MagAO-eXtreme Posts

To simplify maintenance, we’re making the MagAO-X blog a continuation of the MagAO blog. Going forward, we will be doing our project updates here on xwcl.science. I did my best to migrate things without breaking references to our previous nine years (!) of posts. However, if you notice any broken links to visao.as.arizona.edu, do let ...

As originally reported on the Steward Observatory website, and archived here for posterity: On Jan 17, NBA Hall of Famer, one of “50 Greatest Players in NBA History,” and iconic Deadhead Bill Walton came to town to be the color commentator for the UA-Oregon men’s basketball game. Whenever Walton is a commentator ESPN has a 2-minute ...

This is a late post, but on November 16, 2018, Kelsey Miller successfully defended her Ph.D. dissertation! Congratulations, Dr. Miller! Kelsey’s research is on Linear Dark Field Control (LDFC), a focal plane wavefront sensing technique where she monitors the bright field speckles and uses their linear nature to maintain stability in the dark hole. She has ...

On September 17, 2018, we got our first look at the MagAO-X vAPP (that’s “vector apodizing phase plate”) coronagraph optic. Kelsey Miller had been working with the phase pattern for a long time, but there’s something special about holding it with your own hands. Or, at any rate, watching the P.I. hold it with his ...

This past week, the MagAO-X team attended the SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation conference in Austin, TX. Here’s a recap of all of our presentations at the conference. Let’s start off with the talks. Jared kicked off our presentation collection with a talk on the MagAO-X update: Laird gave an update on MagAO: Kelsey gave a fantastic talk ...