MagAO-eXtreme Posts

For about a year, Laird, Alex H., and I have been putting together the protoype-High Contrast Adaptive Optics Testbed (P-HCAT). P-HCAT sent half of the simulated GMT pupil to the “Holey Mirror” which, as the name suggests, is a mirror with a hole in it. Holey Mirror The holey mirror is able to simulate a piston ...

Today is the Autumnal Equinox, the official end of summer and the start of autumn in the northern hemisphere. Autumn doesn’t really mean much here in Tucson, except our days of constant 100+F heat is waning down. (This does not barricade me from getting a PSL.) A more important date is 8 days away on ...

This is a recipe post in the traditional internet style. Part I: The Rains We have had a fairly incredible monsoon season. It just keeps raining and raining here in Tucson, and everything around us is enjoying it. Since this is a science blog, we should start with evidence for these assertions. The plot shows our ...

After a long, dry, and recently HOT year, it appears that the monsoon has begun! Today felt like the first snow used to feel when I lived somewhere more North. The only downside to the monsoon is that the storms often keep us from operating our sensitive equipment. Here’s a real-time lightning map from ...

A beautiful Tucson sunset tonight + iPhone portrait mode + a smidge of the secret Adobe Lightroom sauce = impromptu photo shoot! Please welcome the new member of XWC Lab, a new LAB member! Meet Lani, my new 2 year old yellow lab! Lani came to me via friend of a friend who was looking to ...

Resident pyramid expert Dr. Lauren Schatz defended her thesis work today, despite pandemic pandemonium. The field has decided to accept her (with minor revisions), and she will be joining the Air Force Research Laboratory in Albuquerque, New Mexico later this year. We’ll miss her a lot, but every wavefront sensed by MagAO-X will have her fingerprints ...

One of the most painful things I’ve had to do in graduate school is writing. It’s probably the worst necessary evil in academia. I’ll take documentation and giving presentations any day over writing papers. I’ve finished writing the first full draft of the MagAO-X Fresnel modeling paper and it’s going through the comment cycles. But ...

Tonight was supposed to be MagAO-X’s third night on sky with the Magellan Clay telescope in Chile, but due to the pandemic, MagAO-X is still sitting in the lab in Tucson. It’s sad that we haven’t been to Chile since 2019, but we have been making the most of the time that we do have ...

Steward Observatory and Department of Astronomy tradition is to spend valuable grad student time concocting plans to amuse, vex, or embarrass the principal investigator. Note to P.I.: This also means any embarrassing mistakes you’ve seen me make have been absolutely intentional. We call these pranks, though I’m not sure that’s entirely accurate. In any case, we ...

The sun has just set here in Tucson. But we were supposed to be watching the sunset at LCO tonight, taking our usual break from preparing our instrument for a night of observing. On the schedule, this was to be our first of eleven nights exploring the sky with MagAO-X. An LCO sunset ...