2014A Day 9: A Blue World

Hello everybody, I’ve been enlisted to write the blog post tonight. I take it that I’m supposed to post a picture of a horse:

The daily horse picture, today with domes and Jordan.

To get started, here’s a few images from last night’s engineering. The first is a VisAO image of Baade’s window. Check out all of those stars!

VisAO is able to detect many faint stars within 3″ of this 8th magnitude star in Baade’s window. The faintest stars shown are z’=21.5

Next, here’s  a picture of an asteroid and its little satellite.

MagAO resolves the main-belt asteroid 45 Eugenia, and detects its satellite, the Petit prince. Non-sidereal tracking is facilitated by the AO system.

We also did a bit of engineering on Clio’s spectroscopic mode. Here’s the dispersed L-band image of an A-star. The prism provides R~200.

We spent some time engineering the spectrometer mode yesterday in preparation for tomorrow’s science time. This L-band spectrum of an A star shows 3 Airy rings.
VisAO got into the Brown Dwarf companion game tonight too. This is a z’ image of a BD companion well inside 1″ from its star. The only image processing was unsharp mask and smoothing.

Lot’s of thin cirrus clouds in the sky, but the AO loop remained closed for most of the night. We did lose some time when the power went down briefly in the dome. Everything restarted smoothly and not too much time was lost.

I hope these clouds leave, science time starts tomorrow!

Tonight’s song is, according to Jared, the official VisAO theme song. I present it here in honor of the beautiful blue images produced by VisAO: