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MagAO at 2016 SPIE Astronomical Telescopes & Instrumentation

MagAO is at the SPIE Astronomical Telescopes and Instrumentation conference in Edinburgh, Scotland this week. Instrumentation-astronomers from around the world are gathered here to talk science and engineering. The talks feature everything from detector technology, high-speed computing, and telescope operations to gravitational waves and extrasolar planets.

Edinburgh

My talk about MagAO was the first one of the conference:

My talk about the MagAO status update

Jared had two posters:

Jared’s Orbital-Differential Imaging (ODI) poster

This one is about MagAO-2k and MagAO-X:

Jared’s MagAO-2k and MagAO-X poster

And Enrico had one:

Enrico’s SOUL poster

Laird gave an invited talk about visible-light AO:

Laird’s invited talk about visible-light AO

And Armando about the new AO system for the VLT:

Armando talking about ERIS AO

We took the opportunity of all being in the same place to plan our MagAO upgrade to 2 kilohertz, called MagAO-2k.

The MagAO team meets to plan our next engineering run for the MagAO-2k upgrade

Some more pictures from around the conference:

Claire Max and her current and former students

Proof that Jared and Olivier are in the same room together

UA grad student Asher Baltzell gave a talk in the Cyberinfrastructure section about his work creating a cloud-computing software package to detect exoplanets in MagAO data. This work was featured in this video by Cyverse:

Finally, check out the SPIE post about the conference here. Look for me, Asher, and MagAO in there!

2016B Engineering Only

Just a quick reminder for MagAO users who may be considering submitting a telescope proposal in the near future: MagAO will not be available for general use in the 2016B semester. The system will be on the telescope during the semester, but for engineering work only. This work includes recalibration, and installation of the MagAO-2K upgrades: more modes controlled, faster speed (up to 2000 Hz), and installation and commissioning of a new detector for Clio.

2016A: Home

We all made it home safely. Carefully packing my purse the first time I left the house, I remembered my keys and phone… but forgot my wallet — oh yeah, you need money to acquire goods in the non-mountain economy! At least I remembered I DIDN’T need my flashlight.

Blue Aloe is flowering

This 3-song mashup is so beautiful that my head fills in the other 2 songs when I hear 1 of the songs on the radio:

2016A Day 22: Keep On Turning

Our last day at LCO (this time) was a critter filled day.

A Chilean rose tarantula was trying to snuggle with Laird in his bed. Laird said no. When last seen, the spider was headed towards Katie’s room, but then it disappeared.
A culebra de cola larga crossing the road. Don’t worry, they’re only moderately venomous.
On our last day we saw our first clean room vizzy. It’s not like we haven’t spent any time there.

The Guanaco herd, complete with youngun, made an appearance. The pictures didn’t turn out though.

Today we packed up a lot of stuff.

After all these years and stressful times, my advisor and I still enjoy bonding over packing and sorting.

Some things were more carefully packed than others.

I hope everybody reads the sign.

So long LCO. See you next time.

Don’t worry vizzy. This isn’t our last sunset at LCO. I promise.

Made of Silver. Once.