MagAO-eXtreme Posts

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 ...

Don’t worry, folks–we’ve heard your begging and pleading for more XWCL #blogtent, and the time has finally come. This blogbuster series will come in (at least) three installments, each from a different POV, as we embark on our one-week AO crash course here at the University of California, Santa Cruz. We’re pulling out all the ...

Imagine, if you would, the beautiful Caltech Campus. Imagine, if you would be so generous, a population of exoplanets. Imagine, if you would be so kind, the beautiful minds of exoplanet scientists convening for the 25th year in a row. That should put you in the mood for this very hypothetical blog post. Both in ...

Welcome to SPIE 2025: The Optics and Photonics version (not to be confused with the astronomical instrumentation version which happens every other year)! We welcome you back to sunny San Diego, where I spent my first day in the airport because I initially thought that the conference began on a Monday. Instead, I was running ...

For those unfamiliar with AstroTech, it is a weeklong summer school at UC Berkeley designed to teach the next generation of students how to design and build astronomical instruments, while being collaborative and inclusive. The first few days of summer school started with multiple lectures on astronomy and optics-based content, along with a number ...

Hi I’m here to blog the third and final day of the Magellan Science Meeting. It was a short day, the meeting officially ended after lunch. We spent the morning with talks focused on the future of the observatory and current and upcoming instruments. Including G-CLEF, a high resolution spectrometer designed to be ...

Spring is a great time to be in DC (when it isn’t raining…!). The day started with a typical spring morning in DC and maybe some slight mechanical issues with a certain dishwasher, but we made the ~8 min commute to the Earth and Planets Lab campus without a hitch soon after. After coffee and light ...

Majority of the MagAO-X team traveled to DC in 2023 for the GMT community science meeting , so this is the second time the (partial) MagAO-X team has assembled in Washington. But this time, it’s focus on all sciences done with the not-so-giant Magellan Baade and Clay telescopes. David Osip, the LCO Associate Director, ...