Blog – Page 157 – Extreme Wavefront Control Lab

MagAO at PPVI: Are you the ones with the visible-light disk?

MagAO is representing at the Protostars and Planets VI conference this week in Heidelberg, Germany. Wie geht’s? Well, so far it’s been an inspiring week, seeing all the strides forward our field has come in understanding how stars and planets form, and their physical and chemical properties, since the last Protostars and Planets (PPV) conference seven years ago. You can follow the latest at Twitter.

Our beautiful PSFs and first-light results have resulted in many questions about how to observe with MagAO. Interested observers should please check out Information for Observers and look for collaborators at the Magellan institutions: Arizona, Carnegie, Michigan, Harvard, MIT, and Chile.

One of our favorite comments so far was when I was meeting another astronomer, and mentioned MagAO/VisAO, and he said, “Are you the ones with the visible-light disk?” This is referring to the beautiful I-band image we have on Jared’s poster of a famous debris disk, of which we captured a gorgeous picture.

Oh and speaking of pictures, did everyone wave at Saturn tonight? At 21:27-21:42UT Cassini was taking a picture of Earth, and we were enjoying a picnic dinner along the Neckarwiese (the park by the Neckar River), so we stood where we could see Saturn and waved. We’re in the Cassini picture!

Here are pictures from the conference this week:

the lights are bright — The Schloss at night.

K.C.C.L. — Kate Follette and Keven Flaherty discuss Kate’s poster.

photo-evaporated — Ilaria Pascucci, a professor in LPL, gave a talk on photo evaporation in disks.

Bear down! — Arizona grad Mary Anne Peters, a former student of Laird who is now working on her PhD at Princeton, showed us her poster on tidally heated exomoons.

erstwhile MagAO user — Nathan Smith has a cool poster here.

schloss — The Heidelberg Schloss dominates the hill side above the town.

MagAO's #1 roommate. — Colette Salyk, NOAO Goldberg Fellow, gave a great talk on volatiles in disks.

nice poster kid — Megan Reiter explains her poster to an interested PPVIer.

the boys — Arizona grad students Brian Svoboda and Youngmin Seo.

it's a rough life — The conference reception was at the Schloss. Here’s your MagAO sunset from Heidelberg.

Laird is everywhere — Jason Dittmann, another UA Astronomy + Laird Grad (now at Harvard working on his PhD) shows off his poster.

fully armed and operational. — UA LPL alumn Jonathan Fortney. Yes, that is the Death Star.

contemplation — MagAO’s own Derek Kopon and his poster — which isn’t even on MagAO!

Quote of the week: “If I’m choking, you all have permission to touch my belly” — Kate Follette.

Runner-up quote: “Is your laptop the Milky Way?” — Chabrier, response to theorist with a dissenting simulation.

MagAO is back in Tucson

MagAO is back in town. We have returned from our conferences in Florence (AO4ELT) and/or Victoria (IAU 299 exoplanets) to get down to serious work on our papers we presented at the conferences, and our plans for the next year. Our talks and posters went over well, and we got a lot of requests about how to get MagAO observing time. Institutes that share Magellan telescope time are the Carnegie Institution of Washington, Harvard University, MIT, the University of Michigan, and the University of Arizona. Check with your collaborators at those institutes and keep an eye on this blog to find out about plans for the next MagAO observing run.

Some of our observing partners also presented MagAO results at the IAU symposium. Here are our Arizona State University friends Jenny Patience, Rob De Rosa, and Kimberly Ward-Duong posing by Kim’s poster:

Go MagAO go! — Kim Ward-Duong and Jenny Patience of ASU, standing by Kim’s poster about a direct imaging study to search for and characterize planetary mass companions.

We also saw Emily Rauscher there, the first Sagan Fellow at the University of Arizona:

LPL Sagan #1 — Emily Rauscher stands by her poster about Uneven cooling: The influence of atmospheric dynamics on the thermal evolution of gas giants

We took a few other pictures of our friends’ and collaborators’ posters but they got corrupted. Anyway, we hope you enjoyed those tidbits of the conference.

Finally, here’s a great picture of Jared and Alfio from the AO4ELT conference, in the place that started it all:

MagAO's Real Software Engineers — Jared and Alfio posing on the Arno in Firenze, with the Ponte Vecchio in the background.

Speaking of MagAO’s software engineers, somehow this hasn’t yet gotten posted to the blog, but Alfio modified some code last run so that we can save and watch the turbulence in real-time as it blows across the ASM. Here it is, it’s really cool to watch!

IAUS 299: Misbehaving Planets and Moderately Insane Ideas

Wednesday was a half day, but before we all took off to enjoy sunny Victoria we listened to some interesting talks — and showed off MagAO. Arizona/LPL alum Jonathan Fortney gave the introductory review talk on characterizing exoplanets.

nature always wins arguments with scientists. — Jonathan says that planets “misbehave” when his models don’t match observations. I suspect that the planets actually know what they’re doing, but more work needs to be done.

Here’s Jonathan’s talk:

The famous Matt Kenworthy, now at Leiden but formerly a denizen of Steward Observatory, was the session chair.

FIVE MINUTES!!!!!! — Matt kept everybody in line.

This was the day when we unveiled our MagAO results to the wider exoplanet community. Katie gave a well-received talk on our system’s capabilities and our exciting results on beta Pictoris b.

You can watch the whole talk:

You can find all the talks on Christian Marois’s youtube channel here.

Later, a bunch of astronomers went to the home opener of the Victoria HarbourCats, a westcoast league team. They played the Kelowna Falcons. The Cats won (Bear Down!), and it was a great game on a nice night. We saw 2 homeruns, a diving catch in left field, and some close plays on the bases. We all rooted for the home team, stuffed ourselves with hotdogs, and enjoyed some good local brew.

We were sitting dead-red, and it was right in our wheelhouse, and we went yard. — It was a sellout crowd.

IAU Symposium 299 day 1

Our apologies if you’re having trouble keeping up, but MagAO is now in Victoria, B.C., for IAUS 299. The conference got off to a great start with a review talk by Beth Biller, a product of the Arizona+Laird system.