MagAO-eXtreme Posts

The school year has wrapped up and we’re about to head into summer. Usually we’re excited we survived the year at all, but this time we are celebrating the XWCL undergraduates graduating and completing their bachelor’s degrees! Chris, Maggie, and Madison have worked with us for the past couple years assisting on MagAO-X. Chris joined us ...

* with two DMs! But not at the same time…yet. Late last week, after painstakingly recabling and aligning the BMC 2K following its relocation to the MagAO-X instrument, we closed the loop at 3.6kHz with 2040 actuators. See Jared’s video below: MagAO-X Closed Loop 3.6 kHz What exactly are we looking at in this video? On the far left ...

As of today, our 2040 actuator Boston Micromachines MEMS deformable mirror (BMC-2K DM, for short) has been moved to MagAO-X instrument optical table. With a cost of roughly three houses, it’s by far the most expensive piece of the whole project. (If you don’t count paying half a dozen graduate students for half a decade.) The ...

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 ...