Category: MagAO-X

GMagAO-X just hit another big milestone, we just finished up its Preliminary Design Review (PDR). If you haven’t been to one before, a PDR is a chance for a design to be critiqued and tweaked before moving on. If a project does well on its PDR, it’ll have good reason to be funded and moved to its next phase, the Final Design Review (FDR). If the committee finds it needs more work, an instrument might have another PDR in its future (this has happened to a few other ELT instruments).

Our hope is that GMagAO-X becomes a first light instrument at the GMT, and the PDR is a huge first step.

A huge thanks to the committee members who made their way to Tucson to give their expertise to the exercise:

• Antonin Bouchez (who previously worked with GMT AO, and now is the director of AO at Keck)
• Dimitri Mawet (PI for KPIC, the High contrast fiber fed instrument at Caltech)
• Mike Bottom (UHawaii)
• Markus Kasper (ESO)
• Alan Uomoto (Carnegie Observatory)

The two days were filled with talks about everything from science motivation, to optical design, to predicted schedule and budgeting. We got to do it all in Steward’s historic dome, specially outfitted for the experience.

Since we had them out here in Tucson, the festivities got to include gadgets like a to scale model of of the GMagAO-X design, a non-functional 3K like the ones planned on in the design, and the patented optical locking clamp. Maggie also got a chance to show off the HCAT bench, for some hands on learning.

This was also a good chance for the rest of the team to catch up on where the GMagAO-X project is at.

Thank you again to all the people who put in the work to pull the two days of review together, the committee for their attention and helpful comments. GmagAO-X is a stronger instrument because of the PDR!

Song of the Day

Hello from Arizonans in California! I just got back from the UC Santa Cruz Center for Adaptive Optics (CfAO) Fall retreat, where members of the AO work through some of the pressing problems in the field. This year was focused on High Contrast imaging testbeds, lessons learned from Magellan’s MagAO-X and Subaru’s SCExAO and what might be in the cards for Keck, and a round up of adaptive Secondary progress – LBTO, MMT, and the future of IRTF, KECK, and beyond.

Some of the likely suspects were around, namely Jacob and Robin from UToronto representing MMT calibration work and Sam Ragland from LBTO operations. Thanks to a very generous student scholarship from the workshop organizers, I was able to attend and represent MagAO-X’s progress.

Sam’s update on the LBT’s progress was some of the most concrete work concerning a long-term Facility adaptive secondary, in this case using adOptica technology. Sam discussed the re-coating of the secondary, and future plans, including adopting an ASM from CHile, close to this group’s heart.

Jacob got the longest student talk of the conference, and got to spend an hour discussing his method for calibrating on sky. A key difference between the LBTO and other telescopes discussed being that LBTO is a Gregorian design with an intermediate focus that allows for daytime calibrations of their secondary. MAPS and systems like IRTF and Keck are Cassegrain design with no focuses before the primary, and can only take calibration matrices on a bright star on sky. Making the operating software and calibration procedure robust in the meantime is a huge step towards making these systems reliable and facility class.

We also got one last GMT talk from Antonin, who has recently moved from his role on GMT to the AO scientist for the Keck twin 10ms. He gave an update on the current design of the GMT adaptive secondaries, which will be using a similar technology to what’s currently on LBT. In fact, we learned that the rigorous modeling and testing on the GMT prototypes solved a resonance issue that LBT had unexplained.

I cannot express how grateful I am to have a community that shares and collaborates as this one does. Even though MagAO-X is already built, there’s a lot to learn from the discussions that Keck is having about their own testbed. As in, what areas of interest are already met by our technology? What new avenues are being pursued? And where do all fit in the the US high contrast family?

Thank you to everyone who made this conference so fruitful! And to the organizing committee for the student scholarship.

Song of the Day

I suspect all of our readers will be aware that last Saturday there was an eclipse event over the US. At 9:30 am Tucson Time was the peak of the annular eclipse, an eclipse where the moon is at the furthest point on its orbit, called apogee, so the disk of the moon is a smaller angular size on the sky than the sun (where normally they are essentially the same size) so it doesn’t block the whole disk and you can’t see the corona. Instead you get a “ring of fire” caused by the moon’s antumbra on the Earth’s surface.

Tucson was not in the area of max shadow, it only got about 80% coverage. So some XWCL members traveled to regions getting the full antumbra effect.

I met up with XWCL alum Lauren Schatz and UA OpSci grad Silvana Ovaitt. When Lauren was at XWCL she was my hiking and camping buddy, so we reunited for more L&L adventures by camping in Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park!

We also went on a backcountry guided tour off the public access road and led by a local named Larry

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Song of the day is Black Hole Sun by Soundgarden.