Tag: conference

The biannual Adaptive Optics for Extremely Large Telescopes conference was held in beautiful Viña del Mar this year. Although normally a summer conference, it was held from October 27 to October 31–springtime in Chile!

AO4ELT aims to gather adaptive optics scientists from across the globe to discuss and formulate solutions to the largest problem facing the largest future-generation telescopes: wavefront sensing and control.

Wavefront sensing and control (WFS/C) is critical for the success of the massive 30-m telescopes (ELT, GMT, and TMT), whose performances are severely limited by atmospheric turbulence. For the goal of directly imaging exoplanets around nearby stars, the field of adaptive optics must come together to develop the technology and the algorithms for correcting tens of thousands of controllable elements thousands of times a second.

To summarize the talks, I would say the overall theme of this AO4ELT was the proliferation of improved control algorithms. We have discovered that vibrations and other quasi-stable error modes can dominate the residual wavefront errors of modern AO systems, and simple leaky integrators are insufficient for achieving high Strehl ratios on future telescopes.

The new controller architectures predominantly have moved towards machine learning and reinforcement learning to use data-driven techniques that don’t require precise system models. This agnosticism is powerful for adapting a single control architecture to multiple testbeds and telescopes, and we saw many talks about successful implementations of Policy Optimization for AO (PO4AO), among other machine learning algorithms.

Another common theme of the conference was the success in using older, smaller 1-m-class telescopes telescopes for on-sky prototyping and testing. There is an age-old problem of adapting technology and algorithms from simulations to testbeds, and then from testbeds to telescopes. These older telescopes are having a renaissance in utility, since AO scientists are getting crucial on-sky time without the stress and overhead of competing with observers for time on larger, more modern telescopes. This renaissance is also giving students and young career researchers valuable experience in the planning and operations of observations, something you can’t get on a testbed, alone.

Now, what was I presenting at AO4ELT? Having just started work with the XWCL, I didn’t have any exciting results to share for the polarimetric mode of MagAO-X, but I did share work from my Ph.D. dissertation on the upgrades and early science of the VAMPIRES instrument on SCExAO (the sister of MagAO-X on the Subaru Telescope).

Beyond the conference, I enjoyed the sounds of the sea and many of the cultural staples of Chilean food–including many pisco sours. For those who are unaware, like I was, pisco is distilled fermented grapes, basically distilled wine. A pisco sour combines the liquor with lemon/lime juice, egg white, and a sweetener. The best pisco sour I had was at the Macha restaurant, where I also enjoyed octopus by recommendation of the chef to celebrate my birthday, which fell on the final day of the conference.

Following the conference, I had planned to explore Valparaíso and spend a few days in Santiago, but my arch nemesis, the conference bug, had other ideas. I quickly got caught up on the spanish needed to naviagate a farmacía, from pañuelos to vaporaciones (de Vick). Nonetheless I was able to seek out some cozy cafes and tasty food before my long flight back to the US.

Song of the day: Despacito (it’s the Mr. Brightside of Latin America)

We have reached the epic conclusion of yet another AO summer school. Stay with me, dear reader, as we have much to cover:

Day 4: The Penultimate Chapter

After 4 days in Santa Cruz, I was itching to see a patented yellow slime ball, affectionately known as the “Banana Slug.” In a sort-of slug summoning ceremony, I slipped on my slug stompers at sunrise.

The morning session began with a great controls theory talk given by Dr. Nour Skaf. Sadly, Nour did not stay at the workshop for very long, as she left to begin her new faculty position at UH IFA!!! 🙂 *catjam* *catjam intensifies*

We then heard from UCO director and GPI extraordinaire, Bruce Macintosh, about error budgets within AO systems.

After a long morning’s work AO-ing, it was time to take a brief nap:

Following a quick nap, we worked on an AO simulation workshop led by UC Santa Cruz post doc and HCIPy conspirator, Emiel Por. There are no photos from this activity so I will leave the visuals to the reader’s imagination.

After dinner, Parker went on a hike while others studied for quals or worked on grant applications:

After an unsuccessful attempt to observe some stars, we gathered outside the dorms to sit on tree stumps:

We were kind enough to include this green table in our group selfie:

Day 5: No Fish in the Microwave

The fifth and final day of the AO summer school began with an important reminder:

The final day also included talks on astrophotonics, AO in space, and AO for microscopy!

As this blog post is biased towards my areas of research interests, I included a photo from Rus Belikov’s talk of EFC being done before it was cool:

Finally, it was time for the moment that we have all been waiting for–the AO Summer School Vision Awards 2025!

I won the award for Worst Optics (I thought about contesting but I was bribed with banana slug stickers)! And Parker won the adaptive pupil award!

We then went on a social excursion to the Santa Cruz boardwalk/arcade/karaoke facility/casino/bowling alley/laser tag room!

Here’s to a successful AO summer school!

Just before leaving, we finally got some slug-tent:

I would like to dedicate this blog post to Keck’s broken dome shutter.

Song of the Day:

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.

Song of the Day

Don’t worry, folks–we’ve heard your begging and pleading for more XWCL #blogtent, and the time has finally come. This blogbuster series will come in (at least) three installments, each from a different POV, as we embark on our one-week AO crash course here at the University of California, Santa Cruz. We’re pulling out all the stops: a brand-new cast of guest stars, some of the old regulars, top-tier science, and (with a little luck) a banana slug or two. Buckle up.

No, seriously, buckle up. It turns out that Highway 17 between San Jose and Santa Cruz is no joke, and we were in for quite the ride to UCSC campus. California traffic may be a little foreign to me, but even I could tell that something was up as our Uber driver bobbed and weaved through gridlock in residential neighborhoods for the first 20 minutes. Turns out there was a wreck blocking all traffic down the highway and into town, so our driver did what any rational driver would do: he put the car in park, set his iPad on the dashboard, and we all watched Happy Gilmore 2. If you haven’t seen the movie, I will say that I believe dashboard iPad (with the addition of both Spanish subtitles and English Audio Description) was the way the director intended for it to be seen. No photos were taken of this experience, so you’ll just have to trust me–it was ethereal.

Day 1 of summer school was all about introductions: introducing ourselves to the other participants, introducing the instructors, and introducing the foundations of adaptive optics. We’ve quickly made friends with AO aficionados from all over: Canada, Hawaii, Australia, Finland, and South Korea, to name a few. Josh and Parker really hit it off with some new non-human friends as well.

Parker and I got to give 1-minute pitches for our posters, which will hang up all week as fuel for discussions during coffee breaks:

The agenda was packed: In the morning, Dr. Rebecca Jensen-Clem gave an overview introduction to Adaptive Optics for astronomy, and we played a card game themed around closing the loop on an AO system at Gemini North.

In the afternoon session, we had a crash course on geometric and physical optics by Dr. Renate Kupke as well as an intro to AO for vision science by Dr. Nicole Putnam. We learned a ton about the human eye, and about how to look cool in silly glasses:

The day rounded out with a reception at the Center for Adaptive Optics, where two very exciting things happened:

1. We got to use a really nifty wavefront sensor system to measure the aberrations in our own eyes. We’ll get to use the aberration maps and Zernike coefficients calculated by the system in vision science workshops later in the week. This is the kind of geeky biodata I absolutely love. Who else out there gets to measure their eye’s PSF?

2. There was a cheese platter. There was a large cheese platter. There was a large cheese platter that remained mostly untouched throughout the evening. I’m pretty sure you can guess who volunteered to bring the extras back to his dorm. A dream come true.

Since this is the first blog post of this trip, I get to make the rules. I’ll keep it simple and on theme: since we’re enjoying the lovely geography so much, the song of the day must be related to California in some way.

Imagine, if you would, the beautiful Caltech Campus. Imagine, if you would be so generous, a population of exoplanets. Imagine, if you would be so kind, the beautiful minds of exoplanet scientists convening for the 25th year in a row.

That should put you in the mood for this very hypothetical blog post. Both in that the SSW of 2025 was about exoplanet populations, which inherently include speculation and projection, and also in that I forgot to take any sensible photos, so you’re going to have to paint some mental images for yourself.

The crux of most SSWs are to help younger generations of researchers connect with a topic in exoplanets through lectures and hands on activities. Discussions are more fundamental than you would get from a typical conference and talks are staged to build on each other throughout the week.

This year was a celebration of hitting 25 sagan workshops, and so was an overview of how each detection method has aided our understanding of the whole of exoplanet populations. Take a wild guess at the favorite plot….

The best part of the Sagan Workshop series is that they’re truly meant to be a resource. There are no registration fees and all the talks are posted online after. So I’ll present my chef’s choice from this year with links if you’d like to relive it yourself.

If you’d like to know more about the biases in transiting exoplanet surveys, I highly recommend Josh Winn’s talk Twenty-Five Years of Transiting Planets (Video). He steps through a map of our transit detections through the years and different missions, which really helps contextualize how mission planning shapes the science we use for demographics. The selected slide above is, admittedly, a spoiler for to his very well-crafted narrative.

Of course, I’m contractually obligated to serve up the Direct Imaging talk on this menu. Not only because it really helped put my own work in context, or that all our favorite systems got a shout out, but the speaker Eric Neilson is a former Laird grad student. Check out Eric’s run down of the state of the feild here: Detection Techniques: Direct Imaging (Video)

Tim Brandt’s talk on absolute astrometry finally got me to understand exactly what the hub-bub around Gaia is about. Tim turned my vague notions on astrometry to appreciation for the nuances and limitation of the genre. Highly recommend this talk for a brush up: Detecting and Weighing Exoplanets with Absolute Astrometry (Video)

Finally, I really enjoyed Brendan Bowler’s talk on Gas Giant Demographics (Video). We talk a lot about the distinct populations each technique can study, but this was a really interesting way of tying what each technique gives us for a given population. Gas giants at different separations and ages are approached in different ways, but are quilted together in a great summary here. The talk is also just very expertly crafted, an instant resource.

In addition to the educational talk series, there were also posters and short advertisements for poster pops. I gave my poster on the direct imaging work MagAO-X has been doing on Beta Pic b. Imagine I gave a poster pop and had actually taken a photo, it might look something like:

I also had great conversations over the poster session, across a variety of active research projects. With some stretch of the imagination, that poster session could have looked something like:

It’s true that this year was not necessarily the most on topic for us, but the workshop was a good reminder how far the field of exoplanets has come in my lifetime, and how bright the future is with Gaia DR3, PLATO, HWO, and more.

Song of the week: