- 2013-08-21
Jared Males
The flat pancake-like disks of gas and dust that surround young stars (so-called “circumstellar disks”) are of interest to astronomers because we believe that planets are made from their material. In the 1990s, the Hubble Space Telescope completed groundbreaking observations of the Great Orion Nebula at a red wavelength of light termed “Hydrogen-alpha” (the brightest ...
- 2013-07-20
Jared Males
Esther Buenzli, a Steward post-doc, won the poster prize in the 2nd session at PPVI! That means she had the best poster out of over 300. She presented her work with Daniel Apai on time-resolved variability in Brown Dwarfs, in which they used HST to track the changes in brightness of a couple ...
- 2013-07-19
Katie Morzinski
MagAO is representing at the Protostars and Planets VI conference this week in Heidelberg, Germany. Wie geht’s? Well, so far it’s been an inspiring week, seeing all the strides forward our field has come in understanding how stars and planets form, and their physical and chemical properties, since the last Protostars and Planets ...
- 2013-06-12
Katie Morzinski
MagAO is back in town. We have returned from our conferences in Florence (AO4ELT) and/or Victoria (IAU 299 exoplanets) to get down to serious work on our papers we presented at the conferences, and our plans for the next year. Our talks and posters went over well, and we got a lot of ...
- 2013-06-06
Jared Males
Wednesday was a half day, but before we all took off to enjoy sunny Victoria we listened to some interesting talks — and showed off MagAO. Arizona/LPL alum Jonathan Fortney gave the introductory review talk on characterizing exoplanets.
Here’s Jonathan’s talk:
The famous Matt Kenworthy, now at Leiden but formerly a denizen of Steward Observatory, ...
- 2013-06-04
Jared Males
Our apologies if you’re having trouble keeping up, but MagAO is now in Victoria, B.C., for IAUS 299. The conference got off to a great start with a review talk by Beth Biller, a product of the Arizona+Laird system.
TJ had the honor of closing out today’s session. He wowed the crowd with LBT ...
- 2013-05-31
Jared Males
Today was the last day of AO4ELT3. A few more MagAO team members got their chance to pontificate.
Now we’re off to IAU 299 in Victoria, B.C. Stay tuned for more action packed MagAO fun.
- 2013-05-30
Jared Males
The LBTAO and MagAO projects got their time yesterday at AO4ELT3. The day started with Armando giving an overview of ASM development and status, and their future potential for ELTs.
Then Laird presented the results of our recent commissioning runs. It went over well, and lots of people seem genuinely impressed.
Later, Phil gave an ...
- 2013-05-27
Jared Males
The MagAO project once lived in Florence, Italy, for almost a year. It’s where we first got it all working and got to know our Italian teammates. We’re back, this time for the AO4ELT3 (Adaptive Optics for Extremely Large Telescopes 3) conference.
We includes Laird, Phil, Katie, and Jared from Arizona, Derek ...
- 2013-05-02
Katie Morzinski
MagAO teammates and friends Jared Males, Andy Skemer, and Laird Close recently published a paper: Direct Imaging in the Habitable Zone and the Problem of Orbital Motion. This work describes the problem of how planets won’t hold still, but instead keep orbiting their stars while you’re trying to observe them. The paper is ...