MagAO-eXtreme Posts

Looks like we might actually be doing this … if World War 3 doesn’t break out first. Please enjoy this video of today’s activities from clips taken by me and Alex Hedglen. Since rights-holders can be so mean about these things, no audio track is included. However, I recommend playing the song of the day at ...

With cautious optimism, we are approaching the second ever MagAO-X ship date. It’s hard to believe that it has been 2.5 years since we last did this! The system has grown in complexity in the interim, gaining a spectrograph named VIS-X (P.I. Sebastiaan Haffert) as well as many new controllable degrees of freedom. (Always need ...

The city of Tucson was made brighter today with the passing of Jhen’s PhD defense and a much-deserved level up. A huge round of applause for Dr. Lumbres! Jhen’s talk was very comprehensive regarding her various projects she’s taken on during her time here at UArizona. If you’re like me, you learned a lot about the ...

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 ...