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AstroTech: Building Community and Building Instruments

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!

Song of the Day

MAPS Jun. 2025A Night 5: 100% efficiency

Tonight we tested the new ASM-cooling fans for introduced vibrations:

It was a great time to do this test since we were getting E-stops on the ASM from some overheating actuators. We found that the fans did not introduce appreciable vibrations that couldn’t be taken out by the AO, so we went ahead and turned the fans on for the rest of the night!

We then analyzed the test we did yesterday where we took 5 RMs and compared them to make sure the RMs are actually repeatable modes. We found that they were modal and repeatable!

The next thing was off-loading focus to the hexapod.

And then we tested a 50-modes loop with the IR WFS:

And took some data:

We had some over temperatures so we paused to let the ASM cool down. But the fans were helping because this is no where near the amount of pausing we had to do last June.

And that’s the end of a great run where we made a lot of progress working on CACAO and the IR WFS, and the first run where we’ve had 100% efficiency! 5 nights on the schedule, 5 full nights of clear skies, good weather, and working instruments!!!

The song of the night is “Bridget’s Song” by Celia Farran:

MAPS Jun. 2025A Night 4: RM modes

Tonight was another beautiful clear night. Seeing ranged from around 1-3 arcseconds. At the start of the night we were confused why we were seeing very little AO correction — it turns out the TT mirror was not modulating, oops! After this we took several sets of AO-on vs. AO-off Pisces data. We also compared the response matrix modes for a set of 20-modes-RM taken with 5 trials and it is encouraging that we are seeing the Zernike-ish modes as expected!

The song of the night is “Num Num Cat TikTok Chain but its actually good lol”:

MAPS Jun. 2025A Night 3: IR CACAO

The return of IR WFSing! After squashing some software bugs we closed the loop on 3 and then 20 modes with CACAO using the IR WFS:

I’m back at home where I’m finding it brilliant, reliable, intelligent, diligent, glorious, exceptional, and troublesome. Thanks to the mountain team for enabling a good remote-observing session.

The song of the night is Malagueña – Michael Lucarelli, classical guitar:

MAPS Jun. 2025A Night 2: Aligning CACAO

Tonight after some daytime work on the rotator we tried the rotational centering again. Alas Brian saw that the star was still jumping when he sent the command, and thus we still couldn’t find the chief ray. We moved on and attempted a curvature wavefront sensing test where we defocussed the hexapod and that helped us get as close as we could get with alignment.

From last night’s opening:

Next up was CACAO to start improving our AO modes. This took us a while to get set up, especially the IR WFS which we haven’t used for almost a year. By the end of the night we had a 3 modes loop and were attempting to move on but needed more help with the gains gui that was again not working. Tomorrow we’ll keep going!

Here is the MLAT with the IR WFS:

The song of the night is “Diggy Diggy Hole” by Wind Rose: