This is now my fourth(!) observing run, and they’ve all had a unique flavor to them—but if there’s one thing I can count on, it’s sleeping like a brick the first night at LCO after 30+ hours of travel. This morning the three of us were feeling sufficiently back-from-the-dead, and we hit the ground running on getting MagAO-X ready to be on-sky this Thursday. We started out with some plumbing, removing the pink goo that builds up in our glycol filter and giving it some brand-new o-rings to prevent leaks. Once we confirmed cooling was up and running, Parker took some time to work on his accelerometers while Jared and I brought stagebs back to life:
After lunch I took some time to hide in my room, stare at plots of Xs and Os, and question the stability of both my control systems and possibly my own mental state (the timing of this midterm was kind of inconvenient). At about the same time, two wild postdocs appeared, one of which had gotten much more sleep than the other. The more well-rested postdoc and I took a walk up the mountain and we introduced him to the cleanroom, the library, and most importantly, the espresso machine.
The rest of the afternoon was spent aligning Miles’ polarization generator so that we could capture nice flat fields on both the camscis. Not too bad for having only been at LCO for a few hours.
We haven’t yet been graced by the presence of cleanroom vizzys, but Carlos el culpeo was feeling mischievous and photogenic tonight, and we are all the better for it.
Random fun fact of the day: did you know that one of the world’s largest viruses, Megavirus chilensis, was discovered in water samples from the coast of Chile in 2010 and is larger than many bacteria?
Song of the Day: