya kindly showed us the Baade 6.5-meter telescope mirror. (“It’s a lot like the other one.” — Jorge)

Logan, Emi, and Josh taking a different kind of mirror selfie.

I’ve seen it before, but somehow this never gets old.

I’m headed out this afternoon for another fun day or two of sitting in airports and airplanes as I head back to New York. The science continues without me, with seven more whole nights of MagAO-X-ing to go. I’m sure I’ll be kept in the loop, though—by daily blog posts, if nothing else. ¡Hasta pronto!

Yes, Eden. It’s my mirror selfie. You’re welcome.

Frivolity interlude

The P.I.’s imagination was recently captured by the idea of walk-up music for AO operators. After I added Maggie-O-X to the instrument, it gained the ability to speak on command. It’s a small jump from that to playing arbitrary audio clips.

As of today, when the operator and observer are selected in the MagAO-X web interface, the appropriate walk-up song will play in the control room.

(Note 1: while the clips approved for control room use are G-rated, the full songs are not necessarily “Song of the Day” material. Note 2: Some songs were chosen, others assigned.)

In an effort to motivate deeper understanding of the instrument software, the P.I. has declared that future walk-up song additions must be done and deployed by the party concerned. Godspeed, git users.

Song of the Day

Honestly, this was already Day of the Songs, but what’s one more between friends?

“Stop This Flame” by Celeste

MagAO-X 2025A Day 12: Step Up to the Plate

Like our new friend Emi mentioned in her blog post, there were a lot of us on the mountain yesterday. Josh, Eden and I rolled up to LCO that morning after a smooth trip from Tucson, and Matthijs joined us later that afternoon. As fun as it was to have (nearly) the whole crew down here at once, the arrival of reinforcements meant Parker, Jay, and Alycia all headed down into La Serena this morning. We wish them better luck in their journey home than they had on the way here.

Before I talk about tonight, I would be remiss if I didn’t shout out the alignment work that Laird and I did yesterday afternoon. With only the power of a ball driver, a suction cup, and a pair of tweezers, we managed to correct the mis-clocking of one of our Lyot coronagraph masks. If you think you have steady hands, try holding them both at arm’s length on-and-off for two hours while navigating a minefield of extremely sensitive optics that stand in your way. This was a task not for the faint of heart—or the large of hands.

the way the spiders line up is *chefs kiss*

We had a beautiful albeit chilly sunset to kick off our night. Logan and Emi went vizzy-spotting, because it is simply impossible to have too many viscacha photos.

a good omen

Tonight we took a lot of data in MagAO-X’s Hα mode, which is a mode of operation that we use when we’re looking at young systems undergoing active planet formation. The first half of the night was dedicated to our collaborators at Michigan, and we spent the second half observing some targets from our very own Laird Close and Jialin Li. Because Jialin joined on Zoom, we were blessed with a reluctant guest appearance from Jujube:

Conditions were decent, so science went on pretty much uninterrupted for the entire night. At the end of the night the wind started to pick up, but we didn’t let that stop us from taking data until it started to get light outside.

“That’s no moon . . . it’s a space station!”

In other news, we’ve been making some critical advancements, pushing the boundaries of extreme AO beyond what has ever been seen before. No, I’m not referring to automatic gain optimization, or coronagraphic low-order wavefront sensing, or even electric field conjugation for quasi-static speckle nulling. Instead, I’m referring to Maggie-OX: our trusty computerized voice that, among other things, now contains a variety of . . . walk-up songs? Picture this: you’re about to sit down at the AO station in the control room. You’ve got a long night ahead of you, battling r0 and τ0 and all the other nuances that come with extreme AO operation. You’re a little stressed, and more than a little tired. Then, suddenly, in the distance, you hear it: the little speaker at the control station playing your specifically-designated hype music. People are clapping, cheering even. You’re sauntering up to the computer in slow motion. Fireworks explode in the background. It’s a scene straight from a movie. You were born for this.

Okay, maybe it’s not that dramatic. But it is fun to have a theme song, and laughter makes the nights go faster. It’s the little things.

Song of the Day:

Just Like Heaven – The Cure

MagAO-X 2025A Day 11: New kid on the block!

Hi everyone! I’m Emi, a second year undergrad at U of Michigan. This is my very first time observing, and blogging! And basically being nocturnal. I’m learning that we are the largest group for MagAO-X yet… so here’s to all 14 of us!

Today, we got to go on a tour of the Henrietta Swope and Irénée du Pont Telescopes. As a true Gen Z-er would say, the du Pont telescope was trippy! The telescope was stationary while the dome was rotating, of course, but it wasn’t so straightforward! Look below to see what I mean:

After some… questionable dinner… it was observing time!! I got the chance to help my advisor, Logan, with collecting data and also collecting data for my project!

As you’ll see, the image to the right is of E Hya and her beautiful wee-little companions. Spam incoming of some great images we got as well as good wishes, courtesy of Sebastiaan:

“I wish you all of the seeing! No wait… I wish you none of the seeing!”

Sebastiaan Haffert, 2025A

Now spam incoming of some great photos I got from ’round town:

Overall my time here at LCO has been really great, in part due to the wildlife. Viscachas are the sweetest looking bunny things, and the foxes here have the fluffiest tails. “He’s so fluffy I’m gunna die!!!” – Agnes, Despicable Me.

For now, to all a good night, and to none of the seeing! (Another movie quote?? Hallmark??)

Song of the Day

https://youtu.be/gte3BoXKwP0?si=NLrbmffK4S72GKch

MagAO-X 2025A Day 10: It’s so over

While most of our heroes were still sleeping, Sebastiaan and I went up the telescope to perform some EFC calibration. At first the dark hole digging didn’t seem to work, and it took quite a bit to fix it. Fortunately, just before dinner time we finally managed!

We are astronomers and we are digging a hole DIGGY DIGGY HOLE

Tonight, the MagAO-X team experienced yet again an hard truth: Bad nights are part of the game. This is why the title of this blog post is unfortunately the opposite of my previous one. If you want a visual representation of this, check this out:

Thanks to Joseph Long for this pearl

At the beginning of the night, Sebastiaan tried to perform EFC on AFLep, but with a seeing between 0.9 and 1.4 arcsec and a PSF that looked like the control loop was not even close, we expect the dataset to be good to be thrown in the trash. At some point we gave up, switched to the internal source and did some engineering and more EFC calibration. We managed to take some more data afterwards, although the seeing was still around 1.

We continued with Alycia, who got two lucky hours of decent seeing and observed an edge-on disk …All this before having to close the telescope because of a huge conglomerate of clouds approaching the telescope. Time for some more engineering in lab mode and watching a movie chilling on the amazing Clay furniture.

Clay in the moonlight with clouds + a quote from one of my favorite cartoons

At least we have pictures of animals

Enjoy heartwarming wildlife pictures from today’s selection:

Song of the day + movie

During our time with the telescope closed we have talked a lot about movies tonight, and especially Disney movies. So, today the movie I want to mention is my all-time favorite Disney movie, The Sword in the Stone. I want to quote what I decided to be also the song of the day, “That’s What Makes the World Go Round”, in which Merlin explains to Arthur how opposites continuously balance our existence. Very yin and yang, right?! I utterly love it.

Left and right
Like day and night
That’s what makes the world go round
In and out
Thin and stout
That’s what makes the world go round

For every up, there is a down
For every square, there is a round
For every high, there is a low
For every to, there is a fro

Merlin, in The Sword in the Stone (1963)
That’s What Makes the World Go Round from The Sword in the Stone (1963)

Bonus cloud song

Since we watched the Eurovision movie because of the clouds, today you get a bonus song: What a masterpiece.

Ja Ja Ding Dong – Eurovision song contest: The story of Fire Saga

MagAO-X 2025A Day 9: A clear sky is not enough

We haven’t seen a cloud yet on this run, but that doesn’t mean we’re sitting pretty. MagAO-X is highly optimized for highly optimal conditions, and these ain’t that. Don’t take it from me, take it from the conditions plot:

After a promising start, everything went to heck. I’d love to tell you about the stuff we observed, but the results are embargoed. (By poor seeing, mostly.)

We did use the ultra-secret ghost-busted g band filter (seen previously here). It’s been a huge hit, and Jay’s already shared early reductions of the HR 4796A debris disk in 500-ish nm light (see Parker’s post).

People love the g’ band filter, Jared. All the science on this run came from that little filter on a stick!

Prof. Laird Close, Ph.D.

In other news, we got a special delivery today: Dr. Logan Pearce, and her student Emi Reith from the University of Michigan. Here they are aboard the Plane Train™:

Here they are, 13 hours later, after entering Chile:

Meanwhile, back on the plain trane, trouble’s a-comin’:

That’s right, we’re expecting a shipment of Josh, Katie, and Eden in the near future. When, exactly? Well, there’s the unprecedented global situation, the vagaries of air travel, possible tariffs on Josh… This is a very complicated case. You know, a lotta ins, a lotta outs, a lotta what-have-yous. And, uh, a lotta strands to keep in my head, man.

Movie of the Night

Today’s movie quote was from The Big Lebowski. Alas, it’s the only quote from there I could come up with without excessive swearing. This is what happens when you when you find a stranger in the Alps!

Song of the Day

Life is like spaghetti
It’s hard until you make it
No stresso, no stresso
It’s gonna be espresso!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MS_Fczs_98
Tommy Cash – “Espresso Macchiato”

Finally, some authentic Italian Estonian culture for our friend Elena Tonucci.

Noteworthy Utterances of the Moment

“Laird, do you have an opinion on—”
Laird: “The answer is almost certainly yes”

“What is the point of burros, anyway? Like a bunch of little trucks left to roam the landscape”

“You can eat almost everything”
“Well, some things you can only eat once

“What would be the easiest way to add that?”
“Get someone else to do it.”

“Maybe we could get Jared to blog?”
Jared: “Probably not.”