MagAO-eXtreme Posts

One of the best features in Tucson, in my opinion, is The Loop, a 70+ mile paved bike and pedestrian paths that encircles the city, mostly on the shoulders of a dry wash. I live pretty close to the Loop on the westside of town, and to keep active and get out of the ...

Today is the largest national holiday in the Netherlands, Kings Day. Kings Day is a bit of a difficult holiday to describe. It originates from the 19th century when the great-grandmother of the current king was reigning. The government decided that it was necessary to have a national holiday to celebrate the monarch. And so, ...

External Temperature and Dew Point vs day in April 2020. Less than a month ago, it was below freezing in our back yard. Today we cracked 100 for the first time. Our weather station. It’s not high enough to give NWS quality reports. I’d tell you my Weather Underground station i.d. but ...

I am sure a lot of you are tired of looking at the inside of your own homes, so I invite you to take a look inside of mine. Specifically at my rock collection. It may be hard to believe but mineralogy was my first science love. When I was really little (like 4) ...

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 ...