Blog

Welcome, dear reader, to day 5 of XWCL’s quarantine journal entries (alternatively, your Monday distraction). We’ve had great entries so far showcasing hobbies and activities of the various XWCL members. To keep in theme, this post will cover a few of the things that I enjoy and how it’s been helping me through quarantine.

COOKING
Anyone, graduate school or not, will agree that food induces happiness. Cooking is my main go-to comfort habit, whether because I feel homesick or it was a rough week where nothing worked. Scent has been known to trigger memories; the term “Proustian memory” is coined from his novel A la Recerche du Temps Perdu where Proust ate a madeline cookie which triggered an involuntary memory of his childhood. For instance, when I miss my family (hi Mom, Dad, and Kuya!), I make a cup of roasted brown rice green tea because that’s our choice beverage while we talk at the table after sharing a meal together at home. Whether small family meal or big family gathering, this roasted brown rice green tea is always present. For me, every step in the process of cooking is a small marathon that instills tremendous joy: exploring the various specialty stores in Tucson for procuring ingredients, setting up all my ingredients “mise en place“, listening to the crackling of ingredients in the hot oil, basking in the aroma of the food simmering, and, of course, eating my rewards (especially when it’s my weekly meal prep). Cooking is a methodical and experimental activity I love to do both solo and group settings. I eagerly try to widen my skillset – my 2 best friends from when my PhD began (hi Bharati and Liliana!) are both vegetarian and enthusiastically helped me as taste testers when I wanted to explore meat alternatives. I’ve gotten better at making lentils, but tofu needs further work to get the texture I want.

KITCHEN APPLIANCES
I believe that a significant portion of why I’ve enjoyed cooking is having the correct tools. Therefore, it’s no surprise that I’ve accumulated a collection of various kitchen appliances. Given my graduate student budget, I acquire many of my appliances through Tucson’s Craigslist or following department store sales (sometimes for months). My best Craigslist purchases have been a KitchenAid stand mixer Pro500 for $100 in 2015 and a Breville deep fryer for $25 in 2018 (this is a fun story for another time), where each were practically brand new. Many people have benefitted from these appliances – XWCL, CAAO, Steward Observatory and OpSci graduate students, to count a few. Some appliances/tools have failed me though – I borrowed a mandoline slicer once to try out and from that experience, I’ll stick to chopping all my vegetables manually, even if they come out uneven or not fine enough. I told myself that when I’m employed after completing my PhD, I’ll buy a brand new Le Creuset enameled cast iron pot. (On sale, of course. Some habits will never cease.)

TRENDY DIY
Given that cooking can be categorized as a DIY activity, I’m always in the agenda to try out making trendy foods. I’ve attempted some recipes posted in social media videos – some good, but also many where I failed epically (like Tasty’s no-bake matcha cheesecake video recipe). Although quarantine in the US began at least a month ago, I’m expecting social media will produce some trendy recipes to try.

All of these things have led me to attempt a trendy recipe roaming about the internet: Dalgona Coffee.

WHAT IS THIS DALGONA COFFEE TREND?
Dalgona coffee is a latte which has a thick, sweet whipped coffee foam placed on top of a cup of milk. This viral trend originated in South Korea, where Dalgona is a sponge candy and is derived from the word dalgoona (English: “sweet”). Dalgona coffee is made with 3 ingredients: water, sugar, and instant coffee (yes, instant coffee). To make it, you mix them together and whip A LOT.

Here’s a video that shows the process:

This really perked my interest – I had all the ingredients without needing to go to the store. I had both instant coffee and instant espresso from my experiments at making coffee-filled dark chocolates. I had the tools. There was nothing stopping me from trying this out, especially since I needed a distraction while staying home.

Additionally, if I need any further convincing, it’s a scientific fact that Astronomy and coffee go together as a combination. Given that we’re doing this blog posts in the style of an observation run, making dalgona coffee fits into the theme.

Through the course of many evenings, I attempted making dalgona coffee and experimented in other variants of it. I’ve documented my learning experience here, so you get to know what works just by reading this whole post.

COMMENTS BEFORE BEGINNING:

• The ingredient portions for all my experiments are for 2 servings. Scaling up or down is possible by maintaining a 1:1:1 ratio. I didn’t test this out, but that’s what the recipes said.
• I recommend using a tall, wide container for mixing. It can get messy doing this. I used the tall measuring cup that came with my immersion blender.

ATTEMPT 1: USING A MILK FROTHER
While I am always eager to cook with minimal and manual tools, I’m not in the agenda to sit with a whisk for 10 minutes trying to whip this foam. My friend has done it manually and commented the experience “like some Edwardian kitchen maid” (hi Jordan!). I use a $3 milk frother when I make my morning caffeine drink (Mexican hot chocolate with instant espresso), so it’s obvious that it should do the job for making dalgona coffee, right?

INGREDIENTS: 2 tbsp instant espresso, 2 tbsp granulated white sugar, 2 tbsp room temperature water

• 

• 

• 

VERDICT: The milk frother does help with starting up the foam. However, the frother is neither strong nor fast enough. It couldn’t bring in enough air into the foam to make it thicken up like in the video. A successful dalgona foam is light and thick, but this one did not come out light enough. I’ve been told (hi Martin and Jastine!) that even if you tried with using a hand whisk after the milk frother, the foam is still not good enough. Therefore, I do not recommend using a milk frother to build the foam exclusively.

HOW DID IT TASTE: Really good! Really sweet, though.

ATTEMPT 2: USING AN ELECTRIC HAND WHISK AND HOT WATER
Within my cupboards of kitchen tools and appliances, I have an electric immersion blender which has an attachable whisk and food processor unit. I didn’t want to bring it out the first time because it’s a large, clunky item that requires a wall outlet for power. Plus, I store it on a shelf that requires me to use a stepping stool to reach. After perusing through a few articles, I learned that using hot water instead of cold water creates the foam faster.

INGREDIENTS: 2 tbsp instant espresso, 2 tbsp granulated white sugar, 2 tbsp hot water

• 

• 

VERDICT: This worked super well! I used the milk frother in the beginning to initialize blending the ingredients together. Then I used my electric whisk attachment to bring up the foam. My immersion blender has 3 speed settings and the fastest one worked best. It worked very fast – in less than 5 minutes, I got the thick foam! The foam stuck to itself so well that it made transferring to a mug with hot milk very easy.

HOW DID IT TASTE: Really good! But it was also very difficult to mix the hot milk and the foam together. The foam also starts hardening up on the edge of the cup.

With one successful case* after two attempts, this convinced me to start experimenting with the recipe.
* Please don’t use this statistics logic for your research

EXPERIMENT 1: USING POWDERED SUGAR AND LOW QUALITY INSTANT COFFEE
One major problem I had with the original recipe is that it’s too sweet. I do like sweet foods, but not to this level of sweet. To cut down the sugar, I used 2 tbsp powdered sugar, which has the same sweetness as 1 tbsp granulated sugar. I had powdered sugar lying around from the gatherings I attended pre-quarantine where I bring my deep fryer to make fresh deep fried oreos. Also, to get into the spirit of the recipe, I replaced the instant espresso with some Folgers instant coffee.

INGREDIENTS: 2 tbsp instant coffee, 2 tbsp powdered sugar, 2 tbsp hot water.

• 

• 

• 

VERDICT: This one came out BEAUTIFUL. However, since powdered sugar was used, the foam came out much less heavy than with granulated sugar. There were a lot more air bubbles that made the foam lose its form after a while. The instant coffee also made the foam pick up super fast.

HOW DID IT TASTE: Love that it’s less sweet, but not enough coffee punch. I’ve rediscovered that Folger’s is cheap for a reason.

EXPERIMENT 2: CAN WE DO IT WITH CHOCOLATE?
As you may know from a past blog post, I’m a hobby chocolate confectioner. I started making green tea chocolate when I began my PhD, and have recently figured out how to make coffee-filled ganache dark chocolates. Therefore, for this dalgona coffee challenge, the next logical test was seeing how I can mix in chocolate for this foam. Should taste good, right?

INGREDIENTS: 1 tbsp granulated sugar, 1 tbsp powdered sugar, 1.5 tbsp instant coffee, 1.5 tbsp hot water, 0.5 tbsp dark cocoa

• 

• 

• 

VERDICT: I mixed together the sugars, instant coffee, and water together with the frother to get the foam going, then added in the cocoa powder. After that was mixed together well enough, I went to the electric whisk. However, the foam started collapsing and turned in syrup-like form. Even after 10 minutes on the highest speed of my electric whisk and tilting the container to add more air, the foam refused to build up. Back to the drawing board on how to add in chocolate!

HOW DID IT TASTE: Didn’t want this to go to waste, so it was mixed with cold milk to make chocolate milk. This was the most effort mocha chocolate milk I have ever made. Tasted good, but no dalgona coffee.

EXPERIMENT 3: DOES IT KEEP?
As you may notice, the recipe makes up to 2 servings (or more) worth of foam. But for all that effort and you only wanted 1 serving, how do you make the rest not go waste? I’ve read in some articles that the foam can last for a day or two inside the refrigerator. Is this true? Let’s test an overnight case.

INGREDIENTS: 2 tbsp instant espresso, 2 tbsp granulated sugar, 2 tbsp room temperature water

Here’s photos of the foam the night before:

• 

• 

And here’s the photos from the next day after 11 hours sealed in the refrigerator:

• 

• 

• 

VERDICT: I didn’t document this part, but the reason the foam shrank was because the coffee was separating from the foam. This was easily fixed using a small whisk and whipping for a minute or two. It didn’t build up to the level from when it was freshly whisked, but that’s easily attributed to that I didn’t work hard in adding more air back in. The foam returned to a lighter color and was nice and thick like it was fresh, but maybe a bit more dense than freshly whipped with an electric whisk.

HOW DID IT TASTE: Pretty good! It fueled a lot of writing this post.

FINAL WORDS
Someone challenged me to try it with matcha (hi Jaren!), but it ended up with the same watery result like the chocolate one. I read somewhere that the foam forms because of fat/oil present in the coffee that interacts with the sugar. I suspect that there’s probably something going on with the cocoa powder and matcha that inhibits the foam from taking. I’ve talked with someone who made a matcha version (hi Jade and Adolfo!), but it only worked when they adding in milk, which formed a whipped cream type foam. I read one recipe that recommended using egg whites so the foam builds up like meringue, but that would require me pasteurizing the egg (I am not taking any chances with this pandemic). I’m no food scientist and only a hobby cook at best, so I welcome an explaination to what happened. It’ll make me a better cook!

FINDINGS:

• Hot water versus room temperature water: I’ve experimented using both and found that there wasn’t a distinct difference between the final result foam. I did find that the hot water mixed the coffee and sugar much easier than room temperature water. This may change depending on the sugar and instant coffee you use.
• Instant espresso versus instant coffee: besides the obvious flavor profile, I did not find the foam any different from either. I won’t ever recommend Folgers, but I do recommend the instant espresso I used. If you’re in Tucson, you can find it at Roma Imports (assuming it’s in stock when they reopen during quarantine). Alternatively, I’ve found it on Amazon.

SUGGESTIONS FOR THE READER TO EXPERIMENT FOR ME:

• Using real coffee: I imagine it’ll taste good, but the coffee will need to be concentrated. Too much fluid might be too watery for the foam to take.
• Alternative types of sugar: I only tested using granulated cane sugar and powdered sugar. But would it be different if you used raw sugar? How about sugar alternatives like monk fruit sugar or splenda?

I hope you’ve enjoyed my journey through experimenting on dalgona coffee. I recommend trying it out – even if you don’t get the foam, it still tastes really good mixed in with the milk. Please let me know if you try it out – I’m always welcome to discussing this. Post up some really pretty pictures of your attempts.

Special thanks to Aldo for exploring through this whole process with me and consuming the second serving of all the successful attempts.

SONG OF THE DAY
The song of the day comes from 2 things I’ve been doing while under quarantine – experimenting on whipping dalgona coffee and listening to synth wave instrumental music while wranging my simulation code. The venn diagram overlap of these 2 things comes in the form of this song:

Okay dalgona coffee, let’s post-process out some zernike modes from these mirrors.

• 

Hello, and thanks for joining me. Today marks the end of week three of self-isolation and quarantine for a lot of us here in Tucson. Based on what I have been seeing on social media and my own personal experience, a lot of us are starting to get a bit stir crazy from staying at home everyday. The self-isolation survival advice that I have heard the most is to try and cultivate a new hobby. For me, I have started playing Stardew Valley, a farming simulator game. A lot of hobbies however, require a lot more materials then a video game, making it frustrating and expensive to start up a new one. I thought I would share one of my oldest hobbies, painting. I may be Blog Ross, but I am no Bob Ross. Regardless I will try and step you through a simple painting, and give some advice on how to start painting using cheaper materials to keep the cost down.

A lot of us are missing astronomy and the great outdoors. Today I thought it would be nice to combine the two into a simple night sky in the desert painting. To give you a preview of what we will be painting today, here is my finished result.

To start, collect your materials.

For this painting I used five colors of acrylic paint: black, white, cadmium red hue, cadmium yellow hue, and cerulean blue hue.

My favorite brand of paint is Winsor & Newton Galeria Acylic. This is found in the Level 2: Artist section in Michaels. Almost all of my canvas, paints, and brushes are from this section. I have bought from their Level 3: professional level but couldn’t see a noticeable increase in quality to justify the steep increase in price. I do see a big increase in quality from the Level 1: Academic, and the price increase isn’t much between level 1 and 2 so I do suggest investing a little if you plan to continue painting.

Brushes: I used four of my go to brushes for this painting. A medium sized brush with a rounded tip, a small brush with a clean square edge, a fan brush, and a tiny detail brush.

Other materials: palette (a plastic TV dinner tray from the dollar store is a good alternative), and some water.

I used a canvas sheet that can be bought in a pad, as a cheaper alternative to a full canvas. I taped it to a board, and then drew some reference lines. I looked up some photos of saguaros for inspiration, and based the rock features off of Javelina Rocks at Saguaro National Park East.

To start painting we work from the background to the foreground. For our base color mix a Navy/dark-purple (2 parts blue, 1 part red, and a little black). Paint onto canvas using an up and down stroke, all the way to the rocks and around the saguaro. (I didn’t go all the way because I wanted to add a sunset effect that I decided later on was unnecessary and fixed that mistake). If you accidentally get some in your saguaro or rocks it is not a problem.

Looking at long exposure photos of the night sky, we see that it is not a uniform color. To add contrast mix 2 parts blue and 1 part red. Taking the medium size brush with the rounded edge, use a dabbing brush stroke over the background color. Don’t completely cover the background.

With the leftover paint from the last step, add in a little bit of white (should be: 2 parts blue, 1 part red, a little white). Dab onto canvas again, concentrating the density to the band where you want the Milky Way to be.

To start making the Milky Way I mixed a lavender color ( 1 part white, with a little bit of equal parts blue and red). I used a back and forth brush stroke to make a line/ steak effect. You could probably continue dabbing the color on if you like that look more. Put this color over where you want the Milky Way to be. Over the lighter color you just laid down, add some darker color for the dust lanes in the Milky Way. I used dark purple (1 part red, 1 part blue, a little black), but dark blue would work too.

Now I took my smaller brush with the square edge and white paint, and added highlights and small dust clouds to my Milky Way. I used both small dabbing brush strokes, and some half-circle brush stokes. There is a bright bulge in the Milky Way that faces towards the ground. Decide where you want the bulge and concentrate more white in that area. There is a second smaller bulge on the opposite side at that location. If you go too wild with the white (like I did) go back in with your dark purple or blue and add back in some dust lanes.

Looking at photos of the Milky Way, near the bulge the color is more yellow and less white. Mix a very light yellow (1 part white, a little yellow), and add in some yellow to your light spots. I used my fine detail brush to do this. I then went back over the edges of the yellow parts I put down with some white, to blend the colors a little better. I used a dabbing brush stroke for this.

Once you are happy with how your Milky Way looks (maybe adding in more dust lanes, maybe more bright spots) its time to add stars! Mix white paint with water (something like 2 parts water, 1 part white). Mix it well so that there are no clumps, should look like milk. Take the fan brush, or any large, flat brush and using your fingers flick the hairs of the brush to create the stars. If this explanation is confusing you can find a tutorial on YouTube. Do this until you are satisfied. I found that this made a lot of really small stars, so I took my small fine detail brush and added in some larger stars concentrating them in the Milky Way. I added a lot of these white stars into the brighter areas of the Milky Way.

As we know from astronomy stars aren’t all the same color, so lets give the white stars some friends. Mix some light blue (1 part white, a little blue), and using the fine detail brush add in some blue stars. Concentrate these outside of the Milky Way. I even added 2 or 3 red stars.

At this point my painting looks like the image below. (Noticed I fixed that mistake I made earlier. Acylic is great for beginners because it is very forgiving).

Now it is time to paint in the rocks and the saguaro! Take black paint and the small brush with the clean square edge and fill in the saguaro and rocks with black. I decided to mix a little bit of blue into the black for one of the rocks, so it would look like one rock is in the foreground, and the other in the background.

Now wait for the painting to dry, then add in your signature and it is done!

And don’t forget the important last step, give the painting to a friend who is struggling with isolation :). (While maintaining proper social distancing guidelines.)

Happy painting,

Blog Ross

Here is a relaxing song to paint to for the song of the day.

It’s the first Saturday since the stay-at-home orders were announced, and I’m unwinding this weekend by, well, staying at home. Unlike most of the MagAO-X team, I’m sheltering not in Tucson but instead in my occasional residence in a corner of DC (where stay-at-home orders went into effect just a few hours after AZ). Fortunately, MagAO-X is set up for remote operation, and I can amuse myself by spinning filter wheels and commanding deformable mirrors from the other side of the country.

Since there’s relatively little of astronomical or optical interest within my apartment, and in keeping with blog tradition, I’m dedicating this short blog post to the flora and fauna found within my immediate vicinity (my apartment and the surrounding ~50 ft).

Flora

Since I can’t be in Tucson, I’ve been attempting to reproduce the Tucson biome on my desk with a collection of cacti and other succulents. It’s not quite spiky or perilous enough yet, so my next task will be figuring out how to relocate and squeeze a 30 ft saguaro into my living room.

Fauna

Wild beasts also roam these lands and occasionally drop by for treats. The most frequent visitor is a well-fed (but always hungry) tabby cat with one and three-fourths ears. His once-daily visits have dropped off recently, so the only reasonable conclusion is that he’s doing the responsible thing and staying indoors.

In addition to a small army of rats, the alley behind my apartment is home to what is possibly a groundhog, whom I’ve spotted only once from afar. Expert (and inexpert) opinions on the identification of this animal are welcome.

• 

• 

In recognition of our collective newfound familiarity with the interiors of our domiciles, I leave you with “Hello Walls” by Willie Nelson:

Greetings from the home office! I’ve always been a fan of using my laptop to run my computations on other computers in the lab or data center, so you’d think this MagAO-X Stay At Home run would be mean standard operations for me. Unfortunately, while I’m rarely at my desk in my office, I’m not usually at home. (And I miss my favorite coffee shop terribly. 😭)

Still, it’s been nice to spend some quality time with the cat. We don’t normally spend mornings together, so there was a bit of adjustment when I tried to use my desk and interfered with his morning sun-bathing.

I have been occupying myself by building some software for generating synthetic photometry. Photometry is the surprisingly subtle art of quantifying how bright a star or planet is, and synthetic photometry quantifies how bright a body could be given a model. It turns out the system of squinting at the sky and saying “gee, that’s pretty darn bright” only worked for the first few thousand years of astronomy.

(Now we say “Well, you know how bright that one star is? It’s, like, way dimmer than that.”)

This is important for the interpretation of high contrast imaging data of exoplanets, as what we measure (brightness) and what we care about (planet mass, or minimum detectable mass if no planet is found) are only related through these models.

“That’s cool about the planets, but can we get more cat content?” I hear you say.

Fear not, dear reader. Today is Friday, which means we held the XWCL group meeting over video chat. We gave April Fool’s Day a miss for this year, but we still wanted to annoy our fearless leader.

Since we have limited opportunities to bother Jared with, say, unwanted realizations of his face on canvas (in the style of the renaissance masters), we resorted to silly Snap Camera lenses. We decided “Cat on Head” was the way to go, but he one-upped us with an actual orange cat on his actual head.

This is why he makes the big bucks, while we are lowly students.

Your song of the day is “City Looks Pretty” by drone-y Aussie Courtney Barnett.

Sometimes I get sad
It’s not all that bad
One day, maybe never
I’ll come around

Let’s continue in the spirit of the blog post of yesterday with the introduction of another new member of the MagAO-X team. Last fall I finished my PhD at Leiden University in the Netherlands and I was lucky enough to get a fellowship to work at the University of Arizona. Now I do have to say that preparing for an emigration while finishing your PhD can be quite stressful. Luckily that is all done now so I could focus on settling in Tucson.

Settling in Tucson actually went a lot smoother than expected. We were a nervous about finding housing, because the housing market in the Netherlands is really in a tight spot at the moment. But it was really easy to find nice houses and apartments. Within two weeks of us arriving in Tucson we already found our current house. I would give the advice to everyone that is moving to Tucson to take an hotel / Air B&B / motel for a week or two so you can have a look at apartments and houses. You do not have to be afraid that you will not find something. After we signed the lease we needed a couple weeks to get all the standard things up and running (utilities and bank accounts etc.).

After settling in I could finally focus on working on/with MagAO-X! During my PhD in Leiden I worked most of my time on adaptive optics and high-resolution spectroscopy of exoplanets (some shameless advertisement of my thesis: https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/research/research-output/science/high-resolution-integral-field-spectroscopy-of-exoplanets ). In my remaining 2.5 years ( it has already been half a year since I left the Netherlands ?! ), I will add spectroscopic capabilities to MagAO-X. The idea is that spectroscopy can be used to increase the detection sensitivity to baby planets and to characterize the atmospheres of older more mature planets. The first case is something I have shown in an article that was published last year where we used spectroscopy to discover a second baby planet around the young star PDS 70! This was picked up by over two hundred of media articles( see for example an article by Fox News https://www.foxnews.com/science/growing-alien-worlds-spotted-planet-nursery-young-star ). My favorite article is one from a Russian website (https://www.vladtime.ru/nauka/kosmologiya/723795), where they discuss the process of cosmic IVF that aliens could use to make new planets.

The possibility of life in outer space is something that fascinates us tremendously since people thought that other planets are in fact like Earth, a physical 3D spherical clump of matter instead of just something that brightens the sky at night. The next generation of giant telescopes will enable us for the first time to search for bio-signatures on planets around other stars than our own. The technology that MagAO-X is developing will enable such observations and I am glad that I can be part of the team to do this. While we are out trying to search for life on other planets, we should not forget that life on earth is also important and we all should contribute by staying home. And maybe that is also a place where you can find life.

Staying at home in Tucson is not bad. We have a nice spacious garden, which would not be possible in the Netherlands, and the weather is currently great (a good 25 to 30 degrees Celsius, I am not sure if I will ever get used to Fahrenheit). So we are enjoying our time at home, sitting on our patio looking at all the birds flying by and enjoying the nice weather while it lasts (I wonder whether our weak Dutch skin can handle the Tucson summer).

---

The song of the day has been inspired by the alien artist impression. The composition feels like a shot out of an alien boy band to me. Therefore, to keep some kind of connection to the blog post I have selected an iconic music video from the 90’s.