Category: MagAO-X

AO Summer School Part I: Santa Cruisin’

Don’t worry, folks–we’ve heard your begging and pleading for more XWCL #blogtent, and the time has finally come. This blogbuster series will come in (at least) three installments, each from a different POV, as we embark on our one-week AO crash course here at the University of California, Santa Cruz. We’re pulling out all the stops: a brand-new cast of guest stars, some of the old regulars, top-tier science, and (with a little luck) a banana slug or two. Buckle up.

No, seriously, buckle up. It turns out that Highway 17 between San Jose and Santa Cruz is no joke, and we were in for quite the ride to UCSC campus. California traffic may be a little foreign to me, but even I could tell that something was up as our Uber driver bobbed and weaved through gridlock in residential neighborhoods for the first 20 minutes. Turns out there was a wreck blocking all traffic down the highway and into town, so our driver did what any rational driver would do: he put the car in park, set his iPad on the dashboard, and we all watched Happy Gilmore 2. If you haven’t seen the movie, I will say that I believe dashboard iPad (with the addition of both Spanish subtitles and English Audio Description) was the way the director intended for it to be seen. No photos were taken of this experience, so you’ll just have to trust me–it was ethereal.

Day 1 of summer school was all about introductions: introducing ourselves to the other participants, introducing the instructors, and introducing the foundations of adaptive optics. We’ve quickly made friends with AO aficionados from all over: Canada, Hawaii, Australia, Finland, and South Korea, to name a few. Josh and Parker really hit it off with some new non-human friends as well.

reveling in the luxury of wearing hoodies
while I studied for quals, everyone else went to a … hammock bar? that served … “elixirs”?
he bowled a turkey the other day
do NOT pet

Parker and I got to give 1-minute pitches for our posters, which will hang up all week as fuel for discussions during coffee breaks:

yay for matching MagAO-X templates!

The agenda was packed: In the morning, Dr. Rebecca Jensen-Clem gave an overview introduction to Adaptive Optics for astronomy, and we played a card game themed around closing the loop on an AO system at Gemini North.

was I a little skeptical about this idea at first? yes. did I end up liking it so much i kind of want to make my own? … perhaps.

In the afternoon session, we had a crash course on geometric and physical optics by Dr. Renate Kupke as well as an intro to AO for vision science by Dr. Nicole Putnam. We learned a ton about the human eye, and about how to look cool in silly glasses:

quick quiz: is it a positive or a negative lens? (answer in hover text)
seeing double

The day rounded out with a reception at the Center for Adaptive Optics, where two very exciting things happened:

1. We got to use a really nifty wavefront sensor system to measure the aberrations in our own eyes. We’ll get to use the aberration maps and Zernike coefficients calculated by the system in vision science workshops later in the week. This is the kind of geeky biodata I absolutely love. Who else out there gets to measure their eye’s PSF?

not pictured: parker being informed his pupils are enormous

2. There was a cheese platter. There was a large cheese platter. There was a large cheese platter that remained mostly untouched throughout the evening. I’m pretty sure you can guess who volunteered to bring the extras back to his dorm. A dream come true.

Since this is the first blog post of this trip, I get to make the rules. I’ll keep it simple and on theme: since we’re enjoying the lovely geography so much, the song of the day must be related to California in some way.

Old Hollywood – Julian Casablancas

Sagan Summer Workshop 2025: Silver Jubilee, yipee!

Imagine, if you would, the beautiful Caltech Campus. Imagine, if you would be so generous, a population of exoplanets. Imagine, if you would be so kind, the beautiful minds of exoplanet scientists convening for the 25th year in a row.

That should put you in the mood for this very hypothetical blog post. Both in that the SSW of 2025 was about exoplanet populations, which inherently include speculation and projection, and also in that I forgot to take any sensible photos, so you’re going to have to paint some mental images for yourself.

The beautiful Caltech campus. Theoretically filled with exoplanet enthusiasts for the workshop.
(Photo courtesy of Gabe Weible)

The crux of most SSWs are to help younger generations of researchers connect with a topic in exoplanets through lectures and hands on activities. Discussions are more fundamental than you would get from a typical conference and talks are staged to build on each other throughout the week.

This year was a celebration of hitting 25 sagan workshops, and so was an overview of how each detection method has aided our understanding of the whole of exoplanet populations. Take a wild guess at the favorite plot….

THE observation demographics plot. Plot taken from Christoph Mordasini’s “Demographics Synthesis” Talk

The best part of the Sagan Workshop series is that they’re truly meant to be a resource. There are no registration fees and all the talks are posted online after. So I’ll present my chef’s choice from this year with links if you’d like to relive it yourself.

Slide from Josh Winn’s talk on Transiting exoplanet surveys.

If you’d like to know more about the biases in transiting exoplanet surveys, I highly recommend Josh Winn’s talk Twenty-Five Years of Transiting Planets (Video). He steps through a map of our transit detections through the years and different missions, which really helps contextualize how mission planning shapes the science we use for demographics. The selected slide above is, admittedly, a spoiler for to his very well-crafted narrative.

How many of these have we pointed MagAO-X at?

Of course, I’m contractually obligated to serve up the Direct Imaging talk on this menu. Not only because it really helped put my own work in context, or that all our favorite systems got a shout out, but the speaker Eric Neilson is a former Laird grad student. Check out Eric’s run down of the state of the feild here: Detection Techniques: Direct Imaging (Video)

Tim discussing what affects the certainties in astrometry measurements.
(Slide from Tim Brandt’s talk)

Tim Brandt’s talk on absolute astrometry finally got me to understand exactly what the hub-bub around Gaia is about. Tim turned my vague notions on astrometry to appreciation for the nuances and limitation of the genre. Highly recommend this talk for a brush up: Detecting and Weighing Exoplanets with Absolute Astrometry (Video)

The quilted together occurrence rate conclusion for this demographics talk.

Finally, I really enjoyed Brendan Bowler’s talk on Gas Giant Demographics (Video). We talk a lot about the distinct populations each technique can study, but this was a really interesting way of tying what each technique gives us for a given population. Gas giants at different separations and ages are approached in different ways, but are quilted together in a great summary here. The talk is also just very expertly crafted, an instant resource.

In addition to the educational talk series, there were also posters and short advertisements for poster pops. I gave my poster on the direct imaging work MagAO-X has been doing on Beta Pic b. Imagine I gave a poster pop and had actually taken a photo, it might look something like:

Apologies to my friend Shishir, who was originally the subject of this image.

I also had great conversations over the poster session, across a variety of active research projects. With some stretch of the imagination, that poster session could have looked something like:

A satisfying update on our Beta Pic b Project, pushing bluer than any other project has gotten on the darling hot Jupiter.

It’s true that this year was not necessarily the most on topic for us, but the workshop was a good reminder how far the field of exoplanets has come in my lifetime, and how bright the future is with Gaia DR3, PLATO, HWO, and more.

Song of the week:

“Sagan’s Song” by Emily Davis

AstroTech: Building Community and Building Instruments

For those unfamiliar with AstroTech, it is a weeklong summer school at UC Berkeley designed to teach the next generation of students how to design and build astronomical instruments, while being collaborative and inclusive.

The first few days of summer school started with multiple lectures on astronomy and optics-based content, along with a number of hands-on labs that taught us some of the specialized skills needed to build an instrument including: optomechanics, software design, calibration hardware, detectors, and electronics.

Once everyone had a solid background of the specializations we broke into teams of five to brainstorm science cases that spectrographs would be useful for. In an attempt to think of a unique science case, our group settled with a spectrograph design capable of covering the entire optical spectrum to classify asteroids by their spectral shape but also be able to distinguish between CN and CO signatures. This led us to a more complex design that involved having optical components moving on stages.

While this may sound trivial, the challenging part came when we were only given 10 hours over the course of two days to design, build, test, and present this working spectrograph. This is where the topic of collaboration and teamwork are of the utmost importance. Hence, one of key objectives of the summer school and something we spent time learning and practicing everyday was inclusive teamwork.

Within our teams, each person was responsible for one of the five specialty groups. I worked on developing the software pipeline the read in flats, darks, and science fits files, and processed raw science data. The code then plotted the entire spectra, identified known emission lines in our calibration source, and determined the wavelength solution that maps the x-axis from the pixel domain to the wavelength domain.

One of the most valuable takeaways from this experience will be the opportunity to build connections with a wide range of individuals from leaders in academia, government, and industry to my peers who will shape the next generation of astronomy instrumentation.

While the days were packed with learning and networking, I still found time in the early mornings and late evenings to explore. One highlight was reconnecting with a high school friend who works for the Cal football team. He gave me an incredible tour of the stadium and locker rooms, which resulted in my closet being overstocked with Cal shirts. I also spent most evenings out with the great friends I made during my time there, including one excursion that led to an underwhelming visit to the Golden Gate Bridge.

I will wrap this blog up and leave you with a couple photos from the beautiful Berkeley campus!

Song of the Day

MSM Day End: The future

Hi I’m here to blog the third and final day of the Magellan Science Meeting. It was a short day, the meeting officially ended after lunch. We spent the morning with talks focused on the future of the observatory and current and upcoming instruments. Including G-CLEF, a high resolution spectrometer designed to be coupled to GMagAO-X on the GMT, to feed diffraction-limited 25.4m primary sized PSFs into fibers for getting high high high contrast spectra of planet atmospheres in reflected light, specifically targeting the O2 absorption line on something like Proxima Centauri b. IF Prox b has an atmosphere and IF G-CLEF + GMagAO-X can achieve contrasts of 10 billion and IF there is life on Prox b then we MIGHT see a deep O2 absorption line. A high risk observation but the highest of rewards! Oh, and IF GMT gets built. Melting-face-emoji. Until then G-CLEF is planning to travel to Magellan to be coupled to our favorite child MagAO-X.

Andrew Szentgyorgyi talking about G-CLEF

We said goodbye to Jay in the middle of the morning as he is flying off home.

The meeting concluded with discussion groups focused open questions for the future of Magellan. Some of the major topics under discussion: 1. How do we handle the numerous incredible and in-demand instruments that all want to live on the Nasmyth West platform for long times, including yours-truly, 2. How do we handle interruptions for targets-of-opportunity, such as supernovae that need to be observed immediately once they go off, and how do we compensate observers who lost time due to the interruptions, 3. Is there a better way to handle scheduling than giving someone one full night when they may only need 2 hours at the same time over multiple nights. This last one hasn’t affected us so much since we run our own mini-queue during MagAO-X’s blocks, so we can accommodate those types of things, but it is definitely a problem with other instruments and observers.

Then it was lunch and then it was time to go. Jialin and I are both boarding trains to New York, although not the same train… Shrug. Jialin is meeting her mom and they are bopping around NYC, I’m meeting blog-favorite Dr. Joseph Daniel Long for a visit to Flatiron Institute, and a little bopping around as well, as a treat. Jialin got a happy meal at the train station.

One thing I really enjoyed about this conference is even though it was a diverse set of science topics, everyone was doing observing. The speakers did a really good job talking to the diverse audience and making every talk accessible and interesting to folks from different fields. It was nice to see how everyone was using all the numerous instruments and expansive science impact of the observatory we all know and love. Special thanks to Dr Johanna Teske for all the hard work she did to put this together while also supporting the ongoing PFS run!

Catch you later peeps

The song of the day is Drops of Jupiter by Train

MSM Day 2: Instruments galore

Spring is a great time to be in DC (when it isn’t raining…!). The day started with a typical spring morning in DC and maybe some slight mechanical issues with a certain dishwasher, but we made the ~8 min commute to the Earth and Planets Lab campus without a hitch soon after.

After coffee and light snacks, the morning session was ripe with ienteresting talks from the transiting exoplanet community, which was nice to see. Eventually we broke for lunch where we had some sick mediterranean food and engaged in some colorful dicussions on asteroid mining.

Immediately after lunch Alycia gave her talk on the new upcoming spectroscopic instrument, MagNIFIES. I didn’t realize that this instrument is essentially GMTNIRS and will be installed on one of the Magellans as we wait for GMT, great plan.

We were all treated with a glimpse of CAD Alycia…! Don’t be fooled, but if you suspect that you are, CAD Alycia is apparently ~4 inches taller than her true height. So that’s the distinguishing feature, FYI.

The rest of this session detailed new and upcoming instruments for the Magellan telescopes and was (for me) the most interesting session of the day. In particular, there was a talk on a new instrument (LIGHTSPEED) that makes use of one of the new Hamamatsu qCMOS cameras that had me on the edge of my seat…! Those cameras are impressive (and cheap) pieces of imaging technology.

In the afternoon, a subset of the attendees coalesced and had a nice discussion on efforts towards exoplanet science at Magellan. It was recognized that one of the current drawbacks for the community is a shortage of ports for all the various instruments, and there was some discussion about moving LDSS3 to a permanent position on one of the reinforced auxilary ports in addition to removing Four Star from the other Clay nasmyth platform.

Jialin, being the talented multitasker that she is, juggled participating in the discussion with managing her final exams.

After the breakout sessions, I had a super meeting with Alycia and her postdoc Daniel about our most recent efforts studying the dust that makes up the HR4796 disk. Recall, there isn’t a single grain model that can explain both the scattering function *and* and spectrum across all the data collected on this system so far. Our most recent observing runs have given us some really good data that should really help solve this problem.

We ended conference activities by eating Ukrainian food at a local restaurant with Lennart van Slujis, who is from the Netherlands (now a Univ. of Michigan postdoc) and apparently has attended lectures given by Sebastiaan. Astro is such a small world.

We would like to thank Alycia very much for her hospitality and hosting us during the duration of this conference. Of course, Jialin and I quickly found that the best way to end the work day at Alycia’s house was with a few intense bouts of air hocky and foosball!

Song of the Day

How about some early 2000’s action courtesy of John Mayer?