Category: MagAO-X

Welcome to SPIE 2025: The Optics and Photonics version (not to be confused with the astronomical instrumentation version which happens every other year)!

We welcome you back to sunny San Diego, where I spent my first day in the airport because I initially thought that the conference began on a Monday. Instead, I was running circles around the San Diego airport (quite literally because the San Diego airport is a circle).

Following this adventure, I delivered a very special package to one Sebastiaan Haffert containing multiple MagAO-X masks.

And thus dear reader, this brings us to Day 1 (2) of the conference.

SPIE Day 1 2: Makes Sense

Today’s talks were of a sensitive nature…the wavefront sensing variety, that is. Kevin Derby of the famed University of Arizona Space Astrophysics Lab gave a talk on full-field phase retrieval (say that 3 times fast) for a space telescope.

Rico then made waves (or reconstructed wavefronts) with the one and only MagAO-X talk of SPIE 2025.

I did my best to spread the gospel of the spatially-clipped self coherent camera:

In the evening poster session, Rodrigo did a masterful job presenting MagAO-X’s latest and greatest addition:

After all of this presenting, it was time for a noteworthy celebration which involved dancing inflatable sharks, a blow-up igloo, penguin cupcakes, and steel pan covers of classic pop songs. Before you ask, this was not Katy Perry’s 2015 Super Bowl Halftime Show.

It was the iconic SPIE Welcome Reception!

SPIE Day 2 3: Cats + Dogs + Pi

We may not be in Antofagasta but this conference has gone to the dogs (or rather, the cats). The second not Sunday of SPIE featured a talk on the MEOW survey of directly imaged white dwarfs. Naturally, if the survey is named after an animal and concerns white dwarfs, Logan is involved.

Elisabeth Arcadi from Macquarie University then gave us a lesson on photonic nulling interferometry using tasty baked goods:

SPIE Day 3 4: ExAO at the Plenary + PDS 70 + Aliens + Telescopes in Space + Dune:

The third not Sunday began with Arizona astronomy being featured front and center in the plenary session courtesy of Buell:

Buell then showcased everyone’s favorite instrument:

GMagAO, GMTAO-X, GMagAO-X, MagAO, VisAO, MagAO-X (formerly known as MagAO), Not SceXAO, That Box With a lot of Stickers, MagAO-X!

Buell gave the audience an overview of all the cool work being done at Steward both on the ground and in space!

We then heard from Dr. Sug-Whan Kim who gave us a fascinating overview of Korea’s history in astronomical optics. Dr. Kim ended his plenary in the way that every talk should end: with a Dune reference.

Ramya then gave a great talk on PUFFINS (not the critically acclaimed cereal but the future UV polarimetry mission)!

SPIE Day 4 5: Dark Hole Day

The fourth not Sunday was International Dark Hole Day (I declared it so), featuring some pretty far out dark holes from Rus Belikov:

I spent a good portion of this day on the beach.

The beach in question:

SPIE Day 5 6: Need a vortex coronagraph?

On the fifth not-Sunday of SPIE, the conference gave to me…multiple vortex coronagraph talks! Unrelated, but I also bought 2 shirts this morning because I started running low.

Sebastiaan? Vortex talk.

Rico? Vortex talk.

Iva? Not a vortex talk, but this was a pretty cool wavefront control GUI from her talk on the THD2 high contrast imaging testbed:

Finally, I ended the conference with a plate of loaded fries:

Song of the Day:

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

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.

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

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The song of the day is Drops of Jupiter by Train

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?

Majority of the MagAO-X team traveled to DC in 2023 for the GMT community science meeting , so this is the second time the (partial) MagAO-X team has assembled in Washington. But this time, it’s focus on all sciences done with the not-so-giant Magellan Baade and Clay telescopes.

David Osip, the LCO Associate Director, gave the first talk of the day, which was an overview on the state of the observatory. As someone who miss out on the 2025A observing run, I got a bit emotional (just a very…small…bit), when some familiar faces showed up on the screen.

Of source, MagAO-X has made an appearance within the overview talk despite not being included in the Magellan instruments FOV slide. And the rest of the morning was filled with IFU instrument talks.

During luncheon social, Jay has found a familiar face here at the conference, Marcelo. To us who attended this conference in person, Marcelo is the one who gave a non-IFU talk earlier this morning. To those who are back home in Tucson, you may know him as the person-Jay-ran-to-for-coffee-machine-support-in-Baade-during-2025A-run. Marcelo showed us the face of Magellan, which now none of us can unsee.

All the major events happen after lunch. Logan was the first to be behind the podium and she took it away with the results of her Pup Search. Soon after her talk, Logan also presented a poster on her work on imaging planet with reflected light.

Oh, Logan didn’t just stop here. She also was the chair of third (!!!) spectroscopy session of the day and the second half of the imaging session, where Jay and I presented our work.

I started the second half of the imaging session with some protoplanets.

And the microphone was immediately handed off to Jay for some debris disks.

The rest of the afternoon was filled with talks on objects with non-negligible redshift (what even is that???).

After all the talks, we snap a quick group selfie before attending Alycia’s tour of the EPL campus.

We started the tour off in the Greenewalt building where the conference took place and got a introduction of the history of research done at Carnegie. The research span from project like The Carnegie, a ship that traveled the world to map the earth’s magnetism in the 1920s, to using radio telescopes to prove the prescence of the Earth’s iononsphere. Perhaps the one project that none of the conference attendees can ignore is the Atomic Physics Observatory (APO) located right outside the Greenewalt building. This “observatory” does not house any telescopes, but rather a Van de Graaff generator (designed by Van de Graaff himself) used for splitting the Uranium atom. And it is carefully disguised as an observatory to please the neighbors.

Jay and I got an additional tour of the research building, where Alycia’s office is located. We got to see a lot of the items used by Vera Rubin herself and visited one of Alycia’s colleague, Paul Butler, who was observing at Clay tonight. While crashing Paul’s observing run party, we “ran” into our guest blogger and TO, Carla!

The (partial) MagAO-X team and Dr. Daniel Lin, who is a collaborator of Alycia here at Carnegie, ended the night with some amazing greek food. Unfortunately, I do not have any photos during this social gathering as my phone battery was drained throughout the day for the creation and documentation of blog-tent.

Song of the Day

Already, thanks for reading my full documentation of Day 1 of the MSM, which is full of action. Now, I am ready to goodbye to editing this post and head straight to bed. So please enjoy this fantastic Good Bye.