Blog

*A new grad student has entered the chat.*

Hello Blog! I’m Eden and I’ll be joining the MagAO-X team this fall as an OpSci grad student. This SPIE I’m presenting my wavefront profiling work on imaka, a GLAO demonstrator,  but I’ll be joining the high contrast crew in no time.

This conference is much more exciting, informative, and thrilling than any of the online approximations the last two years. So far, as a first time SPIE-ian, I think I could summarize the experience so far as a mix of:

• Cutting edge talks illuminating the future of our field and fully inspiring me to start over my research from scratch.

• Celebrity Spotting:

• Stalking the exhibition hall for the elusive free coffee and rumors of the best freebies:

• Extreme pride at the progress of the field, the creativity of research, and my own ability to understand some of it.

• Crashing at 3pm and making use of the food and resources in the community lounge networking space.

• Rallying for the 6-8pm poster session, and being surprised when the admin needs to increasingly aggressively flip the lights to force us attendees to leave.

Over the last two days, many MagAO-X talks have graced the stage of the the AO talk session. The group is looking very good up there.

We’ve also had a fully stocked schedule of posters, some of which *cough Sebastian* had an ever present line.

A very special session on Wednesday paid tribute to a titan amongst AO, David L. Fried of the Fried parameter and the Fried geometry who passed away in May. One of his close collaborators gave a history of his career which ended up being a historical overview of the field itself. As a younger scientist, it was humbling to see how much one man had contributed to the science I work with daily as well as how many around had gotten to work with him directly.

Of note, the memoriam presenter was just as excited as the rest of us to receive the speaker gift for the AO session:

Hope everyone can stay strong through the last two days of this intellectual marathon!

Double french Songs for your double day blog:

While the whole group is living up up north, those of us left behind in the sweltering heat and humidity of Tucson in July got a treat today:

That’s right, that’s MagAO-X back home all safe and sound and looking none the worse for wear from her journey home from Chile! Delivery was kind enough to happen when literally everyone from the group is in Montreal or otherwise elsewhere, except moi and undergrad researcher Roz Roberts.

Folks it was a rough one. After about 30 mins of watching the crane and maneuvering the dollies in the 6 million degree heat and 5000% humidity (I measured), I was pretty wiped. And all we did was move it off the loading dock into the staging room. Unpacking comes next week, so stay tuned for the next update!

I attempted to replicate Joseph’s excellent video montages to middling success:

Apologies for the vertical video, I didn’t realize my error until it was too late. I will never apologize for hamster dance.

Hope y’all are enjoying the cool Canadian weather.

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The song of the day is Heat Waves by Glass Animals.

It’s only day 2 of the SPIE Astronomical Telescopes & Instrumentation Conference and already lots of interesting talks, lunch & learns, and posters are underway.

Dr. Richard Dekany gave an interesting talk on SIGHT, the Palomar 5m telescope LGS AO system, and highlighted the support of our very own Sebastiaan Haffert and Meghan O’Brien on the Optical Differentiation wavefront sensor.

The Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) Lunch & Learn brought up interesting points about international differences in approaches to EDI. There are more similar events and networking events throughout the week in room 514!

We supported fellow optical sciences grad student, Kevin Derby, from the UArizona Space Astrophysics Lab during his fantastic talk on pinwheel segmented primary apertures.

Since this lab just loves when things are “in-phase”, several of us attended a talk on the phasing of the James Webb Space Telescope by Scott Acton. He had some thoughtful words on his next steps as a scientist, “And that’s how you align the telescope. Now I need another job.”

On theme with space telescopes, we are finishing the night with UASAL graduate student, Jaren Ashcraft, presenting his poster on the Space Coronagraph Optical Bench – SCoOB.

Sorry, I’m not a connoisseur of French music.

The SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation conference is the main event for instrument builders world-wide, and this year is held in Montréal, Quebec, Canada. The conference is held every two years (because one year is nothing in instrument project timelines) and the last one would have been in 2020. (But then, the plague.)

Anyway, we have a lot of new stuff to report from MagAO-X, and from our friends in UASAL, SCExAO, and beyond. See the schedule at the end of this post. (We’re just jazzed to be here.)

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Today, the first team member to speak was our fearless leader with a status update on MagAO-X Phase II and future plans.

Olivier Guyon gave us a version of his Spirit of Lyot talk, which was fortunate, because that gave some of us a second chance to absorb and understand it. (There’s a lot going on over at SCExAO!)

Sebastiaan was tapped to present as a substitute for a team member who wasn’t attending, and he gave us an overview of image quality calibration from WFS PSF deconvolution (work by Jacob Trzaska) and his own predictive control algorithm (Data-Driven Subspace Predictive Control—DDSPC).

Blog Rules

It’s been a while since we had a Blog Rule, beyond the compulsory Song of the Day. So, here’s my rule for the week: les chansons doivent être en français.

(The songs must be in French.)

Bonus points for chansons Quebecois!

Song of the Day

Today when I went to get a coffee en route to conference registration, I opened with a “bonjour,” following the advice for anglophones in a francophone world. Then, I asked “English OK?” and the barista said “Yeah, sure! My French isn’t that good.”

Maybe that advice is more for the rest of Quebec…

MagAO-X and Friends Schedule

Time	Author	Room	Title
Sunday, July 17
12:05	Jared Males	518a	MagAO-X: current status and plans for Phase II
15:45	Olivier Guyon (SCExAO)	518a	High Contrast Imaging at the Photon Noise Limit with WFS-based PSF Calibration
16:20	Sebastiaan Haffert	518a	PSF evaluation using tip images in a modulated pyramid wavefront sensor
Monday, July 18
poster	Jaren Ashcraft (UASAL)	516	The Space Coronagraph Optical Bench (SCoOB): 1. Design and assembly of a vacuum-compatible coronagraph testbed for spaceborne high-contrast imaging technology
poster	Kyle Van Gorkom (UASAL)	516	The space coronagraph optical bench (SCoOB): 2. wavefront sensing and control in a vacuum-compatible coronagraph testbed for spaceborne high-contrast imaging technology
poster	Kevin Derby (UASAL)	516	Tolerance analysis of a self-coherent camera for wavefront sensing and dark hole maintenance
Tuesday, July 19
13:25	Laird Close (for Alex Hedglen)	518a	First lab results of segment/petal phasing with a pyramid wavefront sensor and a novel holographic dispersed fringe sensor (HDFS) from the Giant Magellan Telescope high contrast adaptive optics phasing testbed
13:55	Antonin Bouchez (for Rick Demers) (GMT)	518	Phasing the Segmented Giant Magellan Telescope: Progress in Testbeds and Prototypes
17:25	Meghan O’Brien	518a	experimenting with the g-ODWFS for use in extended source LGS wavefront sensing.
poster	Sebastiaan Haffert	516	Visible extreme adaptive optics for GMagAO-X with the triple-stage AO architecture (TSAO).
poster	Laird Close	516	A Review of High Contrast AO Imaging of Accreting Proto-Planets
poster	Joseph Long	516	XPipeline: Starlight Subtraction at Scale for MagAO-X
poster	Noah Swimmer (UCSB)	516?	An MKID camera for use behind MagAO-X
Wednesday, July 20
poster	Jared Males	516	The conceptual design of GMagAO-X: visible wavelength high contrast imaging with GMT
poster	Maggie Kautz	516	A novel hexpyramid pupil slicer for an ExAO Parallel DM for the Giant Magellan Telescope
Thursday, July 21
10:30	Laird Close	518a	The Optical and Mechanical Design for the 21,000 Actuator ExAO System for the Giant Magellan Telescope: GMagAO-X
14:10	Lauren Schatz	518a	Experimental demonstration of a three-sided pyramid wavefront sensor on the CACTI testbed
15:40	Andrew Szentgyorgyi	519a	G@M: Design of the Giant Magellan Telescope Consortium Large Earth Finder (G-CLEF) for operations at the Magellan telescopes.
poster	Sebastiaan Haffert	516	Advanced wavefront sensing and control demonstration with MagAO-X

Today was the last day of the conference! We saw many great talks (mostly about PDS 70 and HR 8799…) and many of us have left excited to get back to work and Reduce! That! Data!

Today was a half day and that meant we were finally able to roam free and see the beauty of the Netherlands. Logan, Joseph and I headed over to Den Haag to check out another city.

We saw beautiful architecture…

… gorgeous flowers…

And some authentic Dutch boba tea～～～！ ( ❛ ᴗ ❛ 🌸)

It wouldn’t be a trip to the Netherlands without seeing a Dutch art masterpiece so we went to the Mauritshuis museum of fine art…

…where we saw the famous painting “Girl with a Pearl Earring” by Johannes Vermeer.

Seeing the painting in real life fell a little flat. We much prefer our own take on the Vermeer master work, so we fixed it. “Jared with a Pearl Earring” belongs in a museum don’t you think?

Switching out the paintings caused such a commotion that a protest rapidly formed outside the museum.

Or, was it just a coincidental and totally unrelated protest? Who is to say, really…

Jared and Logan are heading back tomorrow and we wish them safe travels! Joseph and I are on to the next adventure in Belgium.

Song of the Day: