Author: Eden McEwen

MagAO-X 2025B Day 9: The swing of things

If there ever was a day to wake up for lunch, Sunday is that day. While we all placed our much anticipated empanada night lunch orders, nothing beats the pastry goodies paired with the lunchtime soup choices.

Empenada de mariscos e Caldillo de Congrio.

Though delicious, the prize lunch came at the cost of some significant sleep debt for members of our crew. Nevertheless, we rallied, drank our little coffee drinks, and went right back up the hill for an afternoon of testing, bug fixing, and poking around on the internal source. I have no photos to show you the productive daytime endeavors, but I do have the motivational poster now stuck to the control room wall to sum up the energy of the participating members.

“Look at me, 4 hours of sleep and fresh as a lettuce”

Turns out if you wake up early enough, you can have a whole day before your observing work day. Enjoy these vignettes from our afternoon on the mountain.

A spurned pet.
A lush path.
A longing view.

Our empanada appetites did not overwhelm our TO Rebecca, who was able to muscle our nighlunch up the hill. We arrange the spread to remind ourselves of the richness and abundance of life.

The first big LCO empananda order of the run.

The first half of the night was shepherded by Parker, Katie, and Josh. We’re back on tau Ceti with the bells and whistles (iEFC dark holes and almost all the datastreams writing). The seeing gave us a good reason to work a little extra on internal source set up before it settled down to a fairly typical if a bit bumpy LCO night.

Seeing so bad they did not anticipate needing to plot it.
Locked in and focused

At 1am, Parker and I switched. This was actually a big night for me! Though I’ve assisted with observations at telescopes since I was 19, this is the first time I’ve gotten to take data for my own science on my own proposed-for time. I always try to be a diligent AO operator, but it feels different for your own data. (The difference is anxiety.)

Our time on Beta Pic is split in two goals, firstly to try to push into bluer wavelengths (r’ band) where the contrast of Beta Pic b depends on the kind of atmosphere it has, and secondly see if we can observe the closer in Beta Pic c at all. Thank you Katie and Laird for installing the ri beamsplitter cube that makes these goal somewhat simultaneous.

The PIAA engineer at work.

Since Beta Pic c is so close in, and given all the good PIAA work from yesterday, we used the PIAACMC to improve our inner working angles. Thank you Elena for her PIAA expertise, and Tiffany for sticking it out with us for the rest of the night. We wrapped up not too far after our TO gave us the 15 minute warning.

Miles did not lock in on photoshop for his masterpiece to fail to make an appearance on the blog. The whole team in one photo! How lucky to be planet hunting with them all.

Play “spot the difference” with the Day 7 photo.

Fun Fact: Pablo Neruda’s favorite soup

As Duo Lingo likes to remind me, I really need to work on my Spanish. As I was ordering my soup, the chef very excitedly explained something I only vaguely understood to be about Pablo Neruda, the Chilean poet. I since learned, and now you will know this too, that the soup from lunch today was popularized by Neruda’s “Oda al caldillo de congrio” (Ode to Conger Chowder). The conger chowder is one of many everyday items Neruda romanticized in his series of Odes, among soap, socks, and salt. It is considered today one of the most popular Chilean dishes, partially because of his love for how it represents Chile.

“… deliver
the treasure to the flame,
until in the chowder
are warmed
the essences of Chile,
and to the table
come, newly wed,
the savors
of land and sea,
that in this dish
you may know heaven.”
– Pablo Neruda

Song of the Day:

Wait what do you mean Katie hasn’t used a Stroke’s song yet?

The Strokes – Someday

Sagan Summer Workshop 2025: Silver Jubilee, yipee!

Imagine, if you would, the beautiful Caltech Campus. Imagine, if you would be so generous, a population of exoplanets. Imagine, if you would be so kind, the beautiful minds of exoplanet scientists convening for the 25th year in a row.

That should put you in the mood for this very hypothetical blog post. Both in that the SSW of 2025 was about exoplanet populations, which inherently include speculation and projection, and also in that I forgot to take any sensible photos, so you’re going to have to paint some mental images for yourself.

The beautiful Caltech campus. Theoretically filled with exoplanet enthusiasts for the workshop.
(Photo courtesy of Gabe Weible)

The crux of most SSWs are to help younger generations of researchers connect with a topic in exoplanets through lectures and hands on activities. Discussions are more fundamental than you would get from a typical conference and talks are staged to build on each other throughout the week.

This year was a celebration of hitting 25 sagan workshops, and so was an overview of how each detection method has aided our understanding of the whole of exoplanet populations. Take a wild guess at the favorite plot….

THE observation demographics plot. Plot taken from Christoph Mordasini’s “Demographics Synthesis” Talk

The best part of the Sagan Workshop series is that they’re truly meant to be a resource. There are no registration fees and all the talks are posted online after. So I’ll present my chef’s choice from this year with links if you’d like to relive it yourself.

Slide from Josh Winn’s talk on Transiting exoplanet surveys.

If you’d like to know more about the biases in transiting exoplanet surveys, I highly recommend Josh Winn’s talk Twenty-Five Years of Transiting Planets (Video). He steps through a map of our transit detections through the years and different missions, which really helps contextualize how mission planning shapes the science we use for demographics. The selected slide above is, admittedly, a spoiler for to his very well-crafted narrative.

How many of these have we pointed MagAO-X at?

Of course, I’m contractually obligated to serve up the Direct Imaging talk on this menu. Not only because it really helped put my own work in context, or that all our favorite systems got a shout out, but the speaker Eric Neilson is a former Laird grad student. Check out Eric’s run down of the state of the feild here: Detection Techniques: Direct Imaging (Video)

Tim discussing what affects the certainties in astrometry measurements.
(Slide from Tim Brandt’s talk)

Tim Brandt’s talk on absolute astrometry finally got me to understand exactly what the hub-bub around Gaia is about. Tim turned my vague notions on astrometry to appreciation for the nuances and limitation of the genre. Highly recommend this talk for a brush up: Detecting and Weighing Exoplanets with Absolute Astrometry (Video)

The quilted together occurrence rate conclusion for this demographics talk.

Finally, I really enjoyed Brendan Bowler’s talk on Gas Giant Demographics (Video). We talk a lot about the distinct populations each technique can study, but this was a really interesting way of tying what each technique gives us for a given population. Gas giants at different separations and ages are approached in different ways, but are quilted together in a great summary here. The talk is also just very expertly crafted, an instant resource.

In addition to the educational talk series, there were also posters and short advertisements for poster pops. I gave my poster on the direct imaging work MagAO-X has been doing on Beta Pic b. Imagine I gave a poster pop and had actually taken a photo, it might look something like:

Apologies to my friend Shishir, who was originally the subject of this image.

I also had great conversations over the poster session, across a variety of active research projects. With some stretch of the imagination, that poster session could have looked something like:

A satisfying update on our Beta Pic b Project, pushing bluer than any other project has gotten on the darling hot Jupiter.

It’s true that this year was not necessarily the most on topic for us, but the workshop was a good reminder how far the field of exoplanets has come in my lifetime, and how bright the future is with Gaia DR3, PLATO, HWO, and more.

Song of the week:

“Sagan’s Song” by Emily Davis

GMagAO-X featured in Steward GMT overview

We haven’t said much about GMagAO-X since the PDR went well, but we’re still a key part of the collaboration’s suite of instruments. This week we’re in the Steward news talking about what the future instrument could mean for science:

At first light, astronomers will use a special tool called GMag AO-X, an “extreme AO” coronagraph. It will block out starlight and reveal the faint glimmers of orbiting planets.

“The Giant Magellan Telescope will be a major upgrade for our ability to study planets around other stars, especially when we take pictures of them using the in-development instrument GMag AO-X,” said Jared Males from the University of Arizona. 

“The big improvement in resolution and sensitivity over today’s telescopes will open the most exciting science case imaginable: looking for life on those planets by focusing on their atmospheres,” he enthused.’

Read more at the original article: “The Giant Magellan Telescope ushers in a new era of astronomy” by Eric Ralls

MagAO-X 2025A Day 20: you can see yourself out

I regret to inform you, dear readers, that things did not get better. This is not a happy story. Your brave AO operators do not triumph over the atmosphere, because… well it’s a natural phenomenon with a mean streak. We don’t pull an underdog move, miraculously rally, and through the power of friendship get phenomenal data at the last second. We limped towards dawn and the day crew takeover. The last night of the run was a wash, and honestly we’re glad it’s over.

When AO is on the telescope, you don’t get red on this plot…

Now that you’re adequately disappointed for us, here are some good things that happened today:

  1. The sunset was beautiful!
I have a soft spot for the dome reflecting pink cloud glow.

2. The vegan ate well!

A meal so beautiful it needed it’s own fancy plate.

3. Baby viscachas are still very cute!

Hey! Did you know it’s the hoppy holiday today?
If you want it enough, you’ll find him.

4. Another Laird theory proved!

During the course of our bright observations tonight, where we were attempting some engineering despite the seeing, we noticed that our performance was way worse than it should have been… when pointing to the south, where the control room is. Camtip (the champ) bounced like a pingpong ball. Then when we point to the north, away from the telescopes, suddenly smooth sailing. Camtip a beautiful steady ring. (Not useless!) A more detailed proof probably forthcoming, but initial evidence indicates AO doesn’t like the telescope pointing at 210-240 degrees. One more thing to think about when picking targets.

The plots to look at are the circular wind plot against the areal view of where the telescopes point.

5. We got Easter candy!

The bunny (or should I say vizzy?) delivery is always a treat, and which treat changes year to year.

Thank you LCO for making the holiday special!

6. It’s Matthijs birthday!

Well, at midnight it was. He went down the hill before we had a chance to sing him a midnight birthday song in the control room, being a responsible day crew member. So happy birthday to our only postdoc! Hope you have some downtime from your rigging intro to enjoy more puzzles.

That’s a face that says “yum”
sunrise caught by Sebastiaan

Given that the atmosphere basically booted us out the door, we’re done here. The last photons of 25A were tallied up, as scattered as they might be. The sun has risen, the DM cables are tucked into bed, and the day crew will take it from here.

Night crew jumping one last hurdle on the way to bed.
Tucking cables getting tucked in.

As I successfully got every observer to use my daytime calibrated incoherent speckles tonight, I find this quote specifically apt :

“It’s wonderful when you can bring sparkle into people’s lives, especially under difficult circumstances.” — “Castle in the Sky”, 1986.

Song of the Day

Thanks Joseph for introducing me to the perfect song to encapsulate the night.

AHHHH! by Teen Jesus and the Jean Teasers

MagAO-X 2025A Day 14: bug buses, homebound planes, and fantastic foxes

We are happy to report the successful and uneventful homecomings of the first half of our observing crew. Uneventful in that none was stranded in a city they didn’t mean to be in. Successful in that they ended in the warm embraces of various roommate species.

Farewell Joseph!
Sir Alexander reclaims territory.
And we were all jealous.
Delta too intimidated to mess with their schedule.
Plane train closure.
Coming home to loving faces.

For the half of us who remain, the weather has been treating us. Poorly. Has us saying “”If What I Think Is Happening, Is Happening, It Better Not Be.”

So we did not have an alfCen kind of night. We had a “give it your best shot” engineering kind of night. Which stretched until we had to switch to our observer’s time. You’re welcome for the good seeing Gabrielle, Jialin ordered it just for you.

This seeing had such strong low winds our DM looked haunted.
Advanced readers will be able to spot the dark hole.

Our engineering is humming merrily along. Sebastiaan and Josh started the night with dark hole digging. Matthijs LOWFS’ed. Katie successfully wrangled dispersed speckles. Jared’s gain optimization is a huge hit. I’m enjoying my donuts. We’re as happy as we can be with seeing at an all time high.

Speaking of happy… a quick ode to the vegetarian cooking of our Chef’s this turno. Thank you for the beautiful meat free meals! For those of us up at lunch Sunday there was even a vegan empanada, eaten too quickly for the camera to catch. We have been absolutely spoiled.

So beautiful, I almost cried.
cloud sea, by katie
the trio, by me

The quote of today was inspired by the main characters of the Lodge, our very own fantastic foxes, our charming culpeos.

Keep an eye out for a sweet message from our TO Ivonne, who agreed to do a little blog on her last day. Thank you Ivonne!

Song of the Day

Yeah the song and the quote is gonna be from the same movie. It’s a good movie.

Petey’s song from FANTASTIC Mr. Fox