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Another couple of days of AO Summer School are in the books! We’ve moved well beyond introductions and into the core of adaptive optics, exploring topics like wavefront sensing and reconstruction, atmospheric turbulence, and deformable mirrors. Alongside the great lectures, we’ve also had the chance to put the concepts we learned into practice through hands-on labs. In one of our labs, we explored different types of wavefront sensors (WFS) including the Shack-Hartmann WFS, and the Pyramid WFS. Below is Katie and Marcus’s groups setup for the wavefront sensor lab.

The rest of the afternoon was spent touring labs, starting with the Santa Cruz Extreme AO Lab (SEAL). From there, we got a sneak peek at SCALES (imaged below), an upcoming Keck instrument built to probe the compositions of exoplanet atmospheres.

The next lab space we visited was UC Santa Cruz’s massive marble test bed, and their shop where they test new techniques to make shells for deformable mirrors.

The final place we stopped by had a bunch of cool history about UC Santa Cruz’s involvement with optics and astronomy. In the photo below, you can see the 3 meter telescope (yellow structure) at Lick Observatory that was commissioned in 1959. Compare this to the more modern 10 meter Keck telescope structure commissioned in 1985.

On a more serious note, a washing machine was located and disaster was avoided with regards to Josh may or may not having anymore clean clothes halfway through the workshop….

While I’m sure the people are dying for some much needed Vizzy content, the campus turkeys and deer with have to suffice for now.

Song of the Day

Don’t worry, folks–we’ve heard your begging and pleading for more XWCL #blogtent, and the time has finally come. This blogbuster series will come in (at least) three installments, each from a different POV, as we embark on our one-week AO crash course here at the University of California, Santa Cruz. We’re pulling out all the stops: a brand-new cast of guest stars, some of the old regulars, top-tier science, and (with a little luck) a banana slug or two. Buckle up.

No, seriously, buckle up. It turns out that Highway 17 between San Jose and Santa Cruz is no joke, and we were in for quite the ride to UCSC campus. California traffic may be a little foreign to me, but even I could tell that something was up as our Uber driver bobbed and weaved through gridlock in residential neighborhoods for the first 20 minutes. Turns out there was a wreck blocking all traffic down the highway and into town, so our driver did what any rational driver would do: he put the car in park, set his iPad on the dashboard, and we all watched Happy Gilmore 2. If you haven’t seen the movie, I will say that I believe dashboard iPad (with the addition of both Spanish subtitles and English Audio Description) was the way the director intended for it to be seen. No photos were taken of this experience, so you’ll just have to trust me–it was ethereal.

Day 1 of summer school was all about introductions: introducing ourselves to the other participants, introducing the instructors, and introducing the foundations of adaptive optics. We’ve quickly made friends with AO aficionados from all over: Canada, Hawaii, Australia, Finland, and South Korea, to name a few. Josh and Parker really hit it off with some new non-human friends as well.

Parker and I got to give 1-minute pitches for our posters, which will hang up all week as fuel for discussions during coffee breaks:

The agenda was packed: In the morning, Dr. Rebecca Jensen-Clem gave an overview introduction to Adaptive Optics for astronomy, and we played a card game themed around closing the loop on an AO system at Gemini North.

In the afternoon session, we had a crash course on geometric and physical optics by Dr. Renate Kupke as well as an intro to AO for vision science by Dr. Nicole Putnam. We learned a ton about the human eye, and about how to look cool in silly glasses:

The day rounded out with a reception at the Center for Adaptive Optics, where two very exciting things happened:

1. We got to use a really nifty wavefront sensor system to measure the aberrations in our own eyes. We’ll get to use the aberration maps and Zernike coefficients calculated by the system in vision science workshops later in the week. This is the kind of geeky biodata I absolutely love. Who else out there gets to measure their eye’s PSF?

2. There was a cheese platter. There was a large cheese platter. There was a large cheese platter that remained mostly untouched throughout the evening. I’m pretty sure you can guess who volunteered to bring the extras back to his dorm. A dream come true.

Since this is the first blog post of this trip, I get to make the rules. I’ll keep it simple and on theme: since we’re enjoying the lovely geography so much, the song of the day must be related to California in some way.

Imagine, if you would, the beautiful Caltech Campus. Imagine, if you would be so generous, a population of exoplanets. Imagine, if you would be so kind, the beautiful minds of exoplanet scientists convening for the 25th year in a row.

That should put you in the mood for this very hypothetical blog post. Both in that the SSW of 2025 was about exoplanet populations, which inherently include speculation and projection, and also in that I forgot to take any sensible photos, so you’re going to have to paint some mental images for yourself.

The crux of most SSWs are to help younger generations of researchers connect with a topic in exoplanets through lectures and hands on activities. Discussions are more fundamental than you would get from a typical conference and talks are staged to build on each other throughout the week.

This year was a celebration of hitting 25 sagan workshops, and so was an overview of how each detection method has aided our understanding of the whole of exoplanet populations. Take a wild guess at the favorite plot….

The best part of the Sagan Workshop series is that they’re truly meant to be a resource. There are no registration fees and all the talks are posted online after. So I’ll present my chef’s choice from this year with links if you’d like to relive it yourself.

If you’d like to know more about the biases in transiting exoplanet surveys, I highly recommend Josh Winn’s talk Twenty-Five Years of Transiting Planets (Video). He steps through a map of our transit detections through the years and different missions, which really helps contextualize how mission planning shapes the science we use for demographics. The selected slide above is, admittedly, a spoiler for to his very well-crafted narrative.

Of course, I’m contractually obligated to serve up the Direct Imaging talk on this menu. Not only because it really helped put my own work in context, or that all our favorite systems got a shout out, but the speaker Eric Neilson is a former Laird grad student. Check out Eric’s run down of the state of the feild here: Detection Techniques: Direct Imaging (Video)

Tim Brandt’s talk on absolute astrometry finally got me to understand exactly what the hub-bub around Gaia is about. Tim turned my vague notions on astrometry to appreciation for the nuances and limitation of the genre. Highly recommend this talk for a brush up: Detecting and Weighing Exoplanets with Absolute Astrometry (Video)

Finally, I really enjoyed Brendan Bowler’s talk on Gas Giant Demographics (Video). We talk a lot about the distinct populations each technique can study, but this was a really interesting way of tying what each technique gives us for a given population. Gas giants at different separations and ages are approached in different ways, but are quilted together in a great summary here. The talk is also just very expertly crafted, an instant resource.

In addition to the educational talk series, there were also posters and short advertisements for poster pops. I gave my poster on the direct imaging work MagAO-X has been doing on Beta Pic b. Imagine I gave a poster pop and had actually taken a photo, it might look something like:

I also had great conversations over the poster session, across a variety of active research projects. With some stretch of the imagination, that poster session could have looked something like:

It’s true that this year was not necessarily the most on topic for us, but the workshop was a good reminder how far the field of exoplanets has come in my lifetime, and how bright the future is with Gaia DR3, PLATO, HWO, and more.

Song of the week:

Welcome to SPIE 2025: The Optics and Photonics version (not to be confused with the astronomical instrumentation version which happens every other year)!

We welcome you back to sunny San Diego, where I spent my first day in the airport because I initially thought that the conference began on a Monday. Instead, I was running circles around the San Diego airport (quite literally because the San Diego airport is a circle).

Following this adventure, I delivered a very special package to one Sebastiaan Haffert containing multiple MagAO-X masks.

And thus dear reader, this brings us to Day 1 (2) of the conference.

SPIE Day 1 2: Makes Sense

Today’s talks were of a sensitive nature…the wavefront sensing variety, that is. Kevin Derby of the famed University of Arizona Space Astrophysics Lab gave a talk on full-field phase retrieval (say that 3 times fast) for a space telescope.

Rico then made waves (or reconstructed wavefronts) with the one and only MagAO-X talk of SPIE 2025.

I did my best to spread the gospel of the spatially-clipped self coherent camera:

In the evening poster session, Rodrigo did a masterful job presenting MagAO-X’s latest and greatest addition:

After all of this presenting, it was time for a noteworthy celebration which involved dancing inflatable sharks, a blow-up igloo, penguin cupcakes, and steel pan covers of classic pop songs. Before you ask, this was not Katy Perry’s 2015 Super Bowl Halftime Show.

It was the iconic SPIE Welcome Reception!

SPIE Day 2 3: Cats + Dogs + Pi

We may not be in Antofagasta but this conference has gone to the dogs (or rather, the cats). The second not Sunday of SPIE featured a talk on the MEOW survey of directly imaged white dwarfs. Naturally, if the survey is named after an animal and concerns white dwarfs, Logan is involved.

Elisabeth Arcadi from Macquarie University then gave us a lesson on photonic nulling interferometry using tasty baked goods:

SPIE Day 3 4: ExAO at the Plenary + PDS 70 + Aliens + Telescopes in Space + Dune:

The third not Sunday began with Arizona astronomy being featured front and center in the plenary session courtesy of Buell:

Buell then showcased everyone’s favorite instrument:

GMagAO, GMTAO-X, GMagAO-X, MagAO, VisAO, MagAO-X (formerly known as MagAO), Not SceXAO, That Box With a lot of Stickers, MagAO-X!

Buell gave the audience an overview of all the cool work being done at Steward both on the ground and in space!

We then heard from Dr. Sug-Whan Kim who gave us a fascinating overview of Korea’s history in astronomical optics. Dr. Kim ended his plenary in the way that every talk should end: with a Dune reference.

Ramya then gave a great talk on PUFFINS (not the critically acclaimed cereal but the future UV polarimetry mission)!

SPIE Day 4 5: Dark Hole Day

The fourth not Sunday was International Dark Hole Day (I declared it so), featuring some pretty far out dark holes from Rus Belikov:

I spent a good portion of this day on the beach.

The beach in question:

SPIE Day 5 6: Need a vortex coronagraph?

On the fifth not-Sunday of SPIE, the conference gave to me…multiple vortex coronagraph talks! Unrelated, but I also bought 2 shirts this morning because I started running low.

Sebastiaan? Vortex talk.

Rico? Vortex talk.

Iva? Not a vortex talk, but this was a pretty cool wavefront control GUI from her talk on the THD2 high contrast imaging testbed:

Finally, I ended the conference with a plate of loaded fries:

Song of the Day:

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