Jialin Li – Extreme Wavefront Control Lab

MSM Day 1: It’s not giant, but this Magellan is already in Chile

Majority of the MagAO-X team traveled to DC in 2023 for the GMT community science meeting , so this is the second time the (partial) MagAO-X team has assembled in Washington. But this time, it’s focus on all sciences done with the not-so-giant Magellan Baade and Clay telescopes.

David Osip, the LCO Associate Director, gave the first talk of the day, which was an overview on the state of the observatory. As someone who miss out on the 2025A observing run, I got a bit emotional (just a very…small…bit), when some familiar faces showed up on the screen.

Of source, MagAO-X has made an appearance within the overview talk despite not being included in the Magellan instruments FOV slide. And the rest of the morning was filled with IFU instrument talks.

During luncheon social, Jay has found a familiar face here at the conference, Marcelo. To us who attended this conference in person, Marcelo is the one who gave a non-IFU talk earlier this morning. To those who are back home in Tucson, you may know him as the person-Jay-ran-to-for-coffee-machine-support-in-Baade-during-2025A-run. Marcelo showed us the face of Magellan, which now none of us can unsee.

Marcelo and the cute figure of the Magellan face 😉

All the major events happen after lunch. Logan was the first to be behind the podium and she took it away with the results of her Pup Search. Soon after her talk, Logan also presented a poster on her work on imaging planet with reflected light.

Oh, Logan didn’t just stop here. She also was the chair of third (!!!) spectroscopy session of the day and the second half of the imaging session, where Jay and I presented our work.

I started the second half of the imaging session with some protoplanets.

Sorry Sebastiaan… (for not explictly citing Haffert+2019)

And the microphone was immediately handed off to Jay for some debris disks.

Slide with all the appropriate and proper acknowledgments, along with a Jay

The rest of the afternoon was filled with talks on objects with non-negligible redshift (what even is that???).

After all the talks, we snap a quick group selfie before attending Alycia’s tour of the EPL campus.

We started the tour off in the Greenewalt building where the conference took place and got a introduction of the history of research done at Carnegie. The research span from project like The Carnegie, a ship that traveled the world to map the earth’s magnetism in the 1920s, to using radio telescopes to prove the prescence of the Earth’s iononsphere. Perhaps the one project that none of the conference attendees can ignore is the Atomic Physics Observatory (APO) located right outside the Greenewalt building. This “observatory” does not house any telescopes, but rather a Van de Graaff generator (designed by Van de Graaff himself) used for splitting the Uranium atom. And it is carefully disguised as an observatory to please the neighbors.

Jay and I got an additional tour of the research building, where Alycia’s office is located. We got to see a lot of the items used by Vera Rubin herself and visited one of Alycia’s colleague, Paul Butler, who was observing at Clay tonight. While crashing Paul’s observing run party, we “ran” into our guest blogger and TO, Carla!

The (partial) MagAO-X team and Dr. Daniel Lin, who is a collaborator of Alycia here at Carnegie, ended the night with some amazing greek food. Unfortunately, I do not have any photos during this social gathering as my phone battery was drained throughout the day for the creation and documentation of blog-tent.

Song of the Day

Already, thanks for reading my full documentation of Day 1 of the MSM, which is full of action. Now, I am ready to goodbye to editing this post and head straight to bed. So please enjoy this fantastic Good Bye.

MagAO-X 2024B Day 14: More Treats than Just Empanadas

This Sunday, we celebrate the triumphant return of the penguin seeker, Dr. Joseph Long, along with his bonus blog detailing his short weekend journey. On top of the cute penguin pictures, Joseph brought back lots of local chilean snacks that he sourced in supermarkets during his trip.

As always, before the sunset viewing session, a few of us went out for a vizzy spotting session. We only spotted a little baby vizzy and we were unable to find the parents. I suspect that we have been coming to this spotting location too often and have scared some of them away. As requested by a follower of Jay, we recreated the famous “crawling Jay, searching for vizzy” moment.

Bringing dad energy to vizzy spotting (picture by E. McEwen)

Roger, our T.O. for this turno, marched towards the dome with another basket full of empanadas in the glow of the setting sun as we gathered outside the control room for another sunset viewing. Although not captured by a phone, we were fortunate enough to witness another green flash on a Sunday this run. “Do you get deja vu” feeling that I am getting?

Shot of Roger doing his curl workout by E. McEwen.

Tonight on the observation schedule, we have Sebastiaan and Alycia. Some errors popped on CACAO, but were “successfully ignored” and we went to observe giant stars with low resolution mode on VIS-X and regular imaging mode on MagAO-X.

As the time for midnight lunch approaches, Joseph cracked opened some of the snack that have arrived on the mountain today. Katie, our resident Canadian snack tester, had particularly strong feelings about the ketchup flavored cheetos. As a big fan of the Canadian ketchup chips myself, I would have to agree with Katie on this one. Unfortunately, I have another disappointing news to deliver: the empanadas today contained 300% more olives than previous Sunday.

Katie expressing her feelings with her facial features.

With the successful engineering blocks in the past few days, Sebastiaan implemented partial EFC on sky for Alycia and Jay’s debris disk observations, which dug a dark hole for seeing fainter objects like disks.

Song of the Day

Per the 24B blog rules, the song I have chosen for the day is “déjà vu.” We are constantly doing new. and exciting science on the mountain, so I “think everything is special”.

MagAO-X 2024B Day 7: It’s Empanada Sunday!

With our third car stolen by an unknown observer/animal on the mountain/crew a few days ago, the uber arrangement for our 9 people crew has been a bit tricky. Two brave and kind souls volunteered themselves for a hike up to the telescope, Eden and Katie. They were soon rewarded with spotting of the cutest clean room vizzy on this run (thus far).

What a good clean room vizzy! Look at those bunny like ears!(pc: Katie)

Before the dome opening, the crew added the 24B sticker onto the instrument. (Yeah, we are a lil’ late this run).

The sunset viewing session proceeded after the “ensticken” ceremony. Parker’s head acted as the coronagraph for the group photo. Please try to call him by his new middle name, “The Vortex”, from now on. The long anticipated green flash was finally captured by human eyes. On video, which was taken by our one and only Professor Close, the flash doesn’t seem to be so green.

For the “best part of this video”, watch till the end!

Along with our T.O.’s arrival, a basket full of empanadas entered the kitchen. Whether if the cheese empanadas were deep fried this time around remains a mystery, but they were a lot less greasy, which made it a lot more enjoyable for the meat and non-meat eaters.

Another Sunday and another basket full of empanadas (pc Jaylycious)

On the science end, the first half of the night was VIS-X time, and Sebastiaan observed quite a few targets in high resolution mode during this time. These data will probably be reduced by one of his current or future grad students, so look out for more MagAO-X papers? The good seeing persisted through the second half of the night, which was an joint collaboration between Jensen (graduate student from MIT) , Gabrielle, and us. We spent the rest of the night observing a protoplantary disk in Halpha.

Do you know what LMC stands for? Laird Miller Close. — Beautiful picture of the MW and Baade along with the LMC.

Song of the Day

Since we are now in South America, I have been trying to listen to more music from this continent, particularly pieces by Astor Piazzolla. Per the 24B blog rules, I must include two sentences from the song in the blog post. So here are the lyrics that I like the most:

“Y canto un tango que nadie jamás cantó
y sueño un sueño que nadie jamás soñó,
porque el mañana es hoy con el ayer después, che!”

As a non-Spanish speaker, I won’t attempt to translate for you. I would suggest a google search instead.

MagAO-X 2024Aa Day 15: Night of Data Reduction and Science Yields

Around sunset, two of our finest graduate student AO operators took time lapses of the dome opening. Jay covered the inside of the dome, providing us with a view of the primary mirror cover opening. Eden on the other hand, set her phone on the tripod outside the dome and managed to get a video of the telescope turning, louvers opening, and also DIMM opening. If you spotted the abnormal blockage of the telescope view in the beginning of the video, you have witnessed the little bird that delivered a surprised gift for Eden – its guano. Thank you for your sacrifice, Eden’s phone.

Little bird also enjoying the sunset… and we mourn the lost of the cleanliness of Eden’s phone.

And of course, the blog doesn’t quite feel complete without photos of viscachas.

Thanks to Eden for providing the her vizzy shots. — vizzy 1

The night started off with 3 hours of engineering lead by Sebastiaan and Jared, and there are no photo evidence of such event because a majority of us were too amused by the newest entertainment channel at Clay: the window into the supporting astronomer room. As the engineering block ends, the telescope is then handed over to the observers of the night, Logan and Jay. The seeing conditions were non-ideal, but they are still hopeful of their data.

Logan and Jay sharing their work and experiences on an outreach program remotely with Steward grad student.

The rest of us spent the night reducing some of the data we have obtained from the past few nights. We are all excited about the science yield in disk and substellar companion imaging. So keep your eye out for our papers on astro-ph and/or ADS!

Jared sharing his reduction of disk observations.

Laird sharing his reduction and results on a super secret project.

Logan and Sebastiaan overjoyed with their discovery of the Xoomies 1B!

And I am bring back a segment of the blog that I enjoy every much: quotes of the day! Enjoy the selected anonymous quotes.

“Oh, its so good to have Maggie back”

“Sebastiaan likes his cars like he likes his AO loop closing: operated at unsafe speeds”

“No. It’s not yellow. It’s just a golden hour butt.”

Song of the Day

For the song of the day, I, with the assistance of Eden, have selected a song that well fits with the weather of the night: wispy clouds.

MagAO-X 2024Aa Day 10: Scientists Reveal Shocking Secrets in Exclusive Interview – You Won’t Believe What They Confessed!

Clay and the moon, aka the massless particle in a RTBP, at sunset.

It’s the first double digit day of the 2024Aa run! As the master scheduler, tonight’s time is finely chopped up into four different blocks. Let’s hear what the MagAO-X scientists are doing for the night, and maybe ask them some fun questions. Ok, maybe they are just questions randomly popped into the minds of the deliriously tired interviewer and scientists.

Before we go to the main event, here are some animal spotting! Can you spot the 4 different viscachas and the guanaco?

iEFC on Sky Commission with Josh Liberman

What is iEFC and why is it so important?

Josh: iEFC is implicit electric field conjugation, a technique for removing quasi-static speckle and it allows us to reach higher contrast.

How did commissioning go?

Josh: We drove up at 3pm and performed calibrations. Everything went well, and we opted to skip dinner to finish calibration before sunset. The telescope dome opened after sunset viewing. When we returned to the control room, MagAO-X was in a state of extreme distress: the DM got really angry and the system was misaligned. Everything that could go wrong went wrong.

What were the immediate thoughts that went through your head when the system misaligned after dome opening?

Sebastiaan: God Damn it!

Josh recreating the recreaction of Sebastiaan

If you can befriend a fictional character who would it be?

Josh: Flat Stanley, he just gives off good vibes you know?

What is an insignificant petty gripe that makes you extremely angry?

Josh: When someone replies all to a group email.

YSES Survey Follow Up Observations with Sebatiaan Haffert

What is the YSES Survey and what observations are you doing?

Sebastiaan: YSES stands for the young suns exoplanet survey. I am doing a follow up of systems with confirmed companion. So far, 2/3 of my targets are successful.

How is it like being both an engineer and an observer?

Sebastiaan: I am not an engineer.

Logan: But you built an instrument!

On a scale of 1 to 10, where 10 is the most tired, please rate how tired you are after working from 3pm to 6am?

Sebastiaan: A three, it kind of feels like dinner time.

Flying or invisibility?

Sebastiaan: How important is invisibility if you have to be naked?

If you were to be a traffic sign, what would it be?

Sebastiaan: The “Watch Out” sign with the deer on it.

If you could make an office rule that everyone had to follow for a day, what would it be?

Sebastiaan: Everyone should walk backwards

What is an insignificant petty gripe that makes you extremely angry?

Sebastiaan: When the toilet paper roll is put in backwards!

Pup Search Observations with Logan Pearce

What is the backstory of the name of the survey?

Logan: the first White Dwarf-Main Sequence binary ever “made” was Sirius A and B. Sirius A, the main sequence star was known as the dog star. So Sirius B, the smaller companion was nicked name the pup. Now I am looking for more pups!

Pup Search and Xoomies (Logan’s project on fetching companions to accelerating stars in Scorpius Centaurus Star Forming Region with MagAO-X) are all related to dogs, will your next project named similarly?

Logan: Man, it takes so much time to come up with names. We (Sebastiaan and I) spent all of the astrobiology conference coming up with the Xoomies names.

Sebastiaan: Mine will be about a stroop waffle. I don’t know what it will be about, but I already have the logo made.

Flying or invisibility?

Logan: Hands down flying! I don’t get those who chooses invisibility…

If you were to be a traffic sign, what would it be?

Logan: Parking signs with a bunch of confusing texts.

What is an insignificant petty gripe that makes you extremely angry?

Logan: Double doors with one side locked. WHY DON’T THEY UNLOCK BOTH DOORS?????

Debris Disk Imaging with Jaylycia Kuenberger

What kind of objects are you observing tonight and what are you trying to get out of your observations?

Jaylycia: I am observing circumstellar disks, which are rings of dusty materials encircling its host star. I look at disks at all stages of extrasolar system formation. But this particular target tonight is a debris disk and I am just trying to get an image of the disk to characterize it.

Disks are generally thought to be difficult, what are your thought about that?

Jaylycia: Yes, they are more difficult than point sources, but they look cooler! They are very faint and they are easily removed during image processing, by accident.

How does it feel to be an AO operator and an observer at the same time?

Jaylycia: I don’t.

Who came up with your new name?

Jaylycia: Maggie-OX did. It’s the best thing that’s happened to me.

If you were to be a traffic sign, what would it be?

Jaylycia: NO PARKING! I DoN’T KnOw!

As a former pastry chef, which dessert do you think best describes you?

Jaylycia: A hefty cream puff with vanilla custard filling.

Song of the Day

Hmmm… What would be a more fitting music than the BBC News Intro music for an interview?

Well, thanks for tuning into the special program of today!