This is a late post, but on November 16, 2018, Kelsey Miller successfully defended her Ph.D. dissertation! Congratulations, Dr. Miller!
Kelsey and her Ph.D. Committee – Olivier, Jared, and Michael
Kelsey’s research is on Linear Dark Field Control (LDFC), a focal plane wavefront sensing technique where she monitors the bright field speckles and uses their linear nature to maintain stability in the dark hole. She has been developing LDFC using the MagAO-X pupil and vAPP coronagraph design. You can learn more about Kelsey’s work in LDFC (JATIS, arXiv) and how LDFC will work with MagAO-X (SPIE, arXiv).
Kelsey is off to cooler climates at Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands, who have been our collaborators with the vAPP coronagraph. She will be a postdoctoral researcher with Frans Snik, continuing her work on LDFC to get it working on sky. We will miss you tremendously!
On September 17, 2018, we got our first look at the MagAO-X vAPP (that’s “vector apodizing phase plate”) coronagraph optic. Kelsey Miller had been working with the phase pattern for a long time, but there’s something special about holding it with your own hands. Or, at any rate, watching the P.I. hold it with his own hands.
Despite the complicated phase pattern, it looks pretty much clear except for the reflective mask. At extreme angles, you can get some purple from (I think) an AR coating.
Jared and Kelsey clean the hardware to hold the vAPP.
Jared inserts the vAPP in the holder…
…and in it goes!
The vAPP slotted right into Kelsey’s coronagraph testbed, and we got the predicted pattern on our camera! Fourier optics works.
This past week, the MagAO-X team attended the SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation conference in Austin, TX. Here’s a recap of all of our presentations at the conference.
Let’s start off with the talks. Jared kicked off our presentation collection with a talk on the MagAO-X update:
Starting it off with the MagAO-X PI
Laird gave an update on MagAO:
We love MagAO!
Kelsey gave a fantastic talk on the vAPP for MagAO-X and Linear Dark Field Control:
Kelsey’s awesome presentation with excellent use of pictures
Lauren gave an awesome talk on her PyWFS PYRITE sims:
Lauren’s talk stepped through PyWFS really well, great job!
Justin presented PIAACMC designs for SCExAO/GMT/MagAO-X:
Despite being the last talk of the conference, it still had great attendance!
The rest of us had poster presentations:
Joseph presented on his CLIO data analysis
Maggie presented on her work with the MagAO-X kinematic mounts
Alex R (v1.0) presented his simulations work on Fraizen’s paper
Rachel Morgan (MIT) presented her work using the data Ewan collected with MagAO on 2017B
Alex H (v2.0) presented his work with the MagAO-X K-mirror mount
Laird presented the MagAO-X optomechanical design
Kyle presented his work characterizing the MagAO-X DMs
Jhen presented her work using POPPY to characterize the MagAO-X and LGS testbeds
Jared made a poster for GMagAO-X
Here’s some shenanigans from the conference and in Austin:
Jared’s talk crashed several timesonce during his presentation. It turns out, LibreOffice and the SPIE talk upload system disagree with each other, particularly with how to handle Lauren’s 700 KB flaming logo. When transitioning to the next talk, MagAO-X refused to leave the screen.
Free advertisement for MagAO-X!
According to Laird, later in the week, Lauren’s MagAO-X logo came back to shutdown another talk. The computer tried to “recover” Jared’s talk and so the solution was to kill it outright. MagAO-X came back with a vengeance it seems.
Despite the heat and humidity, Austin was a great conference location.
I observed some Texas locals
Sunset dinner by the Colorado River
I did the millennial thing and ate avocado toast for brunch one day
And so concludes SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation 2018. It was a fantastic time seeing everyone, meeting new people, attending talks, and presenting research. To close off, here’s a quote from the MagAO-X PI:
Jared: “All deficiencies in your presentations have been noted and will be addressed in due course.”
