Author: Joseph Long

MagAO-X 2022B Day 0: Launched to LCO

Well, @warrenbfoster still owes us vacation photos from Valparaiso, but who knows what his internet situation is. Someone’s still gotta write the Day 0 blog post, though.

Hello again, LSC hardstand.

Compared to last time this trip didn’t have many surprises. We did learn several things, though:

  • When there’s a choice of LATAM and Delta for the 10-hour flight, Delta’s got the better seats. Jared reports leg-room upgrades on LATAM are barely anything, and not worth the additional cost. I had to sit on my complimentary blanket to sleep because the hard seats were tough on one’s rear after a few hours.
  • COVID-related arrival measures are entirely gone. No test on entry, no verification of vaccine documents. The Ministerio de Salud has dispensed with mask-wearing requirements indoors (except for healthcare settings) and most employees and passengers opted to go bare-faced.
  • Passport control took a while, but kept moving. Single line for nationals and foreigners.
  • Customs enforcement seems to be up. The scannable tags system that was new last time is now gone, replaced with brief interviews with Jared and myself about equipment we were carrying. We aren’t importing anything (of course) so we explained we had tools for scientific research and they let us go.
  • They no longer seem to care about the purpose or destination of visits. I have a slip saying I’m visiting Santiago for vacation that I must present on exiting the country, but I was never asked for those details.
  • As always, the “collect your bag, complete customs, re-check your bag” dance is a pain. Unhappily we must report that LATAM domestic baggage recheck is now even sillier. There is a counter in the international terminal, down the hall with the taxi stands right after customs but before you actually exit. It was super backed up and after waiting 10 minutes not one person had successfully re-checked their bag and left. If it’s not busy, it might be better than the situation across the road. We schlepped our bags across the way to the old terminal (T1) and went to a place with approximately 4 actual agents and all self-service kiosks. Of course, the self-service bag check does not work with our pre-tagged bags so you can go straight to the “I need an actual human” line.

Song of the Day

“Preparada” by El Columpio Asesino

Okay, so the song’s about a violent break-up but… we are preparada for 2022B.

Someone should probably come up with Song of the Day rules.

MagAO-X Voyage à Montréal Day 1: My French isn’t that good

The SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation conference is the main event for instrument builders world-wide, and this year is held in Montréal, Quebec, Canada. The conference is held every two years (because one year is nothing in instrument project timelines) and the last one would have been in 2020. (But then, the plague.)

Anyway, we have a lot of new stuff to report from MagAO-X, and from our friends in UASAL, SCExAO, and beyond. See the schedule at the end of this post. (We’re just jazzed to be here.)

Today, the first team member to speak was our fearless leader with a status update on MagAO-X Phase II and future plans.

Olivier Guyon gave us a version of his Spirit of Lyot talk, which was fortunate, because that gave some of us a second chance to absorb and understand it. (There’s a lot going on over at SCExAO!)

Sebastiaan was tapped to present as a substitute for a team member who wasn’t attending, and he gave us an overview of image quality calibration from WFS PSF deconvolution (work by Jacob Trzaska) and his own predictive control algorithm (Data-Driven Subspace Predictive Control—DDSPC).

Blog Rules

It’s been a while since we had a Blog Rule, beyond the compulsory Song of the Day. So, here’s my rule for the week: les chansons doivent être en français.

(The songs must be in French.)

Bonus points for chansons Quebecois!

Song of the Day

“Je Veux” by Zaz

Today when I went to get a coffee en route to conference registration, I opened with a “bonjour,” following the advice for anglophones in a francophone world. Then, I asked “English OK?” and the barista said “Yeah, sure! My French isn’t that good.”

Maybe that advice is more for the rest of Quebec…

MagAO-X and Friends Schedule

TimeAuthorRoomTitle
Sunday, July 17
12:05Jared Males518aMagAO-X: current status and plans for Phase II
15:45Olivier Guyon (SCExAO)518aHigh Contrast Imaging at the Photon Noise Limit with WFS-based PSF Calibration
16:20Sebastiaan Haffert518aPSF evaluation using tip images in a modulated pyramid wavefront sensor
Monday, July 18
posterJaren Ashcraft (UASAL)516The Space Coronagraph Optical Bench (SCoOB): 1. Design and assembly of a vacuum-compatible coronagraph testbed for spaceborne high-contrast imaging technology
posterKyle Van Gorkom (UASAL)516The space coronagraph optical bench (SCoOB): 2. wavefront sensing and control in a vacuum-compatible coronagraph testbed for spaceborne high-contrast imaging technology
posterKevin Derby (UASAL)516Tolerance analysis of a self-coherent camera for wavefront sensing and dark hole maintenance
Tuesday, July 19
13:25Laird Close (for Alex Hedglen)518aFirst lab results of segment/petal phasing with a pyramid wavefront sensor and a novel holographic dispersed fringe sensor (HDFS) from the Giant Magellan Telescope high contrast adaptive optics phasing testbed
13:55Antonin Bouchez (for Rick Demers) (GMT)518Phasing the Segmented Giant Magellan Telescope: Progress in Testbeds and Prototypes
17:25Meghan O’Brien518aexperimenting with the g-ODWFS for use in extended source LGS wavefront sensing.
posterSebastiaan Haffert516Visible extreme adaptive optics for GMagAO-X with the triple-stage AO architecture (TSAO).
posterLaird Close516A Review of High Contrast AO Imaging of Accreting Proto-Planets
posterJoseph Long516XPipeline: Starlight Subtraction at Scale for MagAO-X
posterNoah Swimmer (UCSB)516?An MKID camera for use behind MagAO-X
Wednesday, July 20
posterJared Males516The conceptual design of GMagAO-X: visible wavelength high contrast imaging with GMT
posterMaggie Kautz516A novel hexpyramid pupil slicer for an ExAO Parallel DM for the Giant Magellan Telescope
Thursday, July 21
10:30Laird Close518aThe Optical and Mechanical Design for the 21,000 Actuator ExAO System for the Giant Magellan Telescope: GMagAO-X
14:10Lauren Schatz518aExperimental demonstration of a three-sided pyramid wavefront sensor on the CACTI testbed
15:40Andrew Szentgyorgyi519aG@M: Design of the Giant Magellan Telescope Consortium Large Earth Finder (G-CLEF) for operations at the Magellan telescopes.
posterSebastiaan Haffert516Advanced wavefront sensing and control demonstration with MagAO-X

MagAO-X Across The Pond Day 4: Let’s Talk It Out

Today I presented Kevin Wagner’s talk about searching for planets in 10 µm light. I think I did an okay job talking about things I know nothing about, but then, I do have plenty of practice.

All questions about Kevin’s part of the talk will be answered with viscacha noises.

Incredibly, people did ask me questions. In this rare instance, “beats me, ask someone else!” was a valid answer. (Actually, I’ve been running audience messages back and forth to Kevin on the Steward grad student Slack. Just not on stage.)

The only MagAO-X/XWCL member officially on the schedule for today was our fearless leader Dr. Jared Males.

GMagAO-* is strictly an improvement over MagAO-X as the * means it can wildcard match all Giant Magellan AO instruments.

I can’t speak for Jared, but I’m happy to be free of any further obligations beyond listening and enjoying the rest of the conference.

Themed Gallery 1: Pictures of PDS 70 b from SPHERE

It’s their fave.

Themed Gallery 2: Food in hand

Li’l marzipan sandwich
If pound-cake were a cookie
Balanced dinner of frites

Song of the Day

“La Vida Es Un Carnaval” — Celia Cruz

MagAO-X 2022A Day 29: Non-Working Title

We did it, folks. We made it the full 29 days. (Maybe there will be a blog post from Atlanta for Day 30, maybe not. Depends how tired we are.) Jared had the presence of mind to take a group shot on our transport down from Las Campanas to the airport.

The covid clinic we visted along the way (fortunately not pictured) was demystified by Justin’s blog post. The most difficult part was waiting for them to fix their printer issues.

At the airport, we saw an interesting macaroni-penguin-liveried plane. And we ordered the traditional papas fritas and Kunstmann Torobayo (on tap no less).

Then we left Laird in La Serena.

(Not really; he was on the next flight out.)

Once in Santiago’s airport we traveled, Lairdless, in search of food and drink. We ended up at notable South American eatery “Ruby Tuesday,” where we finally got Logan a pisco sour. (Due to Las Campanas Observatory’s status as a dry site, there wasn’t a chance previously.)

I dunno, this stuff could catch on. Maybe they’ll expand their franchise to the US!

We’re all about ready to collapse into our assigned seats now.

However, the blog must go on, so I leave you with your…

Song of the Day

The song of the day is “Say Goodbye” by Papas Fritas.

MagAO-X 2022A Day 24: Getting dispersed

Tonight was split 50/50 between Dr. Weinberger and Dr. Haffert. Once Alycia’s observations were done, Sebastiaan started commissioning his extreme, visible, high-resolution, MagAO-X-fed, integral field spectrograph VIS-X. There was a little bit of panic initially when the laptop pinch-hitting for “VIS-X instrument control computer” wouldn’t talk to the camera, but Sebastiaan shimmied up the ladder onto the instrument platform to debug.

It turns out that laptops are just like dogs. If you’re cold, they’re cold. Bring your laptops inside. (This also goes for post-docs.)

Once everything was working, he was rewarded with more mini-spectra than you can shake a stick at.

And, since the observatory advanced to “phase 3” of their COVID plan, we were able to have everyone in the control room for it!

Meanwhile, I was working on some astrometry with a field in Baade’s window that we imaged earlier in the run. (This very blog introduced it to the world as a calibration field for high contrast imaging, but for some reason the blog post doesn’t get the same number of citations as the paper by the GPI folks.)

MagAO-X imaging of HD165054 and its neighbors in z band, 30 second exposures, 10.5 min total. Left is scaled to show faint companions and the glare of the star, right is unsharp-masked to remove most of the glare.

We didn’t get a lot of field rotation to allow starlight subtraction this time, so the unsharp mask is the best way to see the stars hidden in the glare. We’ll be able to use them to calibrate the scale between angular coordinates on the sky and pixel coordinates in the instrument, using the measurements others (like our friends at GPI) have made of the field.

Song of the Day

The most famous spectrally dispersed album in music history is obviously Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. (Plus, it has a celestial body in the title.)

Money is the main thing Sebastiaan needs to make VIS-X even more extreme, so thank goodness he’s got some coming. Stay tuned for 2022B.

Quotes of the Moment

We have not been logging memorable quotes day-by-day because, frankly, we’re all extremely tired by the time it’s time to blog. But here are a few that have been queued up for publication over the last weeks.


“That god damn viscacha shows up in every picture no matter what we do.”

on the appreciation of viscacha visages

“This is so exciting for visitor 3. Visitor 3 gets to go down the road like the big cars!”

on the trip to GMT

“Oh gosh, we might as well be licking each other up here!”

on infection control measures

“At some point, some of us will actually die from lack of sleep.”

on sleep

“I want there to be a cat.”

on the Magellan tertiary mirror

“But seven… seven is a thing.

on mirrors

“He doesn’t know that if he jumps in my lap I’ll give him anything he wants.”

on foxes

“Stop calling it second light!”

on second light

“Oop, that was a shrimp-and-pickle burp.”

on local dietary habits

“Gender is such a complicated thing.”

on the subject of connector pass-throughs

“Justin, are you on your nuts? Everyone check your nuts. [giggling ensues] There’s nothing funny about that. This is a professional environment here.”

on nuts