Category: General

Coming Soon to a Workshop NYRIA

See what I did there? Heh, heh, heh. I hereby present to you a recap of the 2024 NYRIA workshop at UC San Diego–Josh style.

Day 0: Arrival

I arrived in San Diego with multiple hours to kill before my hotel check-in time. After acquiring recommendations from family members, I made my way over to the “Gaslight Quarter” (as it turns out, this is actually the Gaslamp District). I then walked into Petco Park–home of the San Diego Padres baseball team.

Despite its name, Petco Park contained no pets.

I was a bit surprised that the stadium gates were left open to the public, but I suppose the Padres team is used to letting people walk all over them.

After reaching the hotel, my roommate Gustavo and I ran to a nearby Starbucks for some last minute presentation edits/homework assignment submissions.

This late night work session was sponsored by Starbucks.

Day 1: Intros + Tours + Beach Day

On my walk to the workshop, I briefly considered dropping everything to join Saturnia, Emperor of Moths, in their rock band but I thought better of it.

A band of moths.

Maybe next time.

In the opening session, we were treated to a great presentation from Professor Quinn Konopacky on the history of UCSD. Quinn also provided us with a brief update on the status of the Gemini Planet Imager.

Unfortunately, the GPI wavefront sensor is in Indiana at the moment.

We then introduced ourselves via some stylish slides.

Jonas wins for best use of photoshop while Weerapot wins for best use of the International Space Station as a green screen.

Jonas rides an ELT-themed bicycle.
Weerapot joins us from the ISS.

We next went on lab tours, seeing many a detector and dilution fridge.

Detecting a detector with my detector (say this 3 times fast).
This fridge cools things down to millikelvin temperatures.
An old planetarium. Perhaps we can get one for the office?

Following the lab tours, it was time to kayak. Along the way, Olivier’s RTC software made an appearance.

Putting the AO in San Diego.

I have no pictures from kayaking but perhaps that is for the best. Aditya and I managed to crash into every kayak on the high seas at least once. However, we did see some seals, sea lions, and orange fish (garibaldi) so the excursion was very much worth it.

We concluded the day with pizza and smores on the beach (photos courtesy of Weerapot). Unfortunately, no green flash was spotted this time around.

Beaches are best enjoyed with pizzas, smores, and sunsets.

Day 2: Time to Get Down to Business

Day 2 began with a series of talks on instrumentation.

Christian giving a talk on EPRV.

During the lunchbreak, Professor Adam Burgasser led a DEI workshop on adopting a growth mindset. One of the prompts was ‘Your instrument was awarded $30 million…’

Here at MagAO-X, we are always employing a growth mindset.

The afternoon session featured more exciting talks. My roommate, Dr. Gustavo Ramos, fresh off of a PhD thesis defense, gave a great talk on his star recognition algorithm.

I recognize at least one star in this image.

Some additional highlights from the talk session:

I promoted Laird’s postdoc position…
…and preached the good word of iEFC.
Jayke told us about post-processing of Keck NIRC2 coronagraph images.
Dr. Briley Lewis told us about direct imaging of solar system objects.

Upon returning to my hotel, I was greeted by an ominous warning on the microwave.

This signage could have prevented many fire alarms in undergraduate dorms.

Day 3: Talks + Tacos

The morning session was filled with additional instrumentation presentations. Here are a few more highlights:

Chanisa developed a spectrograph for atmospheric + astronomical applications in Chiang Mai, Thailand.
Peyton is characterizing detectors for the Keck SCALES instrument.
Mariam works on an RV spectrograph located in the Canary Islands.

Haffert et al. (2019) count: 2

A fan favorite amongst professors whose names start with “Laird” and end with “Close.”

We were treated to a great career panel during our lunch break, featuring Professor Steph Sallum (she’s a Steward alum!) from UC Irvine, Professor Shelley Wright from UCSD, and Dr. Marie Ygouf from NASA JPL.

We then gathered outside for a group photo followed by tacos.

The sun was in my eyes, so I could not see anything.
Clarissa takes a selfie for the late arrivals table.
The gang’s all here.

Day 4: Field Trip

Thursday featured a field trip to the Palomar Observatory, sponsored by Oreos and Jersey Mike’s.

I’m growing tired of typing, so here are the sparknotes:

The Palomar telescope dome (this telescope is an old soul).
The Palomar AO system.
The telescope itself was too large to fit into my camera FOV.
The PARVI instrument housed within a very professional Styrofoam enclosure.
Photographic plate images from Palomar (photo courtesy of Weerapot).
Ben telling us about his solar tracker for PARVI.
An ABSOLUTE UNIT of a pine cone.

Day 5: More Talks, More Tacos + Closing + Green Things

Day 5 is dedicated to the color green. Thus, I present some green things:

1.) Philz Coffee

The mint leaves from my Philz Iced Mint Mojito.

2.) Our hackathon final project presentations (the prompt was to build a green telescope).

Edoardo presents the S.A.L.A.D. telescope. What is greener than salad? Nothing.
Tania presents Ice-T.
Our fantastic logo (courtesy of Dr. Mark Cunningham).

3.) Dr. Saavi Perera’s closing remarks (not green, but we’ll let it slide)

4.) The green scarecrow hats from Tacos El Gordo

A final acknowledgement goes to Danny for his great stand-up comedy throughout the workshop (not pictured because I was too busy laughing of course).

The 2024 NYRIA workshop was a great success. Perhaps we can hold a future workshop in Tucson?

Song of the Day (Week):

Te Ves Buena-El General

We interrupt your regularly scheduled blog post…

Hey MagAO-X’ers we heard you all were at an observing run, and by coincidence the Space Forcers are too! We are at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory on La Palma, Canary Islands for sodium laser beacon testing. (Initial results shown at the end if you want to skip to the good part!)

This observing run actually started at Teide observatory on Tenerife. Myself and a fellow Space Forcer Robert Johnson were doing some mission reconnaissance to check out an empty dome as a potential location for some future laser beacon experiments.

For more information on future Space Force Space Lasers see our SPIE talks 😉

Next we headed to La Palma and headed up to the observatory. The road is really curvy. Luckily the wildflowers are in bloom here so we stopped a lot to take breaks and take in the views.

Lots of flowers and lots of cool birds. Excellent time for an observing run.

And finally, after over a day straight of traveling, the Starfire team arrived at the observatory!

Starfire Optical Range Team! From left to right: Robert Johnson, Ian Kingsolver, Lauren Schatz, and Lee Kann.

The observatory itself is very dramatic. The telescopes are on one side of the mountain and right across the peak is a huge cliff into the very deep and eroded caldera.

Now onto the telescopes…. The Starfire team is working with a group of Italian and German researchers to test the new sodium laser. We are working in one of the open control rooms in the William Hershel Telescope pictured below. Our job is to perform analysis on the beacon to determine the magnitude brightness and the extent in arcseconds without turbulence. I was told last minute I had to learn astronomy and write a data reduction pipeline so thank you to Joseph and Logan for answering all my frantic questions!

We aren’t observing with the WHT. But they have a really cool new multi-object spectrograph instrument they are comissioning!
Obligatory sunset photo. Grand Canarias Telescope on the right (bigger than Keck if you really want to compare…)

Now onto the best part! The laser beacon! Tonight we are propagating at 45 Watts and hope to ramp up to 75 Watts. This is the brightest sodium laser in the world! It is really amazing to see with the naked eye.

It’s so beautiful :*)

Hope your observing run is going as well as ours!

Song of the Day:

In honor of Brian May who did his PhD observing at the Willian Hershel Telescope.

As seen in the control room kitchenette.

Goodbye Logan Noodle & BBQ party

[We love Logan but we aren’t always great at getting Blog posts out :S ]

Editor’s note: This blog post was left in “draft” status for eight months, and Logan is long since back in Tucson, but its contents are too important to leave unpublished. The management regrets this delay.

Song of the Day

“Things Still Left To Say” – Mal Blum

Congratulations M.Sc. Avalon !

Advisor Jared R. Males and Avalon McLeod

Today another shining star of the MagAO-X team has defended! We all are so happy to announce that Avalon McLeod, after powering through a triumph of a thesis and defense, now has her Masters degree in Optical science!

Ready? Set. GO!

The story of Low Order Wavefront Sensing (LOWFS) was everything a AO control theorist could ask for. We got motivation from the 2020 Decadal Survey, multiple novel acronyms, AO diagrams old and new, PSF cleanup simulations, and stunning comparisons between lab and on sky results. Even those of us who saw the on-sky prowess of the LOWFS loop our own eyes were on the edge of our seats as she revealed how quantitatively well it performed our last run.

The Classic AO Loop
SNR, STDV, and Response Matrix plot trifecta

After the public portion of the talk, everyone but the defendee and the committee were asked politely to “Get out!” We all waited patiently for the committee to decide what we’ve felt for a while, that Avalon has earned the title of a Masters Degree.

(Well, we actually didn’t wait so patiently that we could help ourselves from sneaking a peak to see if they were done yet…)

The Optical Science’s building has glass in unexpected places, which mayhaps should be expected of an optics building

Among Avalon’s many skills is ceremonial un-corking (along with LOWFS-ing, nano-fabrication, hoodie fabrication, cameo printing, and a ccapella do-whops) and we celebrated!

Cheers to Avalon!
Now that’s a grad!

Congratulations Avalon from your MagAO-X family, observing runs and lab time won’t be the same without you. We wish you the best of luck as you go on to be an Astronomer for Draper in Boston! They’re lucky to have you.

Song of the Day

“Shining Star” by Earth, Wind & Fire

Congrats Dr. Long!

Yesterday our very own Joseph Long ascended the hallowed steps of academia and become a PhD holder! The PhD defense at Steward begins with a 30 min public talk summarizing your thesis (summarize 5-6 years of work in 30 mins????), followed by a snake fight with just the committee, who then kick you out to decide your fate. Reception to follow in the venerated “Interaction Area” at Steward, the area in which we interact.

I am actually in California right now doing an internship at NASA Ames for the next 6 months. But Joseph is pretty much my best grad school friend and I have a lot of airline miles, so I hopped a quick flight for the festivities.

There’s the Catalinas in the window

The Public Talk

It was standing room only (not just because the only room he could reserve was too small…) as the audience sat in rapt attention for Giant Planets, Sirius, and Starlight Subtraction At Scale.

Not a Joseph joint without the fizzies
The homies
The plot every exoplanet talk is required by law to show.
Time to get Sirius
Joseph’s aesthetic and vital GUI interface for MagAO-X
Diffraction gif but make it cats.
A certain member of Joseph’s committee is well known for his love of orange Fanta at the telescope.

The Celebration

Of course he passed! While the OpSci grads get lovely sashes, a certain Steward postdoc-turned-faculty Kevin Hainline pioneered a slightly sillier tradition for Steward grads: an elaborate crown and cape featuring highlights of their research. If you follow this blog, you are well aware of the craftiness of some of our group members. So the troops were mobilized into action in true XWCL spirit (with heavy consultation with Kevin).

The cape is an astronomy fabric with gold letters (Avalon-printed) and plots from his papers with logos he made as well. The crown has a circus flair, and features bells on the ends, with a dumpster (I mean a MagAO-X with one too few doors on the top, oops) as the center feature. Around the base of the crown are hand-drawn (Eden-drawn) animals from the mission patches Joseph designed, each with their own crowns. Jialin also made some incredible art of Joseph, to be featured below.

The encrowning and encapening

The ‘fit

cork poppin’
Cheers
Jared’s first astronomy PhD student. He’s had all OpSci grad before this.
Three generations! Laird was Jared’s advisor.
Ewan Douglas was also a committee member. The other two joined remotely.

Joseph’s ‘rents! Two Drs Long + Dr. Capt. Mrs. Marta L. Gwinn-Long (Ret.) M.D. M.P.H.

I didn’t really get any pictures of the food! Jay Keuny’s partner Mel made incredible focaccia bread, Jay made amazing pistachio macarons, Maggie brought a lovely pie, and Jialin brought fun Asian flavor chips!

Behind the scenes

The crown begins

Eden’s amazing crowned animals
The cape begins

Avalon’s amazing craft skills on the letters

Jialin’s Joseph-inspired art projects
I made the MagAO-X and laptop from afar in San Jose

Bonus crafts

Jialin made some incredible Joseph art:

Noodle Chef Joseph
Jester Joseph. Check out the pineapple and space cats lurking in the cards.

As a congrats gift, I made as Business Viscacha, or Businesscacha, or Biscacha. Behold Bizzy Biscacha:

He’s got some serious viscacha business to get to.

The briefcase opens and there are little letters in there 😀

Bizzy in his new home, attendin’ to business.

The Future

This summer Joseph is moving to New York City to begin a postdoc software fellowship at the Flatiron Institute. He’ll still be active with MagAO-X so keep an eye on this blog to follow his adventures.

The song of the day is HAPPY!