Home of MagAO and MagAO-X.
As originally reported on the Steward Observatory website, and archived here for posterity:
On Jan 17, NBA Hall of Famer, one of “50 Greatest Players in NBA History,” and iconic Deadhead Bill Walton came to town to be the color commentator for the UA-Oregon men’s basketball game. Whenever Walton is a commentator ESPN has a 2-minute feature called “Walton’s World.” In this episode, Bill visited the MagAO-X lab at Steward!
This is a late post, but on November 16, 2018, Kelsey Miller successfully defended her Ph.D. dissertation! Congratulations, Dr. Miller!
Kelsey’s research is on Linear Dark Field Control (LDFC), a focal plane wavefront sensing technique where she monitors the bright field speckles and uses their linear nature to maintain stability in the dark hole. She has been developing LDFC using the MagAO-X pupil and vAPP coronagraph design. You can learn more about Kelsey’s work in LDFC (JATIS, arXiv) and how LDFC will work with MagAO-X (SPIE, arXiv).
Kelsey is off to cooler climates at Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands, who have been our collaborators with the vAPP coronagraph. She will be a postdoctoral researcher with Frans Snik, continuing her work on LDFC to get it working on sky. We will miss you tremendously!
On September 17, 2018, we got our first look at the MagAO-X vAPP (that’s “vector apodizing phase plate”) coronagraph optic. Kelsey Miller had been working with the phase pattern for a long time, but there’s something special about holding it with your own hands. Or, at any rate, watching the P.I. hold it with his own hands.
This past week, the MagAO-X team attended the SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation conference in Austin, TX. Here’s a recap of all of our presentations at the conference.
Let’s start off with the talks. Jared kicked off our presentation collection with a talk on the MagAO-X update:
Laird gave an update on MagAO:
Kelsey gave a fantastic talk on the vAPP for MagAO-X and Linear Dark Field Control:
Lauren gave an awesome talk on her PyWFS PYRITE sims:
Justin presented PIAACMC designs for SCExAO/GMT/MagAO-X:
The rest of us had poster presentations:
Here’s some shenanigans from the conference and in Austin:
Jared’s talk crashed several times once during his presentation. It turns out, LibreOffice and the SPIE talk upload system disagree with each other, particularly with how to handle Lauren’s 700 KB flaming logo. When transitioning to the next talk, MagAO-X refused to leave the screen.
According to Laird, later in the week, Lauren’s MagAO-X logo came back to shutdown another talk. The computer tried to “recover” Jared’s talk and so the solution was to kill it outright. MagAO-X came back with a vengeance it seems.
In accordance to the SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation 2016 conference, this time Jared and Olivier were sitting together as opposed to being in the same room at the same time:
Despite the heat and humidity, Austin was a great conference location.
And so concludes SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation 2018. It was a fantastic time seeing everyone, meeting new people, attending talks, and presenting research. To close off, here’s a quote from the MagAO-X PI:
Jared: “All deficiencies in your presentations have been noted and will be addressed in due course.”
We left LCO 48 hours ago.
When we got to La Florida airport in La Serena, it was foggy. And it got foggier. So as we waited for our plane to land so we could board it and travel home, we slowly lost sight of the runway. Then we heard the plane as it buzzed the runway and decided it couldn’t land. That’s a bad feeling.
The official hotel of MagAO, the Casino Enjoy, was full. So we had to downgrade and check into the Costa Real — a.k.a. the GPI hotel.
We ended up with essentially the same itinerary, 24 hours later. So we got some time for a walk around La Serena.
It’s actually been 5 or so years since we bothered to spend time in La Serena. La Recova is the same.
We are now in Dallas. As we landed at 5 am this morning we were greated to notifications that our flight to Tucson was delayed 20 minutes. The delay has continued to grow.
Our next major problem was that the first officer’s chair was broken. We were actually buckled in and ready to go, then they kicked us off to repair the chair. Deplaning number 1.
So. Next. We got on the plane, a little faster having rehearsed once. Everything looked good. Pushed back, taxied for a while, and then stopped. After sitting for a bit, the skipper got back on and started with “Well folks, I guess it’s one of those days . . .” Apparently a fuel gage problem, so we pulled back to a (different) gate.
And then the cops boarded the plane. Yeah.
So we aren’t home yet. We’re back in the terminal in DFW, waiting to board a different plane and try again. We are making lots of friends here in the refugee camp, and AA is giving out free food.
I don’t know where I’ll be tomorrow. I’ll probably still be wearing the same clothes though.
Update:
I’ve been trying to make it home
Got to make it, before too long
Oh I can’t take this, very much longer…
We finally made it:
I’ll admit that I expected my Uber to break down the whole way home.