MagAO-eXtreme Posts

As the quarantine continues with working from home on my simulation code, it’s been day-in-day-out of detective work tracking through countless cases of “Why does my output look horrible / makes no sense?”. The solution usually arrives in the form of opening the wrong file because I formatted poorly, units are missing, and a lot ...

Back in college, I used to listen to Thao & The Get Down Stay Down regularly. I haven’t kept up with their newer stuff, but they were recently in the news for the creative use of Zoom videoconferencing to make the video for their new single: Phenom. The song struck me as dissonant and strange ...

My household grew by one yesterday!  Meet Star: Star is a baby african pygmy hedgehog She’s a baby African Pygmy Hedgehog. She was born on Feb 20th, 2020, and is still so so tiny! I got her from a local breeder, Tucson Hedgehogs, who take extraordinary care of their babies, training them and adapting them ...

In the past week the heat has been slowly ramping up and it will continue to go up the next couple weeks. So staying home and inside is actually not that bad. One thing that I do have noticed is that we are going through our supply of food slightly faster than normal. It seems ...

It has long been my intention to use a XWCL blog post to spread the delights of Simon & Garfunkel with the watching world. But, well, I’m still not going to quite get around to it with this post (but halfway there!). The song of the day is “Waters of March” sung by Art Garfunkel. Feel ...

Hello everyone, my name is Justin. I’m a soon-to-be Ph.D-holder-guy in the midst of writing my dissertation on the topic of the coronagraphic architecture known as the PIAACMC (Phase-Induced Amplitude Apodization Complex Mask Coronagraph). Basically this coronagraph uses everything but the kitchen sink to suppress stellar light, while preserving as much planet light as possible ...

Before I moved to Tucson, I thought there were four seasons. Since living here, I’ve learned there are five. Fall, winter, spring, summer, and the North American Monsoon. I also used to think summer started at the end of May. However, we’re already facing our first 90+ºF (32+ºC) day next week. Soon we will become nocturnal desert ...

Let’s face it. I am bored. You are bored. We all are bored. We have been in social isolation now for over a month, and if you are like me, nice clothes, makeup, even jeans are a thing of normalcy past. Every day I have been hovering between pajamas and gym clothes. One of the ways ...

Hi everyone! It’s been awhile since I’ve written a blog post but it makes me happy that the team thought to include me in their blogger recruits. I am going to do a take on Dr. Kelsey Miller’s “Views from the Apocalypse” but rather than a cute Dutch city, I’ll be reporting from the city ...

One thing I am getting out of this quarantine is exploring many recipes and using my kitchen hardware more often than making weekly meal preps. I purchased a 6-quart enameled cast iron dutch oven back in February and have used it once so far to make beef and red lentil chili. I’m very excited I ...