Tag: 2026A

Welcome to the day of flips, we’re back on the telescope and everything feels just a little off. Flip the platform, NASE to NASW. Flip the schedule, day to night. Flip the detectors, visible to IR. We were not victorious for all fights involving negative signs, but our 24 hour day was full of flipping successes.

Flipping the alignment with fiducials – Success!

The morning was spent following Laird and Katie’s procedure for getting MagAO-X to the mirrored position of its NASE home. Through some of the smallest moves you’ve ever seen a 2000lbs instrument on rough surface make, we got right to where where the fiducials should sit relative to the instrument and guider. There was some discussion about platform height that would needed to be verified once starlight entered the system.

Flipping over the telescope for acc speed – Success!

Post lunch, Parker flipped the telescope on it side to install some new accelerometer raspberryPi hardware and circuits. He’s now able to read out wibbles and wobbles at 10kHz, up from with his previous limits of 4kHz. With these fast and furious speeds a future of predictive control this run is looking bright.

Flipping on all the switches – 95%

The rest of us spent the afternoon threading MagAO-X back together again. This endeavor is partially plumbing, partially fishing around for wires in the rack, and as we cable up the DM, somewhat surgical. Everything was connected by dinnertime, and only 3 of our 50+ wires ended up being somewhat loose. We’ll still call that a success. Initial reviews of NASW are glowing

Flip-worthy sunset? Success!

We’re almost always on the hunt for a green flash at sunset, and tonight’s really delivered. The cloud layer was flat enough and the air was clear enough to catch a seconds-long glimpse of the green light of a refracted setting sun. We were chuffed to bits, to put it mildly. It may have been one of the clearest and brightest green flash the team has ever seen.

Flipping MagAO-X to NASW- A success all things considered

Certain parts of our operation depend on knowing where the telescope will move next. The platform orientation flip affects how our k mirror keeps our field steady, our ADCs keeps the atmosphere from chromatically dispersing our light, and our woofer keeps the telescope on track with periodic offloads. Not all the flips were caught on the first go through, but by the halfway point of the night we had a PSF just as pretty as we’re used to back home (NASE). We didn’t even have to run up to the platform and re-adjust the bench position.

Flipping to a visitor camera – Success!

Camdurham made its way back inside the instrument and tonight it saw its very first stellar photons through MagAO-X. We got beautiful single and double star spectrum throughout the various engineering tasks. In the image below, you can see MagAO-X providing diffraction limited images throughout the near IR. (You can also see our resolution decrease as the wavelengths get longer.)

Flipping off sidereal tracking – Partial success

Tiffany and Jay have been hard at work finding extended objects for MagAO-X to image, such as asteroids or satellites. These are tricky for the AO system, but they’re also tricky for the telescope which can no longer follow the well calculated paths of stars across the night sky, aka sidereal tracking. With the help of our TO Hernán, we were able to center a weather satellite on our acquisition camera. We weren’t able to keep up with it long enough to send through to our science cameras, so there’s more work to be done on the tracking front. Even with our acquisition camera we were able to resolve the solar panels on the 20ft target.

Flipping to remote ops – Setup success

Meanwhile, back in Tucson, we had Jialin and Josh test our remote operations computer. When the rest of us head home in a week, we’ll be using this setup to control MagAO-X remotely in April and May. A huge next step in making MagAO-X available and flexible for our observers.

Color of the Day

Blink and you miss it green, seen tonight but chased after every sunset.

Song of the Day

Onto our 2nd night of observing! Despite the burros best efforts to block us in, we managed to get up the mountain again for an action packed night.

Observing snacks

Everyone knows that you cannot observe off caffeine alone. We all bring a wide range of weird but yummy snacks to keep us going during the night.

Asteroid imaging

As part of demonstrating that MagAO-X can work on a wide range of targets, last night we closed the loop and imaged the asteroid 20 Massalia, which is well resolved.

The MagAO-X blower

The MagAO-X blower is a device which sits at the foot of the optical bench and keeps the air moving in a laminar fashion inside whilst removing warm air. It looked a little bland, so we gave it a little makeover. Meet noo-noo!*

* (any resemblance to fictional, copyrighted characters is purely coincidence… after all this is a blower)

I’ve also added an audible alert whenever someone turns noonoo on, attached below:

Find the vizzies challenge

Taken ~1hr before sunset from the back of the telescopes. I see at least 3.

Color of the day: Wasabi pea green

Song of the day

I really hope we never have to align these cubes again!

Laird Close, MagAO-X 2026A Day 7

Today Laird and I aligned the beamsplitter cubes again. This time we discovered a faulty clamp, which is a better explanation for our constantly having to re-align than “perhaps someone is hexing us.” We’re confident that the problem is fixed for real this time–but if it happens again, we might have to seriously question if we’ve accidentally triggered an ancient curse.

The last two nights have been entirely engineering blocks, so tonight was the first time we had dedicated science time. Thanks to our hard work during engineering, the new infrared camera was up and ready to go for Sebastiaan’s observations at the beginning of the night. After the appropriate amount of ooh-ing and ah-ing over the exquisite stability of the H-band images, we spent some time looking for little guys:

Sebastiaan being Sebastiaan, we also had another tech demo to do tonight. After a long and arduous FedEx journey, a new coronagraph mask arrived at the telescope a few days ago. This very special mask, fabricated by our friends at UCSB, is a metasurface: a material with tiny (think nanometer-scale) structures printed on it that make light behave in very strange ways. This specific part is designed to function as a coronagraph at one wavelength and as a wavefront sensor at a different wavelength. Tonight was the first time a metasurface has been used for high-contrast imaging on a real star!

Sadly, we hit a bit of a snag with the telescope hardware during the second half of the night. It’s always a huge bummer to miss out on telescope time, so here are some of today’s animal friends as a consolation prize:

The color of the day is golden-hour-culpeo:

Song of the Day

The day began with the LCO engineers troubleshooting an issue we were having with the telescope last night. After spending many hours during the night and 10 hours during the day, they were able to determine there was an open loop somewhere in the motor through electrical measurements. They found the part that was causing the issue and replaced it with a spare. Big thanks for the great work and quick work done by all the LCO engineers and staff to resolve this and allow us to get back to normal operations in the evening.

The night started off with a former MagAO-X group member, Logan Pearce, joining us from Michigan for the first half of the night. She was able to successfully observe multiple stars with potential white dwarf companions.

The next part of the night we were joined by another former MagAO-X member, Lauren, who is now in New Mexico. We spent the majority of the time working on imaging and using AO on extended objects, which will be an important feature for GMagAO-X since it will be resolving objects.

We ended the last couple hours of the night back with Logan, as well as her student, Emi. There final target was a very interesting observation of a binary star system with the potential for an additional brown or white dwarf gravitational bound too.

A day at LCO isn’t complete without reviewing the local wildlife encounters.

About a dozen Burros refused to let me walk up to the summit, and a few of them even began walking up the path toward me trying to intimidate me, which worked.

Color of the day: Guy Fiery Flavor Town Donkey Sauce

Song of the Day