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Level up! Congratulations to Dr. Maggie Kautz

Photo by Eden McEwan. Actually, pretty much ALL photos below are by Eden McEwen. We’re all thankful that Eden tends to go into journalist mode during these types of events!

On Friday last week (07/19), Maggie of House XWCL, first of her name, phaser of segmented apertures, protector of 1/4-20 drivers and the first piezoelectric motors, breaker of drywall barriers, the aligned, enthusiast of The Expanse and master of optical waterwheels made Tucson a little brighter that day with the successful defense of her dissertation!

Maggie’s talk took us on a journey through the world of extreme adaptive optics (ExAO) instrumentation and revealed what is coming next for the development of the MagAO-X successor, GMagAO-X, slated to be installed on the upcoming Giant Magellan telescope. If you’re like me, you were mesmerized by the complexities of GMagAO-X’s parallel deformable mirror design and learned a lot about the optomechanical specifics of MagAO-X and the HCAT testbed.

A great introduction by Laird detailing Maggie’s history as a student at the UofA.

Maggie making short work of explaining complicated concepts surrounding phasing of segmented apertures.

It came to the surprise of no one that Maggie emerged from the closed-door session of the defense victorious and ready to take on the post-student world like an absolute boss. To celebrate, we all convened in the Steward Observatory 3rd floor Interaction Area to sample some celebratory bubbly and treats. Thanks to Jialin, Eden, and Josh for helping me supply some Maggie-approved sweets including coffee cake, jelly empanadas, cookies, and peach melba-flavored macarons (a reference to the sci-fi show ‘The Expanse’).

If you have a spare moment and you’re in the Steward Observatory building gaze upon the new the cork-shaped hole in the ceiling at the 3rd floor Interaction Area [edit: kidding].

The gang’s all here ;’)

Maggie has accepted a job offer to work as an optomechanical engineer as part of the staff at the Center for Astronomical Adaptive Optics here at Steward Observatory where she will put her talents towards the latest space-based telescope projects. Though she is moving to a different office space, we’re all super thankful she will stay close to the group both professionally and physically.

First slice; photo by Melanie.

We capped the day off with a fun celebration comprised of family and friends. Congrats again, Maggie!

Miss OpSci rocking the sash expertly crafted by our own (wickedly talented) Eden McEwen!

Song of the Day

The song of the day is Death Cab for Cutie’s “Transatlanticism” which is also the title to the album which Maggie, Eden, and I saw them play live, in its entirety, last September in D.C. completely serendipitously. This also just happened to be the first show of the nationwide tour…!

It’s a long track with a dramatic build-up, but think I speak for Eden and Maggie as well when I say that this song captures very fond memories that we share together.

SPIE 2024 wrapped

For a little while in June, the gang was all back together for SPIE Tokyo. Almost felt like an observing run, but in Japan, and every telescope team you ever heard of was also having their reunions at the same time.

Here’s a round up of all the MagAO-X and friends talks, posters, and proceedings. (Check out Katie’s MAPS blogs for some of the real time updates during the conference.)

Day 0 at SPIE, badges aquired. Left to right: Prof. Sebastiaan Haffert, Katie Twitchell, Dr. Joseph Long, Josh Liberman, Warren Foster, Eden McEwen

Our line up of MagAO-X talks:

MagAO-X Commissioning talk by Jared Males
Camera resolutions these days are just so impressive

MagAO-X: Commissioning Results and Status of Ongoing Upgrades
arXiv:2407.13007 [pdf, html, other]

Neural Nets on MagAO-X by Rico Landman, talk given by Sebastiaan Haffert

Not the proceeding, but some of the work done on this project can be found here:

Closed-loop demonstration of neural network wavefront reconstruction with MagAO-X
arXiv:2401.16325  [pdf, other] 

Direct Imaging results by Jialin Li

Challenge of direct imaging of exoplanets within structures: disentangling real signal from point source from background light
arXiv:2407.13756 [pdf, html, other]

Optical Gain Calibration work by Eden McEwen

On-sky, real-time optical gain calibration on MagAO-X using incoherent speckles
arXiv:2407.13022 [pdf, html, other]

Machine Learning + telemetry by Joseph Long

More data than you want, less data than you need: machine learning approaches to starlight subtraction with MagAO-X
arXiv:2407.13008 [pdf, html, other]

MagAO-X Posters:

The Hero’s Journey to get your poster printed in Japan.
1k DM characterization work by Jay Kuney

MagAO-X Phase II Upgrades: Implementation and First On-Sky Results of a New Post-AO 1000 Actuator Deformable Mirror
arXiv:2407.13019 [pdf, html, other]

iEFC tolerance work by Josh Liberman

Analyzing Misalignment Tolerances for Implicit Electric Field Conjugation
arXiv:2407.13199 [pdf, html, other]

ADC control work by Katie Twitchell

Improving coronagraphic performance with active atmospheric dispersion control on MagAO-X
Stay tuned for the proceeding!

GMagAO-X Presentations:

GMagAO-X overview by Jared

High-Contrast Imaging at First-Light of the GMT: The Preliminary Design of GMagAO-X
arXiv:2407.13014 [pdf, html, other]

HCAT Testbed work by Laird Close 

High-contrast imaging at first-light of the GMT: The PDR optical and mechanical design for the GMagAO-X ExAO system and results from the HCAT testbed with an HDFS phased parallel DM prototype
Stay tuned for the proceeding!

High contrast WFS architecture for by Sebastiaan Haffert

High-contrast imaging at first-light of the GMT: the wavefront sensing and control architecture of GMagAO-X
arXiv:2407.13021 [pdf, html, other]

Wait, what’s that Golden Ticket?

Did you see that, the golden ticket on Sebastiaan’s poster?

Golden ticket for Lego ELT sets courtesy of the Netherlands contingent

If you recall, the Dutch have a history of bringing out the Lego big guns for SPIE. (See: lego JWST at SPIE 2022). This year they’ve gone even bigger with scale Lego models of the ELT! But, instead of the first 200 interested parties, these were exclusively given out to participants with stunning social media posts. Or very good persuasion skills.

Turns out we had an in with a sympathetic ear. And I got to make up for my lack of Lego two years ago:

A win for the office!

In a fairytale ending, the ELT has made it home to Tucson and is in good company with our GMT model.

Left: GMT, foam model. Right ELT, lego model

& the MagAO-X Friends

Of course, we are lucky to also get to see our office neighbors and collaborators present at the conference too! We did not capture them all, but this is a conference that scientifically feels like home (maybe too literally).

Sebastiaan’s collaboration with the Santa Cruz testbed.
Warren Foster, Alum, talking about mirror fabrication for LFAST
Lauren Shatz, Alum, talking about LASSIE at Space Force
Katie Morzinski talking about MAPS commissioning

The End.

Cheers to a good conference and good work by our team!

UA team photo: Josh, Joseph, Katie, Eden, Jared, Jay, Jialin, Laird, and special guest Olivier!
Fireworks over the Yokohama Bay.

Song of the week:

Love Letter to Japan by the bird and bee

MAPS Jun. 2024A Night 7: Final day and night

Today was the last day of SPIE Astronomical Telescopes & Instrumentation 2024 and tonight was the last night of MAPS June 2024A.

Joseph gave a nice talk (second-to-last of the conference) with MagAO-X data:

Joseph Long giving a talk in the PSF reconstruction session.

Meanwhile at the MMT we tested our previous CACAO calibration, took a new one in better seeing, practiced both Bianca and Lauren running CACAO, and were in the process of more testing when we had to close the dome due to high winds. We waited around until finally calling it a night and a run around 2:30am when the winds continued rising and the clouds came up too.

Here’s our pretty good CACAO loop with 50 modes.

We keep asking Tim and others from MMTO to explain the hexapod to us, but we still don’t understand some of the behavior we see. Last night we had the focus pushed to the limit (near +1600 um), even to the point where the LUT wanted to offload coma but couldn’t send it. So last night we tried starting over: We put the focus to +800 um, let the LUT run for a little while, and lo and behold we were way out of focus. As we focused by eye we ended up back near the limit, around +1600. Tonight, on the other hand, we’re around +700 um and we’re in focus. We asked Brian if the temperature correction is very different and it’s not — well it’s about 50 um different, but that’s not enough to account for the focus difference of around 800 um.

Thanks for a great conference and observing run all!

Full moon over Yokohama

The word of the night is 満月 (Mangetsu) which means full moon.

MAPS Jun. 2024A Night 6: Pupils, CACAO, and ARIES

Today/tonight Dan and Amali went down, Dan and Oli came up, and Craig and Oli went down. Oli brought up six (6) new negative lenses ranging from f=-100 to -1000mm to test the Vis WFS pupil focus. We took another image set with the current lens (f=-300mm) and then swapped it out for each of the other lenses to see the difference in pupil focus and pupil size/separation. Here is what we saw:

Negative lens test, in front of Vis WFS.

Result: The best are f=-200 & f=-300. Oli’s feeling is the best focal length is going to be around f=-250mm. That lens is not available but can be created by combining two lenses. Furthermore, there are other degrees of freedom that can be used to fine tune… namely the separations between the CCID75, CTL, and Pyramid. By adjusting those distances, the overall magnification (pupil size and separation) will change. This is a much more complicated alignment and is destructive since a move cannot be perfectly reversed. So we may try that another time.

Meanwhile we took some ARIES spectra, then went on to closing the CACAO loop with 50 modes and saving some ARIES images. Unfortunately the seeing was around 2-3” so these won’t be great, but it was also a really good practice session for Lauren and Bianca to run CACAO while Amali coached them remotely from Tucson.

There was a dust storm blowing over from New Mexico. Around 3:45am it got worse, and meanwhile the seeing had blown up to above 3” where we were unable to make much progress anyway, so it was time to close for the night. We have 1 more night but the forecast doesn’t look promising, so we shall see.

The word of the night is TEAMWORK. The MAPS team has done a great job this run covering the various tasks even though various people have had to come and go due to life circumstances. Thanks for the excellent teamwork, MAPS team!

MAPS Jun. 2024A Night 5: Vis WFS modes

Tonight we worked with the Vis WFS and got up to 50 modes we think. We also made the pupils rounder:

Left: “Centered Pupils” from a couple nights ago. Right: After new flattening and 50 modes tonight.

And at the start of the night we took some darks for Suresh to figure out the IR WFS camera:

Left: Uncovered. Right: Covered.

And we took some MLAT’s with different tuning parameters for Jess.

The word of the night is 霧 (kiri) which means fog. Kiri came up just at the end of the night.