MagAO has produced another Ph.D.! Kate successfully defended her dissertation on Thursday, at the very un-Astronomer hour of 9 am. Nevertheless her talk was well attended, and all of that hard work paid off. Congratulations to Dr. Kate Follette, Queen of VisAO SDI.
Kate describing the recent successes at imaging transition disks. Free sticker to the first person who names all the MagAO team members in this picture.Laird delivering the advisor’s toast to Dr. Follette.
Now that the fun is over, Laird,Katie, and Jared are heading down to LCO for MagAO’s 2014B science run. Our flight leaves Tucson this afternoon. We get the telescope for 37 nights, and we’ll be down there for 6 weeks. That means you get over 40 blog posts in a row. Lucky!
I’m feeling the need for some motivation. It’s time for us to pull our (steel-toe) boots on, lace ’em up, and earn our pay. Here’s what we’ll be singing as we march up to the telescope every day for the next 6 weeks.
We’ve had a few meetings lately to prepare for our upcoming 2014B run in Oct–Dec. This will be our second regular science run, and our operations are becoming more smooth and efficient, so we are going to have a more streamlined personnel plan. It will also be our longest run yet (37 nights!).
We are laying in for spares and planning improvements in our operations. One spare Phil has gotten for Clio is a spare pump for pumping on the liquid nitrogen chamber in the dewar to bring the temperature of the detector from 77 K (liquid nitrogen) down to 55 K (solid nitrogen) by lowering the pressure. This spare pump is coming to us from the LBT where it used to be a vacuum pump, and while it is no longer strong enough to deliver a true vacuum, it is strong enough to lower the pressure to solidify the nitrogen in the dewar. It is a Leybold Oerlikon EcoDry M 30 Dry Piston Vacuum Pump.
New Clio pump technical info, from Phil:
The current Clio pump is specified to reach an ultimate vacuum of 5 Torr (7 mbar). This allows the solid N2 vessel to be at 50-51 K. We typically regulate ~5 K above this or 55 K. The new EcoDry pump has an achieved lab pressure of 0.11 Torr. This will put the solid vessel at ~42 K. This suggest we could regulate as low as 47 K on the detector.
Therefore, on this next run, we will explore new setpoints and the effect on detector performance. Thanks Phil!
Here are Laird and Kim (CAAO Project Specialist) working on shipping the spare Clio pump to LCO. It weighs ~130 lbs and is 50 cm long x 30 high x 30 cm wide, and uses 120 V AC. It will be quite at home in the pump room.
This past week the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute (NExSCI) hosted the 2014 Sagan Summer Workshop, which was on Imaging Planets and Disks. Several members of the MagAO team and extended family attended, and presented some of our latest and greatest results. The workshop was held on the campus of Caltech, in Pasadena.
We all learned a lot, and had some fun. Thanks to the whole NExSCI crew for putting on such a great workshop.
Kate wowed the crowd with her H-alpha imagesHere’s Ya-lin, presenting his VisAO results on CT Cha b.Arizona grad student Nick Ballering giving his poster “pop”Arizona grad student Steph Sallum showed some MagAO+Clio2 non-redundant masking results. Her slides were very patriotic.
The real star of the show was Space Shuttle Endeavour, which has retired to the California Science Center. We took Wednesday afternoon off to go see her, and it was amazing.
Space Shuttle Endeavour. A good ship.
At one point while preparing for my thesis defense, I was faced with a conundrum: work on my dissertation or do something else. So what I did was research my academic lineage. It goes something like:
Jared Males –> Laird Close –> Don McCarthy –> Frank Lowe –> (a bunch of nerds at MIT) –> Robert Millikan –> Albert Michelson.
No disrespect to everybody else, but those last two dudes are pretty big deals. Well, since I was at Caltech, I went and paid Dr. Millikan a visit.
Me and my academic great^N grandfather. He has a nobel prize, by the way. So does his advisor.
I also visited the other famous residents of the campus.
Yesterday our SPIE paper pre-prints were announced on the astro-ph ArXiv. In case you missed it, here’s a run-down:
Into the Blue: AO Science with MagAO in the Visible (Invited Talk)
Laird M. Close, Jared R. Males, Katherine B. Follette, Phil Hinz, Katie M. Morzinski, Ya-Lin Wu, Derek Kopon, Armando Riccardi, Simone Esposito, Alfio Puglisi, Enrico Pinna, Marco Xompero, Runa Briguglio, Fernando Quiros-Pacheco
We review astronomical results in the visible ({\lambda}<1{\mu}m) with adaptive optics. Other than a brief period in the early 1990s, there has been little astronomical science done in the visible with AO until recently. The most productive visible AO system to date is our 6.5m Magellan telescope AO system (MagAO). MagAO is an advanced Adaptive Secondary system at the Magellan 6.5m in Chile. This secondary has 585 actuators with < 1 msec response times (0.7 ms typically). We use a pyramid wavefront sensor. The relatively small actuator pitch (~23 cm/subap) allows moderate Strehls to be obtained in the visible (0.63-1.05 microns). We use a CCD AO science camera called "VisAO". On-sky long exposures (60s) achieve <30mas resolutions, 30% Strehls at 0.62 microns (r') with the VisAO camera in 0.5" seeing with bright R < 8 mag stars. These relatively high visible wavelength Strehls are made possible by our powerful combination of a next generation ASM and a Pyramid WFS with 378 controlled modes and 1000 Hz loop frequency. We'll review the key steps to having good performance in the visible and review the exciting new AO visible science opportunities and refereed publications in both broad-band (r,i,z,Y) and at Halpha for exoplanets, protoplanetary disks, young stars, and emission line jets. These examples highlight the power of visible AO to probe circumstellar regions/spatial resolutions that would otherwise require much larger diameter telescopes with classical infrared AO cameras.
MagAO: Status and on-sky performance of the Magellan adaptive optics system
Katie M. Morzinski, Laird M. Close, Jared R. Males, Derek Kopon, Phil M. Hinz, Simone Esposito, Armando Riccardi, Alfio Puglisi, Enrico Pinna, Runa Briguglio, Marco Xompero, Fernando Quirós-Pacheco, Vanessa Bailey, Katherine B. Follette, T. J. Rodigas, Ya-Lin Wu, Carmelo Arcidiacono, Javier Argomedo, Lorenzo Busoni, Tyson Hare, Alan Uomoto, Alycia Weinberger
MagAO is the new adaptive optics system with visible-light and infrared science cameras, located on the 6.5-m Magellan “Clay” telescope at Las Campanas Observatory, Chile. The instrument locks on natural guide stars (NGS) from 0th to 16th R-band magnitude, measures turbulence with a modulating pyramid wavefront sensor binnable from 28×28 to 7×7 subapertures, and uses a 585-actuator adaptive secondary mirror (ASM) to provide flat wavefronts to the two science cameras. MagAO is a mutated clone of the similar AO systems at the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) at Mt. Graham, Arizona. The high-level AO loop controls up to 378 modes and operates at frame rates up to 1000 Hz. The instrument has two science cameras: VisAO operating from 0.5-1 μm and Clio2 operating from 1-5 μm. MagAO was installed in 2012 and successfully completed two commissioning runs in 2012-2013. In April 2014 we had our first science run that was open to the general Magellan community. Observers from Arizona, Carnegie, Australia, Harvard, MIT, Michigan, and Chile took observations in collaboration with the MagAO instrument team. Here we describe the MagAO instrument, describe our on-sky performance, and report our status as of summer 2014.
Direct imaging of exoplanets in the habitable zone with adaptive optics (Invited Talk)
Jared R. Males, Laird M. Close, Olivier Guyon, Katie M. Morzinski, Alfio Puglisi, Philip Hinz, Katherine B. Follette, John D. Monnier, Volker Tolls, Timothy J. Rodigas, Alycia Weinberger, Alan Boss, Derek Kopon, Ya-lin Wu, Simone Esposito, Armando Riccardi, Marco Xompero, Runa Briguglio, Enrico Pinna
One of the primary goals of exoplanet science is to find and characterize habitable planets, and direct imaging will play a key role in this effort. Though imaging a true Earth analog is likely out of reach from the ground, the coming generation of giant telescopes will find and characterize many planets in and near the habitable zones (HZs) of nearby stars. Radial velocity and transit searches indicate that such planets are common, but imaging them will require achieving extreme contrasts at very small angular separations, posing many challenges for adaptive optics (AO) system design. Giant planets in the HZ may even be within reach with the latest generation of high-contrast imagers for a handful of very nearby stars. Here we will review the definition of the HZ, and the characteristics of detectable planets there. We then review some of the ways that direct imaging in the HZ will be different from the typical exoplanet imaging survey today. Finally, we present preliminary results from our observations of the HZ of {\alpha} Centauri A with the Magellan AO system’s VisAO and Clio2 cameras.
Derek and Jared by the river in Montreal
And here are some pictures from the conference, which was the SPIE Astronomical Telescopes and Instrumentation conference in Montreal in June. You can check out #SPIEastro to find out more about the general topics covered at the conference.
Laird’s talk, which got some good Tweets (see below).
My talk, in the first session of the conference on Sunday morning, was well-attended.Jared’s talk. At bottom, Laird and Bruce are helping him with the projector.
Hello, MagAO fans. Are you attending the SPIE Astronomical Telescopes & Instrumentation conference in Montreal next week (starting tomorrow)? We would love to see you at one of our talks or posters to hear more about MagAO! Look for myself, Jared, or Laird — we’ll be at the conference all week.
This is the title slide of my talk about the status and on-sky performance of MagAO. The talk is quite early, third of the entire conference. It’s Sunday morning at 9:45am in the first AO session, “Session 1: Status of Current AO Instrument Projects I”.Kate’s poster about “New frontiers in circumstellar science with MagAO’s visible light simultaneous differential imaging mode” (Paper 9148-144) will have a viewing Monday from 5:30 PM – 7:00 PM in “Astronomy with AO”.Laird’s talk about “Into the blue: AO science in the visible” is at 4:05pm on Wednesday in “Session 14: Astronomy with AO II”This is the title slide of Jared’s talk about direct imaging of exoplanets in the habitable zone with AO. It is on Thursday at 3:35pm in “Session 17: Extreme AO II”.
