Yesterday our very own Joseph Long ascended the hallowed steps of academia and become a PhD holder! The PhD defense at Steward begins with a 30 min public talk summarizing your thesis (summarize 5-6 years of work in 30 mins????), followed by a snake fight with just the committee, who then kick you out to decide your fate. Reception to follow in the venerated “Interaction Area” at Steward, the area in which we interact.
I am actually in California right now doing an internship at NASA Ames for the next 6 months. But Joseph is pretty much my best grad school friend and I have a lot of airline miles, so I hopped a quick flight for the festivities.
There’s the Catalinas in the window
The Public Talk
It was standing room only (not just because the only room he could reserve was too small…) as the audience sat in rapt attention for Giant Planets, Sirius, and Starlight Subtraction At Scale.
Not a Joseph joint without the fizziesThe homiesThe plot every exoplanet talk is required by law to show.Time to get SiriusJoseph’s aesthetic and vital GUI interface for MagAO-XDiffraction gif but make it cats.A certain member of Joseph’s committee is well known for his love of orange Fanta at the telescope.
The Celebration
Of course he passed! While the OpSci grads get lovely sashes, a certain Steward postdoc-turned-faculty Kevin Hainline pioneered a slightly sillier tradition for Steward grads: an elaborate crown and cape featuring highlights of their research. If you follow this blog, you are well aware of the craftiness of some of our group members. So the troops were mobilized into action in true XWCL spirit (with heavy consultation with Kevin).
The cape is an astronomy fabric with gold letters (Avalon-printed) and plots from his papers with logos he made as well. The crown has a circus flair, and features bells on the ends, with a dumpster (I mean a MagAO-X with one too few doors on the top, oops) as the center feature. Around the base of the crown are hand-drawn (Eden-drawn) animals from the mission patches Joseph designed, each with their own crowns. Jialin also made some incredible art of Joseph, to be featured below.
The encrowning and encapening
The ‘fitcork poppin’CheersJared’s first astronomy PhD student. He’s had all OpSci grad before this.Three generations! Laird was Jared’s advisor.Ewan Douglas was also a committee member. The other two joined remotely.Joseph’s ‘rents! Two Drs Long + Dr. Capt. Mrs. Marta L. Gwinn-Long (Ret.) M.D. M.P.H.
I didn’t really get any pictures of the food! Jay Keuny’s partner Mel made incredible focaccia bread, Jay made amazing pistachio macarons, Maggie brought a lovely pie, and Jialin brought fun Asian flavor chips!
Behind the scenes
The crown beginsEden’s amazing crowned animalsThe cape begins
Avalon’s amazing craft skills on the letters
Jialin’s Joseph-inspired art projectsI made the MagAO-X and laptop from afar in San Jose
Bonus crafts
Jialin made some incredible Joseph art:
Noodle Chef JosephJester Joseph. Check out the pineapple and space cats lurking in the cards.
As a congrats gift, I made as Business Viscacha, or Businesscacha, or Biscacha. Behold Bizzy Biscacha:
He’s got some serious viscacha business to get to.
The briefcase opens and there are little letters in there 😀
Bizzy in his new home, attendin’ to business.
The Future
This summer Joseph is moving to New York City to begin a postdoc software fellowship at the Flatiron Institute. He’ll still be active with MagAO-X so keep an eye on this blog to follow his adventures.
So the fellowship I used to fund part of grad school has supplemental funding for an internship at a “non-academic institution” — basically not a university. I applied for it to fund a 6-month excursion to NASA Ames in San Jose to work with Dr Natasha Batalha on modeling exoplanet atmospheres for future reflected light imaging of exoplanets. I rolled out of town with 6 months of stuff and my dog this morning.
But I didn’t head straight there. So you see, my labrador Lani is every bit a labrador. The most important things in the world are water and the ball, especially water + the ball. So I took my desert dog to San Diego today to hit up their dog beach; I’m pretty certain she’s never seen waves or salt water. I haven’t been to San Diego since back in my Navy days in 2008 (I did also visit Coronado Island and peep for aircraft carriers in port). I’m just staying the night and then heading up to Big Sur area tomorrow, eventually reaching San Jose on Monday.
But you’re not here to listen to me blab, you’re here for the dog pics. So here you go, enjoy pics of my dog having her best day ever.
Unbridled joy at realizing where we were
She just kept running in and out of the waves:
Takes the waves like a boss:
The song of the day is 9 minutes of the Happy Dog Song:
So the last two nights have followed the same pattern: decent seeing and good images until about midnight-1am, then seeing creeps up and up and up and blows past the top of the chart, and we all slump around the control room and lounge in a funk. But tonight there is an added bonus of a storm rolling in!
As I write this here is the current weather conditions:
Education break: “seeing” is how astronomers quantify how sharp or blurry a star image is. Basically if the seeing is 1 arcsecond, then a star’s image will span about 1 arcsecond on the sky. So a large seeing value means more smeared out images. MagAO-X really needs low seeing to function well – 1 arcsecond is difficult for us to work in. 2 arcseconds is unheard of!! Until the last few nights that is.
The bad seeing blues
The best data we’ve gotten the last few days is VIZZIES!!!!!
BABY VIZZIES by Eden
VIZZIE SNACK TIME by me
With bonus tiny dust bath
More pics from today
Sandwich for Alvaro Ncleod?Hoping in vain for a green flash
Some quotes:
You know your greed for empanadas is not one of your better qualities
Tomorrow is empanada Sunday after all
You know what they say. Dry hands at night astronomer’s delight.
Hello! It me, back on the mountain finally. As stated yesterday, I arrived finally yesterday afternoon (after high-fiving the departing Warren and Joseph at the La Serena airport through the window). I managed to stay up for sunset, then quickly went to bed after sleeping not a wink on the plane the night before. I slept all through the night and all through the day, finally rising for good at around 4pm. (note: this was partially on purpose so I could switch onto a night schedule, but my body did not object).
One thing that is super nice compared to our last run is that the nights are much shorter and we have a good amount of time after dinner before the sun sets around 9pm. Last run the sunset was basically during dinner, so we had no time to enjoy it before the work began.
We begun this evening with a vizzy hunt. We have yet to see any clean room vizzies, which is disappointing, but we can climb down a smidge from the telescope to a vizzy wonderland in the rocks below. Tonight was epic vizzy spotting, with a vizzy family and a little vizzy baby!
We love vizz“I love how they just go into 3d kangaroo mode when bouncing away”double vizz
Laird caught an awesome video of the vizzy family! We decided the one is the mom and the little one is her baby.
You’re welcome for the audio btw.
But the fun didn’t stop there. We went to see the dome opening, and the TO was kind enough to put on a little show for us!
Eden filmed the time-lapse videos, I put ’em together. If you watch closely you can spot a little Jialin below the telescope. Note to whom it may concern: she went slowly and carefully, she didn’t jump and bounce like it looks in the time-lapse!Can you spy Jialin in the secondary“Damn she thicc” – Anonymous
But the fun doesn’t stop there. After it got dark Jared and Laird took us to the spoooooky tunnel under the telescope:
MagAO’s old plumbingFan tunnel SPOOPYInterferometry tunnel that never interferometriedLookin’ at the cable wrapCable wrapA feet pic?Checking out how it floats and rotatesSuction cups used to grab and transport the primary mirror for recoating
“Avalon there is a statistically significant number of pictures with your eyes closed that exceed what it should be for random chance.”
And Laird visited an old friend:
The MagAO cooling pump is still alive with some air pressure, eternally hoping in vain for another chance to live out its purpose.
Last night we did a little surgery on VIS-X. It seems that manufacturers think that it’s mandatory to put a blinking or blaring LED on your tech. One of the science cameras in MagAO-X has a bright green LED on the back that shines right into VIS-X’s optics. It was giving ~700 counts just from the LED alone! Bad for science. So we activated VIS-X’s ghost mode:
Problem solved!
Now onto some science. Sebastiaan spent the first half with VIS-X, the integral field unit (IFU) spectrograph. He observed the huge and close giant star R Doradus. This guy is sooo big and soooo close that we are able to spatially resolve the star. That means that we can observe the surface of the star, instead of just a point source like pretty much every other star!
A spatially resolved R Dor. The full-width-half-maximum, which is the size of a typical point source on the image, is shown by the green circle. R Dor is so big!!And there she is on VIS-X. Sebastiaan happy. “Damn she thicc” – anonymousA close up of the VIS-X images. The red on the right is R Dor, the blue on the left is a hot B-type star taken earlier that is not resolved. You can clearly see the difference! In the background is a published paper of earlier R Dor observations; the red arrow is pointing to a star spot they observed. When we squint we can convince ourselves we see it too! Marked with the red arrow again.
Unfortunately the seeing is terrible tonight and the wind is HOWLING. Bad for science! Jialin and Laird took over around midnight, and we spent the next many hours fighting the seeing and getting terrible AO corrections.
But it wasn’t quite bad enough to foil VIS-X, our champion for the night. Sebastiaan hopped on and did another spatially-resolved star, Betelgeuse! He has now gotten 3 of the 4 spatially-resolved stars with VIS-X. Soon he’ll be first kid on the block to collect the whole set!
Look at all the science.
Despite our vizzy-blessed night, Jared once again banished our lucky vizz from the desktop. Hope that doesn’t bode ill for our observations.
BeforeAfter
#ripvizzy
But wait! There’s more! In a moment of triumph, Avalon got her much-labored-over low-order wavefront sensor closed and controlling 16 modes!! WOOO! She can now use past-tense in her phd applications and finish up her masters thesis.
Woozah it works!
Let’s end with some sunset telescope + Jupiter pics
Some quotes:
Damn she thicc
On several things tonight…
I had the flipaqc in again! It’s flipping me out!
On flipping out the flip mirror
There’s nothing like a pack of wild dogs to ruin your day at the beach
There sure isn’t.
I should have watched Super Troopers between the last run and now so I’d be briefed up on my quotes.
On inside jokes on runs.
We had nubbins. Now we don’t even have subnubbins.
On the poor seeing and it’s effect on our observations.
Observing runs are fueled by coke.
For legal purposes this is clearly about coca cola.
“<slightly judgementally>How long do you want to be on this target Laird?</slightly judgementally>”
“It was your dumb idea to go to it Sebastiaan”
Difficult seeing makes for strained interpersonal relationships.
While the whole group is living up up north, those of us left behind in the sweltering heat and humidity of Tucson in July got a treat today:
Everyone safe and sound in the loading dock staging room. The big white box in the back is MagAO-X, the foreground is the electronics box, and the grey box is our control computer.
That’s right, that’s MagAO-X back home all safe and sound and looking none the worse for wear from her journey home from Chile! Delivery was kind enough to happen when literally everyone from the group is in Montreal or otherwise elsewhere, except moi and undergrad researcher Roz Roberts.
Your’s truly and Roz, dripping sweat
Folks it was a rough one. After about 30 mins of watching the crane and maneuvering the dollies in the 6 million degree heat and 5000% humidity (I measured), I was pretty wiped. And all we did was move it off the loading dock into the staging room. Unpacking comes next week, so stay tuned for the next update!
