Another couple of days of AO Summer School are in the books! We’ve moved well beyond introductions and into the core of adaptive optics, exploring topics like wavefront sensing and reconstruction, atmospheric turbulence, and deformable mirrors. Alongside the great lectures, we’ve also had the chance to put the concepts we learned into practice through hands-on labs. In one of our labs, we explored different types of wavefront sensors (WFS) including the Shack-Hartmann WFS, and the Pyramid WFS. Below is Katie and Marcus’s groups setup for the wavefront sensor lab.
The rest of the afternoon was spent touring labs, starting with the Santa Cruz Extreme AO Lab (SEAL). From there, we got a sneak peek at SCALES (imaged below), an upcoming Keck instrument built to probe the compositions of exoplanet atmospheres.
The next lab space we visited was UC Santa Cruz’s massive marble test bed, and their shop where they test new techniques to make shells for deformable mirrors.
The final place we stopped by had a bunch of cool history about UC Santa Cruz’s involvement with optics and astronomy. In the photo below, you can see the 3 meter telescope (yellow structure) at Lick Observatory that was commissioned in 1959. Compare this to the more modern 10 meter Keck telescope structure commissioned in 1985.
On a more serious note, a washing machine was located and disaster was avoided with regards to Josh may or may not having anymore clean clothes halfway through the workshop….
While I’m sure the people are dying for some much needed Vizzy content, the campus turkeys and deer with have to suffice for now.
For those unfamiliar with AstroTech, it is a weeklong summer school at UC Berkeley designed to teach the next generation of students how to design and build astronomical instruments, while being collaborative and inclusive.
The first few days of summer school started with multiple lectures on astronomy and optics-based content, along with a number of hands-on labs that taught us some of the specialized skills needed to build an instrument including: optomechanics, software design, calibration hardware, detectors, and electronics.
Once everyone had a solid background of the specializations we broke into teams of five to brainstorm science cases that spectrographs would be useful for. In an attempt to think of a unique science case, our group settled with a spectrograph design capable of covering the entire optical spectrum to classify asteroids by their spectral shape but also be able to distinguish between CN and CO signatures. This led us to a more complex design that involved having optical components moving on stages.
While this may sound trivial, the challenging part came when we were only given 10 hours over the course of two days to design, build, test, and present this working spectrograph. This is where the topic of collaboration and teamwork are of the utmost importance. Hence, one of key objectives of the summer school and something we spent time learning and practicing everyday was inclusive teamwork.
Within our teams, each person was responsible for one of the five specialty groups. I worked on developing the software pipeline the read in flats, darks, and science fits files, and processed raw science data. The code then plotted the entire spectra, identified known emission lines in our calibration source, and determined the wavelength solution that maps the x-axis from the pixel domain to the wavelength domain.
One of the most valuable takeaways from this experience will be the opportunity to build connections with a wide range of individuals from leaders in academia, government, and industry to my peers who will shape the next generation of astronomy instrumentation.
While the days were packed with learning and networking, I still found time in the early mornings and late evenings to explore. One highlight was reconnecting with a high school friend who works for the Cal football team. He gave me an incredible tour of the stadium and locker rooms, which resulted in my closet being overstocked with Cal shirts. I also spent most evenings out with the great friends I made during my time there, including one excursion that led to an underwhelming visit to the Golden Gate Bridge.
I will wrap this blog up and leave you with a couple photos from the beautiful Berkeley campus!
After very little sleep, I decided to wake up and treat myself with a scenic run around the mountain at noon. This was admittedly more of an excuse to go see some telescopes up close and personal.
After my makeshift tour of the exterior of some of LCO’s beautiful telescopes, I returned to find out Alycia was kind enough to take the time to set-up and bring a group of us on tours inside of both the Henrietta Swope telescope (1 meter) and the Irénée du Pont Telescope (2.5 meter). The Swope telescope is especially interesting because it was the very first telescope built at LCO back in 1971. It was also the one of the first, if not the first, telescope named after a woman. Henrietta made great contributions to work on variable stars and was a trailblazer for women in the field. The du Pont telescope is also one of the older telescopes at LCO, built in 1977.
Here is a look at the interior of the Swope and du Pont telescopes.
The night went smoothly, and Jay/Alycia were able to get some quality disk data shown below. We are also getting closer to correlating the accelerometer data with the wavefront sensor data. At this stage, the best approach is simple “you just begin. You do the math. You solve one problem… and you solve the next one… and then the next. And if you solve enough problems, you get to come home. All right, questions?”
Unfortunately, at the end of the night we had to say adiós to our new friend, María Eugenia, who is headed back to the Netherlands. Safe travels home and thank you for joining us on this run!
We are also looking forward to the next wave of people arriving the next day or two, and hope their travel goes better than our 50-hour ordeal!
Two skittish Burros were very hesitant greeting me on the way up the mountain.
After a long, hard, struggle to try to remember a recent/favorite movie of mine, it wasn’t till I remembered a conversation I had with Laird about UA’s Biosphere2 project/experiment that reminded me of one of my favorite movies, The Martian.
Our travel adventures started in Tucson with joy, enthusiasm, and most importantly, an on-time departure to Atlanta. We carried this positivity through lunch, where we stopped at Jared’s Go To spot. We followed that up with some grease from TGIF’s.
As they say, all good things must come to an end, and sure enough our flight to Santiago got delayed by an hour making our already close call connection impossible. Luckily, Jared with his platinum status has people to call to move some flights around, and was able to push back our connection in Santiago by 4 hours. This gave us plenty of breathing room to get through customs and security. However, Delta had other plans for us. They proceed to delay our flight again by 3 hours, leaving only an hour the catch our connecting flight to La Serena.
To blow off some steam, Jay finds a corner to rep out countless textbook pushups as I am trying to enjoy the beautiful Atlanta view.
Our already extensive layover of 9 and half hours, turned into a crazy 14 hours! This left plenty of time for Jay and I to explore all the greatness Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport has to offer. This led us to explore the secret tunnels under the airport. They start off rather basic, but get progressively more unique and intriguing, displaying history, art, sculptures, and finally the Atlanta Forest.
The pain from Delta didn’t stop here. We patiently waited in the airport for our 2AM flight, only to have Delta delay it again till 10AM last minute. This prompted hundreds of angry customers demanding compensation. We later received a $12 food voucher (covered half my breakfast), and hotel vouchers. All three us opened the link to select our hotel and clicked it at the same time. However, Jay got the last room forcing Jared and myself to split up with him and select the other hotel 19 miles from the airport. We take a 40 min uber there making it around 3AM at this point and arrived at a “hotel” (basically a bunch of cabins in the woods). After waiting in line for another half hour, we made our way to our room. Just as we think we are at the end of our troubles, Jared received the wrong directions to his room and after searching the woods for some time he found it, only to discover his key did not work. After all of this we got to lay down for a much needed 3 hour nap.
After a disappointing day of travel, I woke rejuvenated after not 1, but 2 cold glasses of milk and this tasty hotel breakfast to get my day going.
After breakfast we catch an uber back to the airport and continue on our way to Santiago. With little to no trouble we arrive and check in at the Santiago Holiday Inn.
It didn’t take long for Jared to sniff out the empanadas in the hotel to continue the tradition of empanada Sunday.
After what appeared to be a delicious dinner, we had to return to the reality Delta delays had created for us. We luckily got the last hotel room with two “queen” beds, which turned out to be two full beds. The only problem is me and Jay are two full grown grad students… It is what it is, and ‘sometimes you have to take what you have and make it work’. It was extremely nice being a two-minute walk from the airport.
After a short flight, we touched down in La Serena and only had a minor scare when I accidently left the check bag area to use the restroom, and the security guard refused to let me back in. I didn’t tell Jared or Jay where I was going so they presumed I had been kidnapped. They walked out with all our bags to find me brutally attempting to communicate with a baggage claim worker with my extremely less than fluid Spanish.
After 52 hours of travel, we finally made it to the summit and the work began. I spent the day prepping the mounting of the accelerometers and working to characterize the signal we are receiving from them. Meanwhile, Jay and Jared were productive working with stagebs and the computers. They also managed to complete a backflush of the GPUs and clean the filters.
The new monitor stand has also been installed and mounted!
Finally, to give the people what they are really here to read about and see, is some Chilean wildlife. Enjoy a couple photos of Carlos who said hello to us after dinner. Unfortunately, no viscacha content today, in order to provide incentive to come back and read tomorrow!
I was told I am the one who decides on the blog rule for this run. Since I often get made fun of for how few movies I have seen (Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Titanic to name a few), so I have decided to make the rule that you must include a recent/favorite movie you have seen at the end of the blog post and insert a quote from it within your post.
The movie I recently watched and enjoyed on the plane to Santiago was “Hidden Figures” which is about the story of the Black women who worked as human “computers” for NASA in the 60’s and ultimately played a pivotal role in the success of John Glenn becoming the first person to orbit the Earth.
As always, the song of the day is required and this one which pretty much sums up our trip:
Today was dedicated to removing MagAO-X from the platform and safely returning it to the cleanroom. It feels like just yesterday we were taking it out of the cleanroom, but time sure flies by when you are surrounded by great company and beautiful mountains. However, Elena and Sebastiaan started their journey back to Leiden around lunch. For the rest of us, it is just another day in paradise.
The day crew started bright and early after breakfast to get the instrument prepped for transport. This included removing earthquake bars, bumpers, geophones, and building the cart.
Once the prep work was done, we proceeded to wrap the world’s most expensive present in saran wrap and two emergency blankets.
After craning MagAO-X off its legs, it made the journey down the elevator and onto the Isuzu.
Following the instrument, legs, and electronics rack making it down the mountain, one last task remained for the day crew. We needed to put everything back on the way it was before the transport. Within a few hours, we completed all tasks prior to our deadline of 4PM, which is when the night crew took over operations.
MagAO-X made it back to the cleanroom in record time, so we took the opportunity to train the kids how to cable the DMs. To be honest, I expected this to be a high stress learning experience, but with the expert guidance from Eden, the process went smoothly and efficiently.
Fast forward many hours and everything was re-cabled and set-up for remote operations. By this point, delusion was setting in and it was time to get some sleep.
Only one thing remained on our checklist at the end of the day and that one thing was some MagAO-X plumbing. Stay tuned for Jay’s overview of the plumbing work.
Song of the Day
Today’s song reminds me to appreciate where we are, what we’re working on, and who we are with.
