Lauren Schatz – Extreme Wavefront Control Lab

MagAO-X Day 17: Always something fun when satellites are involved

Lauren Schatz, XWCL alum here! I flew in from Albuquerque, New Mexico to observe GEO satellites with MagAO-X to see if coronagraphy is possible with an extended source. It sounds simple enough right? “Put dot on top of satellite, done”, but turns out it is more complicated than that.

The first thing you have to do is to actually find the satellite, and we spent some time trying out different methods of determining AZ/EL coordinates. Some were more accurate than others, but all required some noodling around to find the satellite. One thing we tested out was Tiffany’s spiral search code, which worked great!

We had some head scratchers though. Some satellites that should have been visible weren’t! And then we had a real shock, we were trying to see one satellite, but accidentally found a second! (see pic below). Predicting satellite conjunctions is really hard so to stumble upon one accidentally was pretty crazy. The satellites are separated by about 45 arcseconds. Assuming they are at about the same range from Earth, this would be a distance of ~7.8 km. This is a good reminder that space is getting more and more crowded which is why we need the Space Force 🫡 haha. So who is this mysterious second satellite? Aliens? Spies? Direct-TV??? We might never find out. Well I might. Maybe I will tell. Maybe…

Acquisition camera image of two GEO satellites. Shame we couldn’t record the images.

Step two of doing coronagraphy on a GEO is to close the AO loop. The sky had other plans however, as the seeing bounced around from 1 arcsec to 2 arcsec and worse. There was a lot of griping about this in the control room, but to me this was excellent seeing compared to Starfire! It was really interesting to see how different AO systems can be and how highly optimized they are for a given site. Average seeing at Starfire is 6 cm r_0 which is about 2.6 arcsec in I-band. The personal best I have ever seen was 11 cm r_0 which is about 1.6 arcsec in I-band. And yet we are able to get meaningful AO correction while tracking LEO satellites screaming across the sky. My personal philosophy is that all problems can be solved with more laser beacons and more AO… so maybe think about LGS-MagAO-X someday…

So I wasn’t able to get the data I needed so this trip ended up being an excuse to binge all my favorite food and shopping I have been missing. It has been really wild to realize I graduated and moved out of Tucson 5 years ago, which is almost as long as I spent living here working on my PhD. Having that context gave me a little bit of an extistential crisis. What have I accomplished in 5 years of my professional career compared to what I did in grad school? Not as much as I would have liked… It is hard to get support when you are a small fish in a big organization so you end up stumbling around trying to get things done by yourself. I have a new appreciation how fast MagAO-X is able to implement new ideas because of the close knit team. Keep on keeping on~

The song of the day is Möbius Chicken Strip by Origami Angel

We interrupt your regularly scheduled blog post…

Hey MagAO-X’ers we heard you all were at an observing run, and by coincidence the Space Forcers are too! We are at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory on La Palma, Canary Islands for sodium laser beacon testing. (Initial results shown at the end if you want to skip to the good part!)

This observing run actually started at Teide observatory on Tenerife. Myself and a fellow Space Forcer Robert Johnson were doing some mission reconnaissance to check out an empty dome as a potential location for some future laser beacon experiments.

For more information on future Space Force Space Lasers see our SPIE talks 😉

Next we headed to La Palma and headed up to the observatory. The road is really curvy. Luckily the wildflowers are in bloom here so we stopped a lot to take breaks and take in the views.

Lots of flowers and lots of cool birds. Excellent time for an observing run.

And finally, after over a day straight of traveling, the Starfire team arrived at the observatory!

Starfire Optical Range Team! From left to right: Robert Johnson, Ian Kingsolver, Lauren Schatz, and Lee Kann.

The observatory itself is very dramatic. The telescopes are on one side of the mountain and right across the peak is a huge cliff into the very deep and eroded caldera.

Now onto the telescopes…. The Starfire team is working with a group of Italian and German researchers to test the new sodium laser. We are working in one of the open control rooms in the William Hershel Telescope pictured below. Our job is to perform analysis on the beacon to determine the magnitude brightness and the extent in arcseconds without turbulence. I was told last minute I had to learn astronomy and write a data reduction pipeline so thank you to Joseph and Logan for answering all my frantic questions!

We aren’t observing with the WHT. But they have a really cool new multi-object spectrograph instrument they are comissioning!

Obligatory sunset photo. Grand Canarias Telescope on the right (bigger than Keck if you really want to compare…)

Now onto the best part! The laser beacon! Tonight we are propagating at 45 Watts and hope to ramp up to 75 Watts. This is the brightest sodium laser in the world! It is really amazing to see with the naked eye.

Hope your observing run is going as well as ours!

Song of the Day:

In honor of Brian May who did his PhD observing at the Willian Hershel Telescope.

As seen in the control room kitchenette.

MagAO-X Across the Pond Day 5: Beauty of the Netherlands

Today was the last day of the conference! We saw many great talks (mostly about PDS 70 and HR 8799…) and many of us have left excited to get back to work and Reduce! That! Data!

Today was a half day and that meant we were finally able to roam free and see the beauty of the Netherlands. Logan, Joseph and I headed over to Den Haag to check out another city.

We saw beautiful architecture…

… gorgeous flowers…

And some authentic Dutch boba tea～～～！ ( ❛ ᴗ ❛ 🌸)

It wouldn’t be a trip to the Netherlands without seeing a Dutch art masterpiece so we went to the Mauritshuis museum of fine art…

…where we saw the famous painting “Girl with a Pearl Earring” by Johannes Vermeer.

Seeing the painting in real life fell a little flat. We much prefer our own take on the Vermeer master work, so we fixed it. “Jared with a Pearl Earring” belongs in a museum don’t you think?

Switching out the paintings caused such a commotion that a protest rapidly formed outside the museum.

Or, was it just a coincidental and totally unrelated protest? Who is to say, really…

Jared and Logan are heading back tomorrow and we wish them safe travels! Joseph and I are on to the next adventure in Belgium.

Song of the Day:

“Pearl” — The Mamas and The Papas

Purrride and Prejudice

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune (lots of wet food), must be in want of a wife. An unprecidented whirlwind romance has budded between Katniss and my neighbor’s cat. His name is Bandit, and true to his name, he has stolen Katniss’s heart.

Although it has been smooth sailing for them lately, they got off to a rocky start in true Elizabeth and Darcy style. When Bandit first started visiting he was only allowed to sit at the top of the stairs and admire Katniss from a distance.

Failure to comply meant he recieved a rebuke in the form of angry hissing and meowing. He was persistent though, and after a couple of months he was allowed to approach the door.

Their romance caused quite the scandal as Bandit is known to be unpropitious, visiting at all hours of the day and night without regard for decorum expected of a proper suitor.

A midnight visiting from Bandit, how uncouth.

There is hope for him yet though, as of late his manners have been improving vastly as he has learned how to knock on my door to get Katniss’s attention.

In the beginning Katniss met Bandit with pride and prejudice. Now she spends a lot of her time in my living room, waiting for him to visit.

Happy Valentine’s Day.

A Purrrfect Birthday

I know what you all are thinking. We have hit triple digits in the number of days since this all began and Lauren still hasn’t made a blog post just about her cat. Don’t worry it is time to right this wrong, and what better time do to so than for Katniss’s 5th birthday!

I’ve heard of a wise philosophy that you should take any excuse to party. This year I decided to throw my cat a birthday party.

The preperations for her birthday began about a week before the party. I decided that since it was her special day, she should have a special outfit to wear. I picked up some cotton fabric at JoAnn’s and made her a little birthday dress. This was a great excuse to try out a ruffler pressure foot for my sewing machine. It is a neat little device that automatically pleats your fabric at a stitch interval of your chosing.

Skirt of the dress ruffled by the ruffler

Once that was done the next part of party planning was to send out the invitations. Under normal circumstances, I would have loved to invite you all, but due to social distancing I kept the gathering small. Sorry you all missed it.

The last step was decorations. I went minimalistic this year, and bought two balloons from the dollar store.

They were a big hit with the birthday girl.

Now that everything is set it was time to party! We did Korean bbq on some tabletop griddles…

… forced Katniss to wear her party dress …

… and then ended dinner with some birthday cupcakes. I had to help Katniss blow out the candles.

My friend made special rainbow cupcakes!

But what would a birthday party be without presents? Katniss really got spoiled this year, Logan made her an abosultely amazing cross stich, and she got some treats from mom.

Happy birthday Katniss! Hope you all have an excuse to party before the end of summer 🙂

Bonus Content: Katniss’s Origin Story

Katniss and I go way back. So far back, that I knew her mom as a kitten! Katniss was born on July 27th 2015 to single mom Legalos. Legalos is the cat of my friend in my hometown. I remember when she was a little kitten, and when she grew up to be a beautiful cat. So beautiful that I said off handedly that if the cat ever had kittens I would want one. My friend remembered it, and when irresponsible teen Legalos snuck out of the house and came back pregnant, I was first in line for one of the kittens. Katniss was born in a litter of two, just her and her brother.

I think Katniss is the one on the right, but who knows?

So we know who the mom is but who is her father? My friend and I like to think her father was a cat we called Mountain Cat. He was a brown Maine Coon mix that belonged to my friend’s neighbors. The neighbors for a while were landscaping their front yard, and almost everyday my friend and I would see Mountain Cat sitting on top of the mountain of dirt in the front yard. Hence the name Mountain Cat.

When I first met Katniss she was a little bit older than the photos shown here. About two months old. She wasn’t quite ready to be seperated from her mother, so we decided to wait until Thanksgiving for my mom to drive her across the desert to me when she was visiting for the holiday. Below is the first picture I ever took of Katniss on her first night at my place. She was already making herself at home!

And this is the first photo I ever took together with Katniss!

To end I will share some fun Katniss facts:

She looks cross eyed but it is only one eye that is derpy.
Her goal in life is to be as chonky as possible.
If you walk past her while she is eating she will sad meow at you, and put on a very concerned face as if you are going to take her food away. Despite the fact that never once in her life has food ever been taken away from her.
Her favorite thing in the world is her most beloved wet food treats.
Everyday when I come home she runs up to me, starts meowing, and will only stop when I pick her up and give her a hug.

Song of the day: Some relaxing vibes