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 learned a lot, and had some fun. Thanks to the whole NExSCI crew for putting on such a great workshop.
The real star of the show was Space Shuttle Endeavour, which has retired to the California Science Center. We took Wednesday afternoon off to go see her, and it was amazing.
At one point while preparing for my thesis defense, I was faced with a conundrum: work on my dissertation or do something else. So what I did was research my academic lineage. It goes something like:
Jared Males –> Laird Close –> Don McCarthy –> Frank Lowe –> (a bunch of nerds at MIT) –> Robert Millikan –> Albert Michelson.
No disrespect to everybody else, but those last two dudes are pretty big deals. Well, since I was at Caltech, I went and paid Dr. Millikan a visit.
I also visited the other famous residents of the campus.