2014A Day 3: And on the third day…

Today I worked with Mauricio and Laird on evacuating the air out of Clio’s cryostat, which involved cleaning the o-ring and then hoping for a good vacuum. Laird did some fixes to the ASM, removing the alignment laser and making an alignment fiducial instead, and fixing some of the protective covering on the back to keep out the dust. Jared and Alfio worked in the morning on software and electronics for the AO system, and in the afternoon and evening they with Laird tested the cleaned VisAO optics and closed her back up.

Mauricio helped us with vacuuming out Clio’s cryostat
Jared and Laird cleaning optics yesterday. Today they finished testing their new optics and closed up VisAO.
Laird did some surgery on the ASM and I helped a bit
I went for a walk/jog and Povilas zoomed by while I took this picture of the valley towards the ocean out there, and the lodge and bird droppings over here.
My nephews are really into trucks. There are some really nice ones at LCO.
A blue truck
A red truck
Vizzy contemplating the sunset

Song of the day for heavy-hearted basketball fans, if you need a cry 🙁
(family-friendly version):

On a happier note, let’s close with some light-hearted fan mail from my sister:

My big sister sent MagAO a fan letter — thanks Anna! She was one of the original 4 MagAO blog subscribers on google reader