Las Campanas Belles: 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!!