Another couple of days of AO Summer School are in the books! We’ve moved well beyond introductions and into the core of adaptive optics, exploring topics like wavefront sensing and reconstruction, atmospheric turbulence, and deformable mirrors. Alongside the great lectures, we’ve also had the chance to put the concepts we learned into practice through hands-on labs. In one of our labs, we explored different types of wavefront sensors (WFS) including the Shack-Hartmann WFS, and the Pyramid WFS. Below is Katie and Marcus’s groups setup for the wavefront sensor lab.
The rest of the afternoon was spent touring labs, starting with the Santa Cruz Extreme AO Lab (SEAL). From there, we got a sneak peek at SCALES (imaged below), an upcoming Keck instrument built to probe the compositions of exoplanet atmospheres.
The next lab space we visited was UC Santa Cruz’s massive marble test bed, and their shop where they test new techniques to make shells for deformable mirrors.
The final place we stopped by had a bunch of cool history about UC Santa Cruz’s involvement with optics and astronomy. In the photo below, you can see the 3 meter telescope (yellow structure) at Lick Observatory that was commissioned in 1959. Compare this to the more modern 10 meter Keck telescope structure commissioned in 1985.
On a more serious note, a washing machine was located and disaster was avoided with regards to Josh may or may not having anymore clean clothes halfway through the workshop….
While I’m sure the people are dying for some much needed Vizzy content, the campus turkeys and deer with have to suffice for now.
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