Tag: 2025B

Phil: Do you know what day it is?
Rita: No, what?
Phil: Today is tomorrow. It happened.

— Groundhog Day (1993)

This will be my 571st night at LCO (and this is my 270th blog post).

I feel like one always gets into a rhythm on a long observing run. It might take a while — with MagAO-X we always start with a frantic lab period, installing the latest crazy upgrades and tuning the instrument up. Then there’s “the day”, where we go 24 hours all at once to move up to the telescope. That helps with the transition, since you’re so tired after that you can’t help but sleep at 8 am. Then after about a week your body starts to adjust, and you can sleep a little later into the afternoon. One night turns into another, and you start to wonder if you’ve ever had a different day. But now we get to go find out what those different days are like.

MagAO-X works because of our great team. Thanks everybody for the hard work. And thanks to our great observers who bring us such interesting projects and challenging observations. See you next time.

As has become our normal practice, we have left MagAO-X set up for remote operations in the LCO cleanroom. This time it’s a little different, since we put it in the corner to keep the tent clear for another instrument. Fits just fine over there.

We have exciting new things planned for next semester, so exciting we may have to change the way the blog works!

Fun Fact: Imbolc is the old Gaelic name for what became Saint Bridget’s day, and is a seasonal festival marking the turning of Winter into Spring. The ancient goddess Brigid was welcomed into homes at Imbolc with hopes for a quick end to Winter and a warm Spring. Part of this festival included watching for animals to emerge, and to see if the hag Cailleach arranges for good weather so she can gather lots of firewood for the long remaining winter ahead. Does that sound familiar? Well, that just might be where modern Groundhog Day comes from.

And here’s a song about Bridget.

This song has been on a MAPS run before. The artist, Celia Farran, was just in Tucson for the Celtic Festival — but we didn’t find out about it until it was too late.

Dear Vizzy,

We missed you! It’s been a whole MagAO-X observing run since we last saw you. We checked every day on our way up, but it seems like you were busy with other business.

Last night, or morning? We had our last hurrah in the control room.

Our take down crew went to bed early, but the night crew holdouts worked on Sebastiaan’s targets until the clouds told us it was time to pack up.

The night crew’s responsible for shutting everything down, and tucking all the cables away before craning operations start. Though I’m sure you’ve heard us up to this before.

You might have seen quite a few cars swinging up and down the road to the cleanroom this morning. Josh and Parker were running up and down on errands before then we fully swapped with the day crew. I’m happy to report that both crews got a filling and balanced breakfast.

How did the day crew do? I heard they had some trouble with the bolt holes in the legs. Thank goodness the LCO crew is around to help when nuts get stuck. As you must have seen, MagAO-X is back in the clean room in good time. Some of us are sticking around one more day to attach all the sensitive parts and make sure it’s ready for remote observation.

I hope you’re staying warm with all these clouds coming through. We got one good walk in before they fully swallowed the mountaintop. The moisture in the air was just enough for us to finally smell the flowers. Also we finally had some free time to smell the flowers.

Don’t forget to say hi to Manny! It’s been a while since the last time he was here but we promise he’s friendly. He just got here yesterday, but he’s already gotten so much of CLIO into a box.

Sorry for all the noise by nap spot in the eves. I promise things will start to quiet down soon. Till next time,

Eden

P.S Song of the Day

P.P.S. Fun Fact.

Did you know that Seattle, USA has more cloudy days than London, UK?

P.P.P.S. Laird said to tell you hello.

Hi everyone! I’m Leah, a visiting observer from MIT. Tonight marks the last evening of observing for this run. After two successful previous nights of star-hopping for my targets (and some other observations), the operators began the day with a delicious breakfast (while I was fast asleep).

Today we were joined by Manny, the Technical Director for the Center for Astronomical Adaptive Optics, for the day. See an archival post from a previous trip of his here: https://xwcl.science/hardware/it-begins-clio-unpacking/

In our downtime, Elena and I have been testing the Merlin birdwatching app around the telescope domes and dorms. So far, we have found the Moustached Turca, the Greenish Yellow Finch, Black-winged Ground Doves, and the Mountain Caracara (and many other species we were unable to identify).

After dinner, the team made their way up the mountain, and partook in the usual viscacha-watching. Many of us gathered to watch the sunset, and took a group selfie (sans Parker and Josh).

Tonight’s science began with my observations where we are using a method called star hopping. For these observations, we jump back and forth from a star with a protoplanetary disc, to a similar star without a disc. We can then subtract the non-disc star from the disc star, which removes any unmasked starlight. This leaves us (hopefully) with a nice image of the dust in the disc.

It is imperative to switch between the two very quickly so as to not waste telescope time. Jared decided that part of his mission tonight was to optimise this process, so provided strict instructions for the operating team to work simultaneously to “reduce latency”. He brought out his phone stopwatch, and timed the operators, a responsibility taken over by Joseph later in the night. I am proud to say that all of our hops took less than one minute, reflecting the team’s dedication to optimising my observing time.

Despite the forecast originally being for thick clouds to roll in during the afternoon and stick around the whole night, we were very fortunate that the prophesied doom did not arrive. Aside from a few high altitude wispy clouds, our observations were unaffected. In fact, seeing improved greatly by the end of my time, leaving good seeing for Sebastiaan to finish the run.

I had a great time observing at LCO. The MagAO-X team was amazing to work with, and I have learned a lot about being an observational astronomer (one should make sure to have many backup targets!). Thank you to everyone for letting me join you here, and I hope to come back soon.

Song of the Day

A sunset conversation got me thinking back to my plants back home… accompanied by an impending feeling of doom.

Blonde Redhead – My Plants are Dead

Fun Fact of the Day

In the spirit of star hopping, I will educate you about a different type of hop. Hops (the plant) always grow in a clockwise spiral!

Today it is my (Rico) turn to write the blog. It has been great fun joining the observing run this past week, and I am impressed with the team. It feels a bit like being in the cockpit of a starship: everyone instantly knows what the 100+ buttons do on the six monitors controlling the instrument. It’s an organized chaos I’m quickly growing to love. However, since I have arrived, the seeing deities have not been in the spirit of giving. To appease the seeing gods special agent Joseph finished his all important mission: The Enstickening. With the sticker in its proper place, we optimistically set up the instrument for this nights observations.

The night started with Elena and Katie operating the instrument for Miles. Miles is focused on further validating the polarimetric mode of the instrument. He is hoping to generate some beautiful Polarimetric Differential Imaging images of protoplanetary disks.

After that we switched to Josh and Eden who spend the rest of the night star hopping for Leah, also in search of protoplanetary disks. It turns out Leah is remarkably good at finding previously unknown binaries for the hopping.

With only two observing nights remaining, a part of the group (among which the PI) called it an early night to start adjusting to a daytime schedule, and like the instrument says: “Als de kat van huis is, dansen de muizen op tafel”. We took full advantage, turning on DJ Haffert’s playlist and letting the music energize the final hours.

Just as things were settling into a rhythm, we got hit by a small earthquake. Some people quickly ran outside. However, I was too busy wrestling with a different kind of instability. I was trying to get the Neural Network (NN) to run its AO correction loop. When the ground is moving, and the control loop is fighting the atmosphere, you quickly learn what your priorities are. It’s fair to say my own internal NN has not been performing well on little sleep, as I almost walked straight into a Burro earlier this afternoon. The Burro was clearly not happy with this sudden close encounter, and I was also pretty startled. The instrument’s NN, however, survived the tremor, and helped us collect better data when the seeing was not ideal.

Fun ‘fact’ of the day: Donkeys Kill More People Than Plane Crashes

There are an estimated 44 million donkeys on the planet. A donkey kick can be anywhere between 0-2000psi, depending on the size and breed. As of 2013 there were 20000 planes on the planet. Due to these numbers it is safe to presume that this is true. In 2016 there were 325 aircraft related fatalities. In the same year there were 5478 admissions to emergency rooms across the world, 1478 of these resulted in the death of the donkeys victims. (the very reliable source: https://imgur.com/gallery/donkeys-kill-more-people-than-plane-crashes-QAhE6)

Song of the day

It is definitely better when not everything is in C.

“Eden, you have to stop making people blog”
— anonymous

Taking that note, we will no longer have any people blogging. Eden asked me to fill in.

Today, I went out human-watching at sunset.

While we were out there, Miles kindly took a portrait of me to use on my dating profile.

I understand that these nerds have finally enstickened their instrument, albeit only halfway. Still, I told my guy at the weather agency that they’re cool, and he’s hooking them up with half-arcsecond seeing for tonight.

Fun Fact of the Day

A viscacha who goes into business is technically called a bizcacha.

Song of the Day