MagAO-X 2026A Day 15: Another day (or night) at MagAO-X

Color of the day

El color nos lo entrega la última imagen, un amarillo esperanza para todos nosotros.

Song of the day

La canción, acorde a la temática, Scorpions – Wind Of Change (Official Music Video), porque hoy más que nunca, a cada instante vivimos los cambios.

MagAO-X 2026A Day 15: It’s the final countdown

This is my first blog post of the run even though I have already been here for nearly two weeks! It’s great to be back again at LCO. After being here for so many observing runs it is starting to feel like a second home. And it is almost time to go back because tonight was our second to last night of in person observing at LCO. As is tradition, we ensticken the instrument before we start observing. This is a tribute to please the weather gods and grant us good seeing. Due to some unspecified reason, we did not ensticken the instrument until last night. And miraculously, we had good seeing for the whole week! So to make certain we continue this streak, we finally added the 2026A sticker onto the instrument.

The PI is very carefully adding the run patch to the instrument.

And how we hoped that the amazing seeing would continue. Yesterday was great again after the telescope was back on its feet after a brush with a motor. So, today what could happen? The instrument is performing really well. The telescope is back in action. Our team finally switched our biorhythms to the night schedule. We had great food. There was fun. There was excitement. And then the atmosphere took a big dump on us.

The night started off great. The seeing was dropping. Justin Homs was observing remotely. And he was for the first time getting amazing MagAO-X data for his exciting Roman vetting campaign. And then that happened. The seeing went officially off the charts. And that was not the end of it.

According to chatgpt: “The only thing MagAO-X is resolving in bad seeing is the emotional limits of the observer.”

Throughout the night we had extremely variable seeing with patchy and thick clouds rolling over our observations. The atmosphere did try to convince us that it loved us. Look at the nice heart-shaped PSF we got from the atmosphere.

It was only between 2:00 and 3:00 (24h format FTW), that the seeing started to settle and give us a chance at correcting the atmosphere. And my dear readers, that is exactly the moment it switched to my observing time for the night. The second half of the night was used to do some new controls engineering. We had two exciting success stories. The first is that we finally got the ADC control to work robustly !!!

A very excited Katie that was finally able to robustly control residual atmospheric dispersion.

And the final excited result is that we got predictive tip/tilt control working! This has been a pet project of mine that I started working on in 2018 after reading Olivier Guyon’s paper on Empirical orthogonal functions. So, stay tuned and I will show some results soon at a conference near you.

Song of the day:

The color of today is red because of the atmosphere’s love for us. And therefore, the song of today is Be My Lover from La Bouche.

MagAO-X 2026A Day 16: And Nothing Else Matters

I heard you guys are finally leaving?

Well here we go, on our way home. Wow this run felt long, even though we only had 7 nights. The first group of us got here 10 days early, though as is typical we mostly sat around waiting for a shipment to arrive.

This captures how it always feels when we careen back down the mountain, hoping to find a sign of our old civilization somewhere ahead.

In truth we did an unreal amount of work. From overhauling our instrument’s glycol cooling to fixing all the vibrations to installing a new infrared camera, this has been action packed. And it all works!

A big accomplishment was all the people who got their driver’s license on this run.

Our last day/night was not without excitement. Over the last two nights our AO Operators Computer (AOC) has been randomly freezing up. My little buddy (read as either GPT-5 or Joesph, your choice) had lots of ideas. After a dawn reboot it was still spewing disk errors when I woke up this afernoon, so we decided to do some troubleshooting.

I feel like there is always a wrong choice made about “do it right, move it and have full access” vs. “touch as little as possible so you don’t break it more”. You never know until you’re done.

In the end we didn’t actually learn anything. We did stop the freezes, but not the disk errors, so we have fewer ideas than when we started.

At least the computer came back up and is operational except for a [_UUU] we have to fix before we leave.

The official group photo. We’re missing Miles (who left a few days before) and Laird (who I left a few minutes before).
MagAO-X will be here for you even after we’re gone.

Here’s the craziest part: this isn’t even the end of the run. We have 13 more nights coming up, but we’ll be driving MagAO-X from the friendly confines of Steward Observatory. Another adventure begins.

The color of day is a moonlit-sky-blue

The song of the day is Nothing Else Matters by Metallica

This makes a good lullaby (except for the yeah-yeah! part)