MagAO-eXtreme Posts

I think I speak for all three of us MagAO-Xians that went to the AO workshop last week when I say that it was a blast! Between the beautiful campus at UCSC, fun hands on activities, and friendly participants there was always something to focus on (heh). Unfortunately it was probably the diverse group of ...

I am generally horrible at finishing things, and there were so many stories to tell about good times in Santa Cruz that I never finished my blog post. I started writing during the first night of the workshop, but didn’t return to tell the stories of renting a bike and spending afternoons enjoying rides in ...

It is extremely illegal to smuggle Andean mammals of the high desert into downtown Montréal, but I have always wanted to try poutine, and MagAO-X already got me as far as Tucson anyway. At the border, I tried to explain I was going to the SPIE conference but I’m not sure Google Translate was working. Today, Laird ...

*A new grad student has entered the chat.* Hello Blog! I’m Eden and I’ll be joining the MagAO-X team this fall as an OpSci grad student. This SPIE I’m presenting my wavefront profiling work on imaka, a GLAO demonstrator,  but I’ll be joining the high contrast crew in no time. Happy to report that I survived my ...

While the whole group is living up up north, those of us left behind in the sweltering heat and humidity of Tucson in July got a treat today: Everyone safe and sound in the loading dock staging room. The big white box in the back is MagAO-X, the foreground is the electronics box, and the ...

It’s only day 2 of the SPIE Astronomical Telescopes & Instrumentation Conference and already lots of interesting talks, lunch & learns, and posters are underway. Dr. Richard Dekany gave an interesting talk on SIGHT, the Palomar 5m telescope LGS AO system, and highlighted the support of our very own Sebastiaan Haffert and Meghan O’Brien on the ...

The SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation conference is the main event for instrument builders world-wide, and this year is held in Montréal, Quebec, Canada. The conference is held every two years (because one year is nothing in instrument project timelines) and the last one would have been in 2020. (But then, the plague.) Anyway, we have ...

Today was the last day of the conference! We saw many great talks (mostly about PDS 70 and HR 8799…) and many of us have left excited to get back to work and Reduce! That! Data! Today was a half day and that meant we were finally able to roam free and see the beauty of ...

Today I presented Kevin Wagner’s talk about searching for planets in 10 µm light. I think I did an okay job talking about things I know nothing about, but then, I do have plenty of practice. All questions about Kevin’s part of the talk will be answered with viscacha noises. Incredibly, people did ask me questions. In ...

Where are days 1 & 2 you ask? Um we didn’t blog those. *Sheepish grin* Your favorite MagAO-X team is living it up in Leiden, Netherlands this week at the Spirit of Lyot conference – a conference devoted to bringing exoplanet direct imaging science and instrument builders together to unite the tech with the ...