MagAO-X Voyage à Montréal Day 1: My French isn’t that good

The SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation conference is the main event for instrument builders world-wide, and this year is held in Montréal, Quebec, Canada. The conference is held every two years (because one year is nothing in instrument project timelines) and the last one would have been in 2020. (But then, the plague.)

Anyway, we have a lot of new stuff to report from MagAO-X, and from our friends in UASAL, SCExAO, and beyond. See the schedule at the end of this post. (We’re just jazzed to be here.)


Today, the first team member to speak was our fearless leader with a status update on MagAO-X Phase II and future plans.

Olivier Guyon gave us a version of his Spirit of Lyot talk, which was fortunate, because that gave some of us a second chance to absorb and understand it. (There’s a lot going on over at SCExAO!)

Sebastiaan was tapped to present as a substitute for a team member who wasn’t attending, and he gave us an overview of image quality calibration from WFS PSF deconvolution (work by Jacob Trzaska) and his own predictive control algorithm (Data-Driven Subspace Predictive Control—DDSPC).

Blog Rules

It’s been a while since we had a Blog Rule, beyond the compulsory Song of the Day. So, here’s my rule for the week: les chansons doivent être en français.

(The songs must be in French.)

Bonus points for chansons Quebecois!

Song of the Day

“Je Veux” by Zaz

Today when I went to get a coffee en route to conference registration, I opened with a “bonjour,” following the advice for anglophones in a francophone world. Then, I asked “English OK?” and the barista said “Yeah, sure! My French isn’t that good.”

Maybe that advice is more for the rest of Quebec…

MagAO-X and Friends Schedule

TimeAuthorRoomTitle
Sunday, July 17
12:05Jared Males518aMagAO-X: current status and plans for Phase II
15:45Olivier Guyon (SCExAO)518aHigh Contrast Imaging at the Photon Noise Limit with WFS-based PSF Calibration
16:20Sebastiaan Haffert518aPSF evaluation using tip images in a modulated pyramid wavefront sensor
Monday, July 18
posterJaren Ashcraft (UASAL)516The Space Coronagraph Optical Bench (SCoOB): 1. Design and assembly of a vacuum-compatible coronagraph testbed for spaceborne high-contrast imaging technology
posterKyle Van Gorkom (UASAL)516The space coronagraph optical bench (SCoOB): 2. wavefront sensing and control in a vacuum-compatible coronagraph testbed for spaceborne high-contrast imaging technology
posterKevin Derby (UASAL)516Tolerance analysis of a self-coherent camera for wavefront sensing and dark hole maintenance
Tuesday, July 19
13:25Laird Close (for Alex Hedglen)518aFirst lab results of segment/petal phasing with a pyramid wavefront sensor and a novel holographic dispersed fringe sensor (HDFS) from the Giant Magellan Telescope high contrast adaptive optics phasing testbed
13:55Antonin Bouchez (for Rick Demers) (GMT)518Phasing the Segmented Giant Magellan Telescope: Progress in Testbeds and Prototypes
17:25Meghan O’Brien518aexperimenting with the g-ODWFS for use in extended source LGS wavefront sensing.
posterSebastiaan Haffert516Visible extreme adaptive optics for GMagAO-X with the triple-stage AO architecture (TSAO).
posterLaird Close516A Review of High Contrast AO Imaging of Accreting Proto-Planets
posterJoseph Long516XPipeline: Starlight Subtraction at Scale for MagAO-X
posterNoah Swimmer (UCSB)516?An MKID camera for use behind MagAO-X
Wednesday, July 20
posterJared Males516The conceptual design of GMagAO-X: visible wavelength high contrast imaging with GMT
posterMaggie Kautz516A novel hexpyramid pupil slicer for an ExAO Parallel DM for the Giant Magellan Telescope
Thursday, July 21
10:30Laird Close518aThe Optical and Mechanical Design for the 21,000 Actuator ExAO System for the Giant Magellan Telescope: GMagAO-X
14:10Lauren Schatz518aExperimental demonstration of a three-sided pyramid wavefront sensor on the CACTI testbed
15:40Andrew Szentgyorgyi519aG@M: Design of the Giant Magellan Telescope Consortium Large Earth Finder (G-CLEF) for operations at the Magellan telescopes.
posterSebastiaan Haffert516Advanced wavefront sensing and control demonstration with MagAO-X