2014A Day 22: Grumpy’s Back!

The big news of today is that our favorite Viscacha made an appearance at the clean room wall today. We’ve been missing him!

We hadn’t seen the old man, Grumpy Viscacha, Vizzy himself, for a long time. We were getting worried. Yes, he’s still grumpy looking.

After a few days of Engineering and Arizona science, we welcomed Subo Dong from Peking University to the Clay telescope. Jennifer Yee (Harvard), who is observing in a few nights, was also here to help out and see how things work.

Jared, Subo, Jennifer, and Katie set a record for most Sagan fellows (current or past) using MagAO at one time.

We continue to make progress in improving the quality of MagAO operations.

This blog gets results! Here we see logs being taken by the AO operator.

The MagAO team is thoroughly nocturnal now. But that means our food is eaten in the wrong order by all standards of civilization.

Katie’s breakfast. Which was really her supper. Or whatever you call the meal before you go to bed.
Just some flowers cuz I saw them today.

Finally, we have a clarification from Katie’s post about all of our control loops. Though not specifically annotated, the VisAO Gimbal was shown on the diagram, and you just have to know where to look for our X-Y-Z stages.

The board GUI (code by Alfio), with extra annotations to show where everything is. Today’s free-sticker-question: what’s wrong with our X-Y-Z coordinate system?

Listen close to this song, and you’ll hear an entire verse about adaptive optics. Plus, once you’ve been on a month long MagAO run you’ll know what Bono is saying, though maybe not in spanish.