Tag: 2025A

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.

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.

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.

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:

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

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!

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:

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.

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)

Bonus cloud song

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

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

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.”

After very little sleep, I decided to wake up and treat myself with a scenic run around the mountain at noon. This was admittedly more of an excuse to go see some telescopes up close and personal.

After my makeshift tour of the exterior of some of LCO’s beautiful telescopes, I returned to find out Alycia was kind enough to take the time to set-up and bring a group of us on tours inside of both the Henrietta Swope telescope (1 meter) and the Irénée du Pont Telescope (2.5 meter). The Swope telescope is especially interesting because it was the very first telescope built at LCO back in 1971. It was also the one of the first, if not the first, telescope named after a woman. Henrietta made great contributions to work on variable stars and was a trailblazer for women in the field. The du Pont telescope is also one of the older telescopes at LCO, built in 1977.

Here is a look at the interior of the Swope and du Pont telescopes.

The night went smoothly, and Jay/Alycia were able to get some quality disk data shown below. We are also getting closer to correlating the accelerometer data with the wavefront sensor data. At this stage, the best approach is simple “you just begin. You do the math. You solve one problem… and you solve the next one… and then the next. And if you solve enough problems, you get to come home. All right, questions?”

Unfortunately, at the end of the night we had to say adiós to our new friend, María Eugenia, who is headed back to the Netherlands. Safe travels home and thank you for joining us on this run!

We are also looking forward to the next wave of people arriving the next day or two, and hope their travel goes better than our 50-hour ordeal!

Two skittish Burros were very hesitant greeting me on the way up the mountain.

After a long, hard, struggle to try to remember a recent/favorite movie of mine, it wasn’t till I remembered a conversation I had with Laird about UA’s Biosphere2 project/experiment that reminded me of one of my favorite movies, The Martian.

Song of the Day