Category: MagAO-X

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Hello, and thanks for joining me. Today marks the end of week three of self-isolation and quarantine for a lot of us here in Tucson. Based on what I have been seeing on social media and my own personal experience, a lot of us are starting to get a bit stir crazy from staying at home everyday. The self-isolation survival advice that I have heard the most is to try and cultivate a new hobby. For me, I have started playing Stardew Valley, a farming simulator game. A lot of hobbies however, require a lot more materials then a video game, making it frustrating and expensive to start up a new one. I thought I would share one of my oldest hobbies, painting. I may be Blog Ross, but I am no Bob Ross. Regardless I will try and step you through a simple painting, and give some advice on how to start painting using cheaper materials to keep the cost down.

A lot of us are missing astronomy and the great outdoors. Today I thought it would be nice to combine the two into a simple night sky in the desert painting. To give you a preview of what we will be painting today, here is my finished result.

To start, collect your materials.

For this painting I used five colors of acrylic paint: black, white, cadmium red hue, cadmium yellow hue, and cerulean blue hue.

My favorite brand of paint is Winsor & Newton Galeria Acylic. This is found in the Level 2: Artist section in Michaels. Almost all of my canvas, paints, and brushes are from this section. I have bought from their Level 3: professional level but couldn’t see a noticeable increase in quality to justify the steep increase in price. I do see a big increase in quality from the Level 1: Academic, and the price increase isn’t much between level 1 and 2 so I do suggest investing a little if you plan to continue painting.

Brushes: I used four of my go to brushes for this painting. A medium sized brush with a rounded tip, a small brush with a clean square edge, a fan brush, and a tiny detail brush.

Other materials: palette (a plastic TV dinner tray from the dollar store is a good alternative), and some water.

I used a canvas sheet that can be bought in a pad, as a cheaper alternative to a full canvas. I taped it to a board, and then drew some reference lines. I looked up some photos of saguaros for inspiration, and based the rock features off of Javelina Rocks at Saguaro National Park East.

To start painting we work from the background to the foreground. For our base color mix a Navy/dark-purple (2 parts blue, 1 part red, and a little black). Paint onto canvas using an up and down stroke, all the way to the rocks and around the saguaro. (I didn’t go all the way because I wanted to add a sunset effect that I decided later on was unnecessary and fixed that mistake). If you accidentally get some in your saguaro or rocks it is not a problem.

Looking at long exposure photos of the night sky, we see that it is not a uniform color. To add contrast mix 2 parts blue and 1 part red. Taking the medium size brush with the rounded edge, use a dabbing brush stroke over the background color. Don’t completely cover the background.

With the leftover paint from the last step, add in a little bit of white (should be: 2 parts blue, 1 part red, a little white). Dab onto canvas again, concentrating the density to the band where you want the Milky Way to be.

To start making the Milky Way I mixed a lavender color ( 1 part white, with a little bit of equal parts blue and red). I used a back and forth brush stroke to make a line/ steak effect. You could probably continue dabbing the color on if you like that look more. Put this color over where you want the Milky Way to be. Over the lighter color you just laid down, add some darker color for the dust lanes in the Milky Way. I used dark purple (1 part red, 1 part blue, a little black), but dark blue would work too.

Now I took my smaller brush with the square edge and white paint, and added highlights and small dust clouds to my Milky Way. I used both small dabbing brush strokes, and some half-circle brush stokes. There is a bright bulge in the Milky Way that faces towards the ground. Decide where you want the bulge and concentrate more white in that area. There is a second smaller bulge on the opposite side at that location. If you go too wild with the white (like I did) go back in with your dark purple or blue and add back in some dust lanes.

Looking at photos of the Milky Way, near the bulge the color is more yellow and less white. Mix a very light yellow (1 part white, a little yellow), and add in some yellow to your light spots. I used my fine detail brush to do this. I then went back over the edges of the yellow parts I put down with some white, to blend the colors a little better. I used a dabbing brush stroke for this.

Once you are happy with how your Milky Way looks (maybe adding in more dust lanes, maybe more bright spots) its time to add stars! Mix white paint with water (something like 2 parts water, 1 part white). Mix it well so that there are no clumps, should look like milk. Take the fan brush, or any large, flat brush and using your fingers flick the hairs of the brush to create the stars. If this explanation is confusing you can find a tutorial on YouTube. Do this until you are satisfied. I found that this made a lot of really small stars, so I took my small fine detail brush and added in some larger stars concentrating them in the Milky Way. I added a lot of these white stars into the brighter areas of the Milky Way.

As we know from astronomy stars aren’t all the same color, so lets give the white stars some friends. Mix some light blue (1 part white, a little blue), and using the fine detail brush add in some blue stars. Concentrate these outside of the Milky Way. I even added 2 or 3 red stars.

At this point my painting looks like the image below. (Noticed I fixed that mistake I made earlier. Acylic is great for beginners because it is very forgiving).

Now it is time to paint in the rocks and the saguaro! Take black paint and the small brush with the clean square edge and fill in the saguaro and rocks with black. I decided to mix a little bit of blue into the black for one of the rocks, so it would look like one rock is in the foreground, and the other in the background.

Now wait for the painting to dry, then add in your signature and it is done!

And don’t forget the important last step, give the painting to a friend who is struggling with isolation :). (While maintaining proper social distancing guidelines.)

Happy painting,

Blog Ross

Here is a relaxing song to paint to for the song of the day.

It’s the first Saturday since the stay-at-home orders were announced, and I’m unwinding this weekend by, well, staying at home. Unlike most of the MagAO-X team, I’m sheltering not in Tucson but instead in my occasional residence in a corner of DC (where stay-at-home orders went into effect just a few hours after AZ). Fortunately, MagAO-X is set up for remote operation, and I can amuse myself by spinning filter wheels and commanding deformable mirrors from the other side of the country.

Since there’s relatively little of astronomical or optical interest within my apartment, and in keeping with blog tradition, I’m dedicating this short blog post to the flora and fauna found within my immediate vicinity (my apartment and the surrounding ~50 ft).

Flora

Since I can’t be in Tucson, I’ve been attempting to reproduce the Tucson biome on my desk with a collection of cacti and other succulents. It’s not quite spiky or perilous enough yet, so my next task will be figuring out how to relocate and squeeze a 30 ft saguaro into my living room.

Fauna

Wild beasts also roam these lands and occasionally drop by for treats. The most frequent visitor is a well-fed (but always hungry) tabby cat with one and three-fourths ears. His once-daily visits have dropped off recently, so the only reasonable conclusion is that he’s doing the responsible thing and staying indoors.

In addition to a small army of rats, the alley behind my apartment is home to what is possibly a groundhog, whom I’ve spotted only once from afar. Expert (and inexpert) opinions on the identification of this animal are welcome.

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In recognition of our collective newfound familiarity with the interiors of our domiciles, I leave you with “Hello Walls” by Willie Nelson:

Greetings from the home office! I’ve always been a fan of using my laptop to run my computations on other computers in the lab or data center, so you’d think this MagAO-X Stay At Home run would be mean standard operations for me. Unfortunately, while I’m rarely at my desk in my office, I’m not usually at home. (And I miss my favorite coffee shop terribly. 😭)

Still, it’s been nice to spend some quality time with the cat. We don’t normally spend mornings together, so there was a bit of adjustment when I tried to use my desk and interfered with his morning sun-bathing.

I have been occupying myself by building some software for generating synthetic photometry. Photometry is the surprisingly subtle art of quantifying how bright a star or planet is, and synthetic photometry quantifies how bright a body could be given a model. It turns out the system of squinting at the sky and saying “gee, that’s pretty darn bright” only worked for the first few thousand years of astronomy.

(Now we say “Well, you know how bright that one star is? It’s, like, way dimmer than that.”)

This is important for the interpretation of high contrast imaging data of exoplanets, as what we measure (brightness) and what we care about (planet mass, or minimum detectable mass if no planet is found) are only related through these models.

“That’s cool about the planets, but can we get more cat content?” I hear you say.

Fear not, dear reader. Today is Friday, which means we held the XWCL group meeting over video chat. We gave April Fool’s Day a miss for this year, but we still wanted to annoy our fearless leader.

Since we have limited opportunities to bother Jared with, say, unwanted realizations of his face on canvas (in the style of the renaissance masters), we resorted to silly Snap Camera lenses. We decided “Cat on Head” was the way to go, but he one-upped us with an actual orange cat on his actual head.

This is why he makes the big bucks, while we are lowly students.

Your song of the day is “City Looks Pretty” by drone-y Aussie Courtney Barnett.

Sometimes I get sad
It’s not all that bad
One day, maybe never
I’ll come around

Let’s continue in the spirit of the blog post of yesterday with the introduction of another new member of the MagAO-X team. Last fall I finished my PhD at Leiden University in the Netherlands and I was lucky enough to get a fellowship to work at the University of Arizona. Now I do have to say that preparing for an emigration while finishing your PhD can be quite stressful. Luckily that is all done now so I could focus on settling in Tucson.

Settling in Tucson actually went a lot smoother than expected. We were a nervous about finding housing, because the housing market in the Netherlands is really in a tight spot at the moment. But it was really easy to find nice houses and apartments. Within two weeks of us arriving in Tucson we already found our current house. I would give the advice to everyone that is moving to Tucson to take an hotel / Air B&B / motel for a week or two so you can have a look at apartments and houses. You do not have to be afraid that you will not find something. After we signed the lease we needed a couple weeks to get all the standard things up and running (utilities and bank accounts etc.).

After settling in I could finally focus on working on/with MagAO-X! During my PhD in Leiden I worked most of my time on adaptive optics and high-resolution spectroscopy of exoplanets (some shameless advertisement of my thesis: https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/research/research-output/science/high-resolution-integral-field-spectroscopy-of-exoplanets ). In my remaining 2.5 years ( it has already been half a year since I left the Netherlands ?! ), I will add spectroscopic capabilities to MagAO-X. The idea is that spectroscopy can be used to increase the detection sensitivity to baby planets and to characterize the atmospheres of older more mature planets. The first case is something I have shown in an article that was published last year where we used spectroscopy to discover a second baby planet around the young star PDS 70! This was picked up by over two hundred of media articles( see for example an article by Fox News https://www.foxnews.com/science/growing-alien-worlds-spotted-planet-nursery-young-star ). My favorite article is one from a Russian website (https://www.vladtime.ru/nauka/kosmologiya/723795), where they discuss the process of cosmic IVF that aliens could use to make new planets.

The possibility of life in outer space is something that fascinates us tremendously since people thought that other planets are in fact like Earth, a physical 3D spherical clump of matter instead of just something that brightens the sky at night. The next generation of giant telescopes will enable us for the first time to search for bio-signatures on planets around other stars than our own. The technology that MagAO-X is developing will enable such observations and I am glad that I can be part of the team to do this. While we are out trying to search for life on other planets, we should not forget that life on earth is also important and we all should contribute by staying home. And maybe that is also a place where you can find life.

Staying at home in Tucson is not bad. We have a nice spacious garden, which would not be possible in the Netherlands, and the weather is currently great (a good 25 to 30 degrees Celsius, I am not sure if I will ever get used to Fahrenheit). So we are enjoying our time at home, sitting on our patio looking at all the birds flying by and enjoying the nice weather while it lasts (I wonder whether our weak Dutch skin can handle the Tucson summer).

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The song of the day has been inspired by the alien artist impression. The composition feels like a shot out of an alien boy band to me. Therefore, to keep some kind of connection to the blog post I have selected an iconic music video from the 90’s.

Greetings blog world. You haven’t heard from me yet, because this is my first post here on the XWCL blog! First let me introduce myself. I joined the group last fall as a new 1st year graduate student at Steward Observatory at Univ of Arizona in Tucson. I came from the glorious University of Texas at Austin, where I worked with a group there studying directly-imaged low mass companions to young stars with the Keck telescope. So joining the MagAO-X team was a no-brainer. I plan to continue to study how stars and planets form with MagAO-X and MagAO-classic for my PhD work. You can see my science at my website www.loganpearcescience.com

Outside of science, I chose to come to Arizona because I knew I would love living in Tucson. I am a non-traditional student, I am returning to school following a career as a public school science teacher, and another as an officer in the US Navy (our illustrious leader and I have that in common). So in addition to the great food scene, numerous parks (national and otherwise) to explore, and craft beer scene, Tucson was appealing because I could afford to buy a house and live a more “adult” life than is stereotypical for a grad student.

And well things currently being what they are, I’m getting to spend a lot of quality time with the new house these days. As Jared said yesterday, we’ve officially begun a stay-at-home order in Arizona as of last night, but I’ve been effectively quarantined, working from home and only going out for groceries and exercise, for 18 days as of today. So I thought I’d share a bit of what being a grad student looks like, at least for me, right now.

First of all, I want to acknowledge my incredibly privileged position. I have a steady job with guaranteed income for at least two more years (I’m on a fellowship), I have stable housing and am in no danger of not being able to pay my mortgage, and I don’t have to put myself at risk of exposure to COVID-19 as part of my job like healthcare professionals, janitorial staff, and grocery store workers do. I am incredibly grateful to have these privileges, and am glad to do my part to help keep everyone safe by essentially doing nothing. It gets tedious and sometimes I get sad, but it helps me to remember that my staying home is an essential part of keeping everyone safe, and to remind myself how much worse some folks have it, and how incredibly brave our front line actors are in these strange times.

What’s more, transitioning to working from home was pretty easy for me. I don’t really work in the lab on campus, my science is basically entirely done from my laptop. And switching to classes via zoom was pretty smooth as well. It took some adjustment, but things are basically proceeding as before, only minus the social interaction and with the addition of existential dread.

When I first arrived at Steward Observatory in August, I had to move into a temporary office for 8 weeks while they did maintenance in my wing. Then I was able to move into my actual office for a few months and get settled in. Now, I’m in a brand new office, otherwise known as my dining room. Here, let me give you a brief tour:

Zoom has been huge, also Slack and WhatsApp, for keeping some semblance of social interaction. I will be joining a zoom game night with other grad students tonight.

So, in summary, while no one has any idea what the world will look like in a few months, technology has enabled me to keep going more or less as before, with the exception of no MagAO-X run to look forward to next month, and missing vital social interaction. I won’t claim that it hasn’t been hard, but I’m well aware of how much worse it could be. If you’re struggling with uncertainty in these times, with your mental well being from isolation, with being productive with your children at home, or with fear of exposure to the virus from your job, please know that I’m thinking of you, I’m wishing you the best, I’m hoping you are able to stay safe and well. And we’ll get through this together, while we’re apart.

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My song(s) of the day comes from something helping me stay sane in these times, as well as be productive on my newfound cross-stitching habit: Star Trek. Star Trek has practically raised me from an early age (and probably was a non-trivial factor in my decision to join the Navy…), and it has some of the most iconic classic theme songs ever made. Much as Jared studied iterations of Jolene yesterday, I would like to offer my reflections on a Star Trek theme. I’ll go chronologically.

Of course everyone knows the classic original. It’s identifiable almost from the very first note:

Plus that classic monologue. I’ve never loved the original series much (despite trying to forgive it as a product of its time, I just can’t stand the misogyny), but you can’t deny the impact on culture.

Next of course is the show that defined my childhood, and the one I’m currently cross-stitching to, Star Trek: The Next Generation. A theme every bit as iconic, dare I say more-so, than the original:

I mean come on. Who won’t be stirred by that? Plus look at all the exoplanet love.

And now we come to the most important entry. The absolute pinnacle of everything Star Trek. A show ahead of its time, that pioneered the story arc and paved the way for the golden age of television we’re living in now*. A show from the 90’s that is every bit as good as it ever was to modern watchers. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

It’s not your parent’s Star Trek. It’s dark, actions have consequences (unlike the very episodic TNG). Every character, even the side characters, are deep, rich, and have long character arcs that grow and change over the run of the show. Some of the most compelling characters, like Nog or Damar, start out as throw aways or comic relief, and end up with some of the most powerful transformations. And Major Kira was definitely an early feminist icon for me. And Captain Sisko had moral grey areas unlike Picard. I could write a thesis on this show. I watched it as a kid, and now I’ve watched it all the way through twice as an adult. Proud to report, it holds up.

The theme itself is pretty standard fair for a Star Trek show, nothing too unique to say about it. The song is lovely and the imagery serves as nice establishing shots for the show.

*(no joke – it was one of the first shows of the 90s to incorporate the story arc, and was criticized at the time, and made the networks really nervous. But because of it they were able to tell richer stories and characters than TNG or Voyager. Look it up!)

Next we come to Star Trek: Voyager. It’s a fine intro I guess.

Voyager is trash. I said what I said.

Next up is the most controversial entry in the bunch: Star Trek: Enterprise. Whoa boy did this theme get the fandom’s panties all in a bunch. First of all, it has lyrics. And, *dumb* lyrics at that. Then the imagery behind the song was such a huge departure from tradition, some folks lost their minds. Enterprise is widely regarded as the black sheep of the Star Trek family, and honestly this theme song is a big part of it.

Hot take: I actually rather like Enterprise. I even kinda like this silly theme song. Yes, it’s quite cheesy. But I find it charming anyway. Same with the show. It is *far* from perfect, but it’s got its charms, and it’s better than Voyager. The show is about the first USS Enterprise starship, and it’s trying to be about voyage and discovery venturing into the unknown, and theme was meant reflect that.

Next is Star Trek: Discovery. It has a lovely theme. I love the call back to the original theme, with the modern imagery.

The theme really reflects the show. It is set right before the events of the original series, and includes some TOS characters like Captain Pike and Spock, and we even see an updated original USS Enterprise bridge in the 2nd season. The theme does a nice job of incorporating those elements, and set the stage for the show, classic but updated. It’s lovely.

And finally, Star Trek: Picard, who’s first season just wrapped up last week. This is a lovely lovely intro theme, and sets a very nice mood for this show. There are notes calling back to the themes of both TNG and Discovery (which is on the same network), something that is continued in the music of the show. Whenever Picard does something very Picard-like, we hear themes we recognize from TNG or TNG movies. It’s lovely, and the show is lovely. It’s not perfect, but it makes me very happy.

That’s it for Star Trek show themes, but there is so much more that could be said. I could write another essay on music from the movies. Hmm, perhaps for my next blog post. Seeing as we have some time on our hands now….