MagAO-Classic posts

The big news for today is that Laird and Katie cabled, plumbed, and powered-up the ASM. We’ve never done that before without at least one Arcetrian in the room. It all went very smoothly, and the ASM is ready to go on sky! Our day started with Oscar introducing us to the Cherimoya. ...

There was a cold wind blowing today but in the hottest/sunniest parts of the day it calmed down. During this time we moved the ASM from the clean room up to the Clay dome: It’s beautiful up here. Breakfast was amazing: fresh-squeezed orange juice, oatmeal with warm milk, dos huevos fritos por favor, and ...

MagAO fans… we have arrived! It’s nice to be back here at LCO in Chile, where all the coffee is strong, all the viscachas are good-looking, and all the food is above average. Jared, Laird, and I left Tucson on Saturday and arrived here on Sunday, for an uneventful trip. Believe it ...

MagAO has produced another Ph.D.! Kate successfully defended her dissertation on Thursday, at the very un-Astronomer hour of 9 am. Nevertheless her talk was well attended, and all of that hard work paid off. Congratulations to Dr. Kate Follette, Queen of VisAO SDI. Now that the fun is over, Laird,Katie, and ...

We’ve had a few meetings lately to prepare for our upcoming 2014B run in Oct–Dec. This will be our second regular science run, and our operations are becoming more smooth and efficient, so we are going to have a more streamlined personnel plan. It will also be our longest run yet (37 nights!). We ...

This past week the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute (NExSCI) hosted the 2014 Sagan Summer Workshop, which was on Imaging Planets and Disks. Several members of the MagAO team and extended family attended, and presented some of our latest and greatest results. The workshop was held on the campus of Caltech, in Pasadena. We all ...

Yesterday our SPIE paper pre-prints were announced on the astro-ph ArXiv. In case you missed it, here’s a run-down: Into the Blue: AO Science with MagAO in the Visible (Invited Talk) Laird M. Close, Jared R. Males, Katherine B. Follette, Phil Hinz, Katie M. Morzinski, Ya-Lin Wu, Derek Kopon, Armando Riccardi, Simone Esposito, Alfio Puglisi, Enrico ...

Hello, MagAO fans. Are you attending the SPIE Astronomical Telescopes & Instrumentation conference in Montreal next week (starting tomorrow)? We would love to see you at one of our talks or posters to hear more about MagAO! Look for myself, Jared, or Laird — we’ll be at the conference all week.

I’m on Mauna Kea visiting Olivier Guyon and the Subaru Coronagraphic Extreme AO (SCExAO) system. At 13,800 feet I’m pretty sure this is the highest altitude pyramid AO system in the world. Despite having a pyramid wavefront sensor, SCExAO is a pretty different AO system from MagAO. For one thing, there isn’t ...

Hi MagAO fans, you’ll never guess where I am… We spent almost the entire month of April in Chile for MagAO’s first science run, and we were very happy with how well it went. So what better thing to do than get on a plane back to Chile to work on my other high-contrast AO ...