Blog – Page 11 – Extreme Wavefront Control Lab

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.)

sweaty and ready — 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]

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:

a little sweatier than they may have hoped, but it all works out in the end — 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]

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

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

GMagAO-X Presentations:

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

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:

willy wonka dejavu — 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.

NOT TO SCALE. unfortunately — 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!

Oli actually goes to UA too — UA team photo: Josh, Joseph, Katie, Eden, Jared, Jay, Jialin, Laird, and special guest Olivier!

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!

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:

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.

MAPS Jun. 2024A Night 4: Closed due to high winds

We never opened the dome tonight, due to high winds. And in Yokohama it rained hard all day.

Manny went down and Dan came up.

Dan and Amali measured voltages on various pins of the SAPHIRA under Suresh’s guidance. Based on their measurement, the detector temperature matches what is observed by the cold head. So it is not a temperature issue and likely an electronics issue. The next step was to measure two separate voltages to ensure they are correct. They were all around 5V which is where they were supposed to be. Suresh is now crunching the data to see if it gives any other clues to the IR WFS behavior.

The word of the night is たいふう (Typhoon) because apparently all this rain in Yokohama today was actually a small typhoon.