Sorry, Jared. I don’t make the rules.
Sound: on.
Song of the Day
You already know.
Bonus
Happy Pranksgiving
Blog
2022B Packing Operation: Success
What’s on more wheels than it should be, has three bulk bags of desiccant for a carry on, and is heading for a South American Vacation??? Only our favorite high contrast imaging system!
The team has spent the last week in booties and safety boots making sure that the instrument gets to Chile as cozy as possible.
Monday: Batten down the hatches!
Mere hours after its last lab experiment, MagAO-X is wrapped into shipping shape. This is the first “All hands on deck” of the week: cables unplugged, optics covered, mounts tightened, glycol drained, etc.
The whole package is wrapped, and rewrapped (after that thing we forgot), and wrapped a third time (just to be sure) in anti-dust plastic wrap and anti-static covers. You better believe we used extreme amounts of bubble wrap wherever possible.
Tuesday: A hard hat kind of day
Tuesday 7am and we’re back in lab (the morning people are, that is). We meet up with Tom and Pat, the guys qualified to work the heavy machinery, and get to work making MagAO-X portable. First, the crane with a fancy name is assembled with grad student labor and good balancing skills.
We tuck the support into the lab, right below the highest point between the vents and lights. We lift the beam as high as possible, and attach a pulley system to hoist up MagAO-X. This gives us enough of a gap to attach a specially designed cart to the table’s base, the right width to wheel down to the cargo elevator.
After carefully wheeling our cargo to the loading doc, we get to work with unsealing the large wooden shipping crate.
Next, we gently lift the instrument, wheel the base underneath, bolt the instrument to the crate base, then undo the cart. We can bolt the box back together once the top is lowered into place.
After the instrument, a lunch break. Then we do it all again with the electronics rack.
Our two big boxes with instrument tucked in tight, and we’re done for the day. Done by 3pm? Our best time yet.
Friday: Load ‘er up!
The movers show up like clockwork, right during Logan’s internal symposium talk. Those of us not giving Xoomies facts hustle back from LPL to the loading doc and help scoot boxes to the forklift pickup.
One 2 million dollar Jared Males signature later and the instrument is officially in the shipper’s hands. Have a nice flight to Chile MagAO-X, we’ll see you in November.
Bonus: MagAO-X says Happy Halloween
Song o’ the day:
In recognition of astronomically significant time intervals
According to Poor Vizzy’s Almanack, every October 14th some nonsense transpires in Tucson, Arizona. Usually having to do with this guy.
This time, he received a surfeit of cupcakes:
Artisanal wrapping paper:
A Starbuck™:
Many happy returns!
Inspirational stickers will be available through the usual channels.
Song of the Day
Well, what’d you expect?
AO Summer School 2022: Eye Day
Summer school posts were delayed due to blog server space, but we’re back with recap blogs!
It’s summer camp season. The older you get, the harder it gets to secure a summer full of bunk-bed living, bug spray, buffet lunches, and late night card games. The folks at Santa Cruz gave us a pretty wonderful approximation, chock full of AO knowledge to boot.
All last week we started our days in campus apartments, wandered to breakfast in the nearby dining hall, and then took the short walk to the conference center. All in the idyllic redwood forest of Santa Cruz, of course.
Possibly one of the most exciting part of the summer school was the vision science talks. The first two days we took deep dives on AO generically and AO for astronomers. The third day, we got the rundown on resolving the cells of our eyes, sorting by color receptor, and exciting them individually to mimic colors independent of the excitation laser.
We got the opportunity to measure the aberrations in our own eye! In real time Professor Austin Roorda was able to map the distortion in the SH and tell participants the magnitude of each Zernike polynomial. Of special interest were those of us who had glasses, where he was able to get uncannily close to their true prescription (from the focus term). He’s been teaching at the summer school since its inception in the early 2000’s
In the lab section of the day, after lunch, we were lucky enough to get to see the aberrations in our own eyes. There were a few sized pupils we could check against, and we could convolve the distorted PSF with letters to check our vision.
We also got to see a bare-bones AO bench, where we closed the loop and inserted a turbulence screen. They trusted us enough to take out some lenses and have us put it back together again. Even for those of us with experience in labwork, it’s still a treat to get to investigate a system with minimal hazard to research deadlines.
On the last day, after some exciting HCIPy talks and hands on work, we were treated to a much anticipated event, the Visual Optics Awards! Catagories included the Thirty Meter Telescope award for largest pupil, The Hubble Space Telescope Award for the poorest optics, and a medal ceremony for best RMS WFE after defocus and astigmatism correction.
Suffice to say, the week was over too quickly. A huge thank you to the organizers at UCSC and CfAO! I learned more than I thought I would, have many foundational papers to start reading up on, and a whole new community of AO enthusiasts to look forward to at future conferences. Hopefully I will be back at some point to help out! For now, I’ll be fondly remembering Santa Cruz with all my sunset beach photos.
Song of the Post: Home by the Sea by Genesis
Bonus: Warren wheeling away on our last day.
UCSC’s AO Summer School 2022: The Times That We Live In
I think I speak for all three of us MagAO-Xians that went to the AO workshop last week when I say that it was a blast! Between the beautiful campus at UCSC, fun hands on activities, and friendly participants there was always something to focus on (heh). Unfortunately it was probably the diverse group of international attendees that had COVID-19 prowling for victims, and I was one of the ones to get caught in the nets…! Thus I unfortunately had to miss the last few parts of the event, but the parts I did get to participate in was rich in really cool AO things.
I was mesmerized by lectures detailing all the non-astronomical applications of AO — who knew microscopists could benefit so much from AO? I also got a chance to converse with Dr. Phil Hinz who (to my surprise) contributed work towards the MagAO/Clio project. Astronomy is such a small world. I especially enjoyed seeing Prof. Olivier Guyon’s presentations on things going on over at the SCExAO project.
Onwards on the road to recovery…