Tonight was another Laird night which means more of our favorite target, PDS 70!
Could PDS 70 have alien life? Will we find a new planet? Are the answers to these questions always ‘no’?
Who’s to say.
We will get back to the PDS 70 excitement shortly, but first, a recap of the day’s festivities:
Sebastiaan and Elena got the FAST-SCC (self-coherent camera) working in lab! In the FAST-SCC, a coronagraph yeets light through a pinhole in the Lyot stop. This spatially filtered light interferes with residual stellar speckles, creating a fringe pattern in the focal plane from which the wavefront can be recovered. With our wavefront measurement, we can diggy diggy a dark hole.
Meanwhile, Katie and I hiked out to the solar telescope, and we also saw a burro.
Following a brief interlude, we have returned to the scene of PDS 70. While Logan may have left us, the good seeing that typically follows her decided to stick around.
“How could this be?” You ask.
Enter…Stewart.
With Stewart’s steady hand, we got some of the best seeing of our entire run!
Our night also featured a beautiful moon.
Having reached the epic conclusion of this blog post, I am ready to go to bed. “The midnight hour is passed and my attendants have all retired.” I recently watched the 2024 remake of Nosferatu, and it was difficult to find an appropriate quote for this blog post.
Song of the Day
Dancing in the Moonlight – King Harvest