The sky makes us sad, but at least there's vizzies.

 Hi!  It me.  I'm Logan, currently a 4th year PhD student at Steward Observatory in Tucson.  As Alycia said in her post, I'm writing this from the Clay control room on my 3rd observing trip down here.  But first, a tiny bio:

I'm a non-traditional student.  I got a bachelor's in chemistry from Purdue University in 2003, and earned a commission as a US Navy officer.  I served as a nuclear reactor operator on an aircraft carrier until 2008, then I returned to my hometown of Austin TX.  I then taught middle school science in Austin for 6 years.  Then a rage-quit teaching and decided to go to grad school for astronomy, but oops, it's been 15 years since I've seen calculus, and I can't even spell python.  So I used the GI Bill (yay!) to go back for another undergrad at UT Austin.  I did research with Adam Kraus on wide planetary-mass companions with Keck/NIRC2.  I graduated UT in 2019 and moved to Tucson to work with Jared Males and the MagAO-X crew.  I've put out papers on doing RDI with visual binaries on MagAO/CLIO, a candidate signal confirmed with MagAO-X (the first science paper with MagAO-X woo!), confirming that Boyajian's Star has a wide stellar companion, and contributed orbit fits of wide stellar companions to transit planed hosts in a lot of papers.  I'm currently working on accelerating stars with MagAO-X, a white dwarf-main sequence binary project with MagAO-X, and next year I will be doing an internship at NASA Ames working on modeling for reflected light exoplanet observations with GMT.

So, about this MagAO-X run.  It was supposed to be over day ago, but there was a conveniently timed truckers strike in Chile that lined up with when MagAO-X was on a truck.  So she sat on the highway or who knows where for several days, while the crew sat around the lodge.  I wasn't down yet so I delayed my flight by 4 days so she could get to the telescope and get set up.  I was staying at my parent's house at the time, and I left my dog with them while I traveled.

Unfortunately since I've been down here, observing for my white dwarf project, the seeing has been record terrible.  Most of the nights around midnight it shot up to ~2 arcsec, and was often literally off the charts.  MagAO-X struggles to work well in 1 arcsec, so this made things very difficult.  We also closed for humidity a few times.  

Here are some pics of MagAO-X chicks:

left to right: Avalon McCleod, Eden McEwan, Jialin Li, and me.

Here is a great timelapse of the Clay that Eden recorded and I stitched together:

We've also collected some great viscacha data!  If you climb down the hill just a bit from the telescope there is an abundance of vizzies living their best lives among those boulders.  We even saw two baby vizzies!!

And vizzy getting a snack and having a tiny dust bath:

Happy to report that as I am writing this on out last day on sky, that seeing is behaving and I am getting some good white dwarf images!  Wooo!

Cheers everyone!  Happy to be here.

Henrietta Swope - The Original Las Campanas Belle

Back in 2014, I did some research on Henrietta Swope, so I could give her a significant Wikipedia entry. I think of her whenever I'm at LCO, because, of course, the first telescope here is named for her (aside: it was used last night by LCO astronomer Nidia Morrell - I'm embarrassed to say I don't think Nidia has ever blogged for us here). In fact, one of the original suggestions that Johanna Teske gave for the name of this blog was "Spirit of Swope."

Swope gave the gift that allowed Carnegie to develop LCO. I just looked up the magnitude of that original gift -- $650,000. What I hadn't done before was use an inflation calculator to convert 1967 to 2022 dollars. There's an inflation rate of 791% between then and now, which would make $650K into $5.8M.   According to the Carnegie Yearbook, the total bequests she gave were $1.45M through her death in 1981 and a final bequest check from her estate in 1983.  I've long thought the unit of wealth should be the telescope!

Here is an article about Swope from the 1983 Carnegie Institution Yearbook:

An unexpected pleasure of looking at that article again was seeing the photo that included Jean Mueller. Jean was working at Palomar when I was a graduate student, as she was finishing the 2nd Palomar Sky Survey (photographic plates!) on the 48-inch Oschin telescope that is now the Zwicky Transient Facility telescope. Later, she was also an operator at the 200-inch Hale Telescope when I was doing my thesis. She also hunted comets with great enthusiasm. I always enjoyed talking to her, learning from her, and having her run the telescope. I'm happy to find that she also has a Wikipedia entry!

Belles are back in force at LCO!

I am back at LCO for the first time since November of 2019!

I spent many virtual nights here via Zoom and screen sharing during the Covid-19 pandemic, but MagAO-X is back on the telescope and its high telemetry rate and complicated interface make remote observing nearly impossible. So, I had a good excuse, I mean reason, to come back! 

And we have had quite the belle domination since I got here -- five women! Let me introduce some of them: 

 ***Jialin Li, a new graduate student on the team from University of Arizona See her first MagAO-X blog post here. Check out the photo she posted on her blog post with two of the other female students here.

***Eden McEwen, also a new graduate student on the team of University of Arizona See her first MagAO-X blog post here. 

 ***Avalon McLeod, a master's student in optical sciences at University of Arizona See her first MagAO-X blog post here. 

***And returning for her 3rd run at LCO: Logan Pearce, a graduate student in astronomy at University of Arizona and the only one of us to have actually submitted MagAO-X results for publication (go Logan!) and taker of Viscacha videos extraordinaire!  See her posts here and here, complete with said videos. 

And I make number 5. Though I think you can add the ages of two of these students and not get to mine.

 Here are Logan, Eden, and Avalon stalking the Viscacha family:

I blogged over at MagAO-X yesterday, so read about "Dripping not KLIPping" there.