IAUS 299: Misbehaving Planets and Moderately Insane Ideas

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.

Jonathan says that planets “misbehave” when his models don’t match observations. I suspect that the planets actually know what they’re doing, but more work needs to be done.

Here’s Jonathan’s talk:

The famous Matt Kenworthy, now at Leiden but formerly a denizen of Steward Observatory, was the session chair.

Matt kept everybody in line.

This was the day when we unveiled our MagAO results to the wider exoplanet community. Katie gave a well-received talk on our system’s capabilities and our exciting results on beta Pictoris b.

Katie gave yet another great talk on our MagAO commissioning results. Here she’s fielding questions at the end.

You can watch the whole talk:

You can find all the talks on Christian Marois’s youtube channel here.

Later, a bunch of astronomers went to the home opener of the Victoria HarbourCats, a westcoast league team. They played the Kelowna Falcons. The Cats won (Bear Down!), and it was a great game on a nice night. We saw 2 homeruns, a diving catch in left field, and some close plays on the bases. We all rooted for the home team, stuffed ourselves with hotdogs, and enjoyed some good local brew.

It was a sellout crowd.