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I’ll try to make up for my clickbait title by starting right off with the secret ramen seasoning that I’m uniquely suited to identify.

The last supper

It’s apparently very rare, but chefs from select regions of Japan will season tonkotsu (pork) flavored ramen with peanut dust or peanut butter to impart a special nuttiness to the savory soup. As many of you might guess, this didn’t turn out well for one of the resident peanut deniers in the group. But hopefully those who read this blog will help spread some awareness since, in general, Japanese food restaurants have been a very safe haven for peanut allergy sufferers…! And no, the restaurant made no mention of this additional ingredient anywhere on their menu :-/.

After a quick brush with my kryptonite, we were back the next afternoon exploring the surrounding Chicago area to seek out the healing properties of a slice of deep dish. Although the weather was less than ideal for most of Wednesday with a slight chance for multiple tornados.

As for the workshop, we (Jialin, Gemma of España, and I) shared a brief eureka moment when we successfully created and pip-installed our very own open-source Python package on our computers! To get everyone else up to speed, we utilized this workshop to get a head start on a collaborative, bright, most-likely-to-be-single star catalog for AO calibration purposes! All that’s really left to do is streamline the catalog querying and crossmatching functionality and then actually make the SQL database prior to our next observing run.

Big thanks to Logan for helping us refine this idea and make it happen in such a short timespan!

I always worry my posts end up evolving to be too too wordy so please enjoy a photo dump of the social activities that took place for the rest of the workshop and afterwards before flying back home to Tucson :-).

This is Ben from UC San Diego. We ran into Ben serendipitously and after some small talk he confessed to being a fellow Jared fan after seeing Jared’s talk at AO4ELT. Astro is such a small world.

Song of the Day

We had a Lyft driver who was literally the city of Chicago anthropomorphized. dApparently in his youth one of his favorite pastimes was staying at the bars in Downtown Chicago until closing. Well so, around last call, when they played this song at the end of the night it was his cue to antagonize the bouncers and convince them, as best as he could, that he makes his own rules, he owns this bar, they’d have to use force to get him to leave, etc. On more than one occasion he got the bouncers grinning and giving him the stink-eye while cracking their knuckles at ten minutes to closing. However, as soon as the clock showed 30 seconds to official closing time he was already 100 ft away from the building and power walking his way home. In between belly laughs he exclaimed “I was young, dumb, and I’m *still* only 5’5″ on a good day so what did you expect? I knew my limits!”

It was way funnier with the thick Chicago accent and euphemisms than is probably coming off typed out here.

Both the non-Ph.D.ed KLIPers convened at O’Hare and ready to create a catalog of non-binary stars for the next MagAO-X run, we enjoyed the mild (relative to Tucson) sunshine on the Northwestern Campus. We spotted a nice garden with some cool spiders and Northwestern viscacha enjoying its nutritious meal.

We visited the old astronomy building on Northwestern Campus, which is also the site for the Dearborn Observatory completed in 1888. The 18.5″ refractor inside the dome as well as the entire building was closed to visitors during our visit on Sunday.

In addition to the OG KLIPers or KLIPistas of MagAO-X, Gemma Gonzalez-Tora from ESO joined the team. We have made a decent amount of progress on making a code to find single stars within a given coordinate. Stay tuned for Jay’s post later this week to see our final product!

We also spotted the third MagAO-X team member on Zoom! Hello Eden!

Oh yes, the title can very deceiving, but the rest of the post contains only Jialin’s review of the Chicago/Evanston food. Chicago deep dish is of course a must try for first timers. Jay and I stopped by the famous Labriola on our half-day off for a 12 inch Danny’s Special Deep Dish Pizza, which contained Russo Sausage, mushrooms, green pepper, and onion in addition to lots of mozzarella cheese and tomato sauce. (And half the pie is about to head back to Tucson!)

The Chicago Style hot dog is on par with the Sonora Dog, with fresh tomato and a good thick slice of dill pickle!

If you can’t wait until SPIE 2024 in Japan to try the famous Omurice or Japanese omelette rice, you can find a pretty good substitute in downtown Chicago. (Don’t bother getting the ramen, you can find better ones in Tucson, shhhhhh….)

And I won’t be myself if I don’t recommend a good boba or bubble tea place.

Song of the Day(s):

I wanted to catch a musical in Chicago Broadway during my time here, but unfortunately, July is the month of nothingness. Thus, I feel inclined to share one of the most famous numbers from the musical Chicago!

Hello, it’s me again. For various reasons, more senior members are not available for extended comments on AO4ELT. (Notably either enjoying France or other vacation escapades.) So to keep Joseph from shutting down the blog in disappointment, here’s another Eden recap of a French conference.

Day 2: WFS, DMs, and phasing – Oh my!

How do you get a gainfully employed post doc to arrive on time to an 8:30am conference start time? You make him the session chair. Maggie and I might have been a liiiiittle late to the invited speaker, Roberto Ragazzoni, the origin of pyramid WFSs, gave an engaging talk on the 27 OTHER WFS designs he’s dreamed up over the years.

The DM vendors gave their talks the second day as well, and it was nice to hear someone outside the team bragging about us for a change.

Just to prove their point and show how to use a BMC DM in a truly extreme AO system, Laird followed up with our GMagAO-X

We concluded the day with dinner in the very same halls the palace of old used to dine in. Whats more, they gave us a light show of projectors to display the hall in its different eras. Rumor has it Jared has a video of the light shows, even though he prefers the hall in its more natural lighting.

In true french fashion, this dinner took around 4 hours and multiple bottles of wine. Sebastiaan did not eat the offered cheese.

Day 3: XWCL past present and future

Wednesday, midway through our conference days, we had our largest number of XWCL talks yet! Especially if you include the once and future lab members. We started with Lauren Schatz, recently graduated and now a critical member of space force, give her invited talk on LASSIE – Laser guide Star Sensor Integrated Extreme adaptive optics.

Sebastiaan Haffert, current group postdoc, gave the first talk of the evening session, with a hot-off-the-press presentation on more novel WFS designs.

What you might not know is that he finished the last simulation mere minutes before we had to turn in our slides:

We then got to see a future XWCL-er, Josh Lieberman, present on his implementation of iEFC with the KPIC instrument/testbed. We’re so excited to have Josh be a part of our group next spring!

Last of the day, bringing up the other half of the MagAO-X sandwich, was me! I got to give my talk on my sparkles work that I took on over the last year. Having multiple people I cite in the crowd was new, usually I have to fight to get people to care about optical gain. This talk I got good feedback and even more to think about once I’m back.

After surviving the stress of presenting to some of the most knowledgible people in the field, we all relaxed by having cocktails on the Bridge of Avignon, courtesy of First Light and ALPAO. It was something special to see the bridge in such beautiful golden light.

Day 4: Last talk!

Jared, giving the invited mid-morning talk, finished up the MagAO-X talks with an overview of what it’ll take to get us to the contrast of the planets we care about, and what MagAO-X is doing to get us there. Of course the whole team sat close to be sure to show our support. We weren’t the only ones who liked Jared’s talk though, younger scientists later reported it to be very accessible, which is a win among some of the other update talks we listened to.

During the coffee break, we finally got our group photo! Feels good to know our group did so well. “Go Team!” – Jared

We also had some of our friends from MAPs present later in the day, (see Joseph’s and I’s MAPS posts last month to see this group photo in full color). Jacob gave voice to the struggles that adaptive secondaries and bad weather can can give observers. The next MAPS talk will get to be much more triumphant though, I can feel it.

Some of the best parts of this conference happen when you aren’t last minute cramming for your talk and you can just appreciate the good company of your science peers. Cheers to the Arizona team!

Day 5: We all gave our talks, what do you mean there’s more conference?

Even after we finished XWCL talks, turns out there were still things to stick around for! Sarcasm aside, the last day of the conference wasn’t one to miss, with plenty of atmospheric simulations to go around. Plus, we got a free tour of the Papal Palais with our badge!

All too soon though, it was over. Personally, I got so much from being around this international group of instrumentalists! After being inspired and motivated by all the various project people have been working on, I know I have a lot more too look forward in the rest of my PhD.

Farewell France! Thank you for treating us so well.

Song of the Days

Putting respect on the Avignon name with:

Bonjour! In the early hours of Saturday, I joined the team in Paris! Fun fact: if you land in Charles de Gaulle Terminal 2E and you want to be picked up by an Uber, do NOT go to the door labeled “Rideshare Pickup.” That would be far too easy. Uber is relegated to “Express Pickup Door 7A”.

Anyways, we shortly boarded our train to Avignon and got a lovely ride through the French countryside.

Apparently in the words of some Roman cardinals, Avignon is one of the most revolting and polluted cities ever seen. Except not really at all…it’s maybe the prettiest. A gorgeous walled-in city surrounding a castle, Avignon is lush and vibrant.

Thanks to the recommendation of Sebastiaan, the team took a fun tour of the Pont Saint-Bénézet, a medieval bridge across the Rhône. Okay it doesn’t exactly go across…it kind of stops in the middle…there was a lot of drama in the Middle Ages.

Sunday night was the conference registration and welcome reception where we finally joined Laird after his excursion through Portugal. Five is a party! A party with wine and cheese!

Day 1 of AO4ELT7

The conference hall is in the medieval conclave of the Palais des papes d’Avignon. It’s very unique, and we likely need to elect the next AO pope, but there is definitely not air conditioning.

The conference kicked off with interesting overview talks about the AO systems of each of the ELTs: GMT, TMT, and of course ELT itself. I presented my first conference talk of my grad school career on our up-and-coming extreme AO instrument, GMagAO-X. GMagAO-X is such an exciting project to be on, as a highly likely first light ELT ExAO instrument working in the VISIBLE.

And as you do at conferences, you network (with your roommates).

This is the prologue to the long sweaty conference the XWCL team will be spending in Avignon, in which some of us spend a shorter but just as sweaty time at a workshop in Paris. (There is a heatwave here, and it’s humid, and the desert kid in me is struggling to adapt.). Last year Sebastian, having good ideas as he does, collaborated with other high contrast imaging folks to think up a workshop on Coherence Differential Imaging, or CDI. As the whole point was to entice the next generation of instrumentalists with the siren song of coherent starlight subtraction in control and post processing, I was an easy target to convince to attend. Jared, having never been to Paris before, was also more than willing to spend a few days in the discussion. So here we are, tourists in a world-dominant optics hub.

Day -4: What is CDI again?

The first day of our CDI journey gave us a late start and a delightful Uber driver, who not only saved us from walking up a long hill to the conference location, but also regaled us with a deep dive into just how bad the drivers there really are.

The Observatory itself was nestled overlooking over the city from it’s Parisian suburb, magnificent among the larger park and woods that presumably came with the original estate.

We started the day with a series of very helpful overview talks, in which I rapidly went from not even really knowing what CDI stood for to appreciating cutting edge efforts to use the coherent properties of starlight with our high contrast systems. Barnaby Norris, Sarah Stieger, Axel Potier, and William Thompson should be commended on how much effort they put into the breadth and depths of their review talks. If you had listened closely, over the birds and the beatific breeze, you would have heard my brain expand three sizes in just an hour.

Almost as helpful as the actual programming were our extended coffee breaks, catching up and floating ideas with some of the leading experts in the field amid delicious pastries. It’s a good reminder that no matter how deep in the trenches I am with my little calibration codes, plenty of my colleagues in the field are right there beside me, banging their heads against similar walls.

At the end of the day we snuck in a little solar observing in an H-alpha filter. What a welcome sight to see the small saguaro on the solar telescope, designed and built by Lunt Solar Aystems in Tucson Arizona! With that petite piece of home, this place started to feel familiar.

Day -3: Discussions and downpour

Our second day was focused on hands-on teamwork exercises, which the MagAO-X team prepped for with the team exercise of figuring out how to get on the train, in the rain, from the wrong end of the station. It made us miss our chatty uber driver, especially with the quarter-mile hill treck from the train station to the workshop. Sweaty and drenched and a little dazed, we quickly got into our day of working through simulations and practical implementations of CDI algorithms and architectures.

One of our hands-on notebook experiences allowed us to play with the test bench right here in Paris. Their team has done great work to show a possible use case for AO telemetry, and in some of them we were even able to use their complex coronographic phase mask to pull out the planet!

After the day wrapped up, and to much nicer weather, Vincent Deo, a Paris local, walked us through the Meudon streets to a delightful sidewalk restaurant. There, discussions continued, though perhaps on much sillier topics, over wine and Belgian Beers and Charcuterie.

Meanwhile… word has reached us that the Space Force AO4ELT contingent has arrived on the other side of France …

Day -2: Reflect, Revise, Repeat (in 2-3 years?)

And before you know it its over. We wrapped up our discussions on the final day, summarizing our progress, thoughts, and future projects to the rest of the attendees. It was required that the students do the talking, and because of that the final presentations had much fresher face than the introductory ones. It did feel like

Of course, for all we’re learned, it was also a treat to be able to see another world center for astronomy, and another old telescope. Though this site is mostly for solar observing in the modern day, it has a history of observing that you can feel wandering the halls.

Finally, we finished this productive and educational tour de force with a very french dinner. More cheese, duck, and good friends from California and Australia.

See you all soon in Avignon!

Song of the Day(s):

Blog Rules for the french trip: Every post should use at least one french word, have a song of the day, and be tied to a memory of the trip.

The streets of Meudon were perfumed by the many jasmine bushes, wafting along a puff of breeze. I can understand why they’d want to host a workshop out there.