MagAO-eXtreme Posts

Welcome to the first blog post of this run from the Leiden team! It’s great to be back up at LCO. Matthijs and I are starting to feel the seasonal depression leaving our bodies thanks to the good old vitamin D we are soaking up these days. Incredible what such a small thing is capable ...

This week started off with the arrival of Matthijs and Elena; welcome (back) to Chile! Elena and Matthijs arriving in Santiago (credit Elena) New Optics More optical adjustments and alignments on the MagAO-X bench were led by Katie and Laird to prepare for a new dual-band observing mode. The goals today were to prepare alignment targets, install a ...

Parker has been working on detecting vibrations within MagAO-X using some fancy accelerometers and a Raspberry Pi™ and a bucket with a hole in it. Parker’s holey bucket. (Photo by Katie Twitchell) Also, we all had a chance to employ our god-given accelerometers later that evening, as Vallenar had a little baby earthquake just for us. I spent ...

This is now my fourth(!) observing run, and they’ve all had a unique flavor to them—but if there’s one thing I can count on, it’s sleeping like a brick the first night at LCO after 30+ hours of travel. This morning the three of us were feeling sufficiently back-from-the-dead, and we hit the ground running ...

It’s that time of the year! The start of another MagAO-X observing run. For Jared, Katie, and myself that meant 3AM alarms for Thursday morning. Shortly after arriving at the airport, a wise man said, “a little airport milk never hurt anyone”. 30 grams of protein later, I was energized and ready for any wild ...

The biannual Adaptive Optics for Extremely Large Telescopes conference was held in beautiful Viña del Mar this year. Although normally a summer conference, it was held from October 27 to October 31–springtime in Chile! The Reloj de Flores, a landmark in Viña del Mar. AO4ELT aims to gather adaptive optics scientists from across the globe to discuss ...

It’s been a while since we’ve had a results post, but it is returning after almost 10 years. Abstract: 2MASS J16120668-3010270 (hereafter 2MJ1612) is a young M0 star that hosts a protoplanetary disk in the Upper Scorpious star-forming region. Recent ALMA observations of 2MJ1612 show a mildly inclined disk (i=37∘) with a large dust-depleted gap ...

Written by Daniel Stolte and originally posted at UA News. Featured on kvoa.com. A team of astronomers has detected — for the first time — a growing planet outside our solar system, embedded in a cleared gap of a multi-ringed disk of dust and gas. The team, led by University of Arizona astronomer Laird Close and Richelle ...

We have reached the epic conclusion of yet another AO summer school. Stay with me, dear reader, as we have much to cover: Day 4: The Penultimate Chapter After 4 days in Santa Cruz, I was itching to see a patented yellow slime ball, affectionately known as the “Banana Slug.” In a sort-of slug summoning ceremony, I ...

Another couple of days of AO Summer School are in the books! We’ve moved well beyond introductions and into the core of adaptive optics, exploring topics like wavefront sensing and reconstruction, atmospheric turbulence, and deformable mirrors. Alongside the great lectures, we’ve also had the chance to put the concepts we learned into practice through hands-on ...