MagAO Commissioning Day 16: Clio and VisAO

Today we worked more on interaction matrices and calibrations during the day.

In the evening, Phil and T.J. spent some time optimizing and testing Clio.  Clio got to move to the big computer in the Clay control room for the first time (instead of running it off Phil’s laptop).  Here are some pictures of the big event.

T.J. is impressed by all the real estate
Optimizing the system
T.J., Phil, and Jared working on their respective science cameras
Meanwhile, I was running the AO loop

 

Jared  is taking the slopes from the wavefront sensor and multiplying them by the reconstructor to determine the phase of the wavefront (including adding back in the high order terms that are above our cutoff frequency).  He writes the residual wavefront error to the VisAO FITS headers.  He also records the gimbal position so we know the position of the star in the image with respect to the center line set by the AO Pyramid.  Jared has calibrated the gimbal position and the wavefront error using the focal plane.  Soon, we will only need the VisAO FITS headers, not the images themselves!

The VisAO quick-look gui
Jared's VisAO software reports the AO loop status, the wavefront error, and the Strehl in real time
The VisAO FITS headers record the WFE and the gimbal position, so in principle you can reconstruct the image plane without needing the actual FITS image

 

Sunrise from this morning:

Sunrise from this/yesterday morning.
Moonrise from this evening.

Jared: I record the wavefront error and position of the star in the FITS headers.
Katie: So what do we need the VisAO CCD for anyway?
Kate: To calibrate the FITS headers!