Sagan Summer Workshop 2024: A Menagerie of Planets, People, and Projects

At risk of not being able to show my face in Eden’s upcoming quals study session, I hereby present to you the Sagan Summer Workshop 2024–a journey through space and time .

But first, here’s a clip of the Journey cover band that blessed my ears on my first night in California.

Journey(?) coming to you live from Burbank, California.

Day 0: PROTO Workshop

We began our week with a professional development workshop where we learned about large-scale mission planning. We also learned to appreciate the full breadth of NASA’s acronyms.

So many missions…so little time.

Day 1: HCIPy Day

It wouldn’t be a direct imaging conference without HCIPy! Sebastiaan masterfully guided the workshop attendees through a tutorial of everyone’s favorite high contrast imaging simulation framework.

Unfortunately, some of us skipped the workshop, thinking that they already knew HCIPy. These individuals in question came to regret their decision while going through the tutorial a few hours later (It was me…I was the ‘some of us’).

Workshop highlights from those who did attend:

Sebastiaan and David twinning with their water bottles.
Smile if you like HCIPy!

Day 2: A Disk Enthusiast’s Guide to the Galaxy

Day 2 featured lots of disks. Unfortunately, we were too captivated by the talks to take any photos, so here is a picture of the Philz Iced Mint Mojito (the coffee not the cocktail) that kept me going throughout the week.

I drank this every day of the week.

Day 3: MagAO-X’s Debut!

Day 3 featured a coronagraphic imaging talk from Professor Haffert. It also marked the triumphant debut of MagAO-X at Sagan 2024.

The famous Pi Pup video with MagAO-X (I heard it makes for a great YouTube channel intro)!

Around this time, Pasadena attempted to do its best Tucson impression, becoming unbearably hot. Luckily, we have a former chef to teach us how to make Queen’s Coffee.

Cold brew coffee and lemonade is a real thing, I swear!

But wait? Where is our advisor you ask? Let’s take a look:

Oh…

Day 4: The Imagers Behind Images of Imaged Planets

I would be remiss without showing some exciting, direct imaging results at a high contrast imaging workshop. Our friends in UASAL imaged Eps Ind Ab with James Webb!

Congrats Sai, Justin, and Ewan!!

Sebastiaan directly imaged PDS 70b and c (at one point) with VLT!

This is one of our favorite planetary systems.

I directly imaged this corporate office building with my Samsung Galaxy S9!

At this resolution, we are able to make out the “199 South Los Robles” address in the lower left quadrant.

Day 5: The GMagAO-X Grand Finale

On the final day of the workshop, Jared arrived to give his signature talk on GMagAO-X and it did not disappoint.

The famous waterwheel (featuring Dr. Hedglen and Dr. Kautz).
Imaging exoplanets requires high vizzybility.

Following Jared’s talk, the Arizona contingent gathered for a group photo:

Awww…

Finally, we wrapped up the workshop by presenting some of our group projects:

Eden presenting on post-processing of high contrast imaging data.
The ghost of Joseph Long.
The ghosts of Jay Kueny and Jialin Li.

And thus concludes a successful workshop!

Song of the Day:

Gojira made history, becoming the first metal band to perform at an Olympics opening ceremony.

Gojira-Ah! Ca ira! Paris Olympics, 2024 opening ceremony.

SPIE 2024 wrapped

For a little while in June, the gang was all back together for SPIE Tokyo. Almost felt like an observing run, but in Japan, and every telescope team you ever heard of was also having their reunions at the same time.

Here’s a round up of all the MagAO-X and friends talks, posters, and proceedings. (Check out Katie’s MAPS blogs for some of the real time updates during the conference.)

Day 0 at SPIE, badges aquired. Left to right: Prof. Sebastiaan Haffert, Katie Twitchell, Dr. Joseph Long, Josh Liberman, Warren Foster, Eden McEwen

Our line up of MagAO-X talks:

MagAO-X Commissioning talk by Jared Males
Camera resolutions these days are just so impressive

MagAO-X: Commissioning Results and Status of Ongoing Upgrades
arXiv:2407.13007 [pdf, html, other]

Neural Nets on MagAO-X by Rico Landman, talk given by Sebastiaan Haffert

Not the proceeding, but some of the work done on this project can be found here:

Closed-loop demonstration of neural network wavefront reconstruction with MagAO-X
arXiv:2401.16325  [pdf, other

Direct Imaging results by Jialin Li

Challenge of direct imaging of exoplanets within structures: disentangling real signal from point source from background light
arXiv:2407.13756 [pdf, html, other]

Optical Gain Calibration work by Eden McEwen

On-sky, real-time optical gain calibration on MagAO-X using incoherent speckles
arXiv:2407.13022 [pdf, html, other]

Machine Learning + telemetry by Joseph Long

More data than you want, less data than you need: machine learning approaches to starlight subtraction with MagAO-X
arXiv:2407.13008 [pdf, html, other]

MagAO-X Posters:

The Hero’s Journey to get your poster printed in Japan.
1k DM characterization work by Jay Kuney

MagAO-X Phase II Upgrades: Implementation and First On-Sky Results of a New Post-AO 1000 Actuator Deformable Mirror
arXiv:2407.13019 [pdf, html, other]

iEFC tolerance work by Josh Liberman

Analyzing Misalignment Tolerances for Implicit Electric Field Conjugation
arXiv:2407.13199 [pdf, html, other]

ADC control work by Katie Twitchell

Improving coronagraphic performance with active atmospheric dispersion control on MagAO-X
Stay tuned for the proceeding!

GMagAO-X Presentations:

GMagAO-X overview by Jared

High-Contrast Imaging at First-Light of the GMT: The Preliminary Design of GMagAO-X
arXiv:2407.13014 [pdf, html, other]

HCAT Testbed work by Laird Close 

High-contrast imaging at first-light of the GMT: The PDR optical and mechanical design for the GMagAO-X ExAO system and results from the HCAT testbed with an HDFS phased parallel DM prototype
Stay tuned for the proceeding!

High contrast WFS architecture for by Sebastiaan Haffert

High-contrast imaging at first-light of the GMT: the wavefront sensing and control architecture of GMagAO-X
arXiv:2407.13021 [pdf, html, other]

Wait, what’s that Golden Ticket?

Did you see that, the golden ticket on Sebastiaan’s poster?

Golden ticket for Lego ELT sets courtesy of the Netherlands contingent

If you recall, the Dutch have a history of bringing out the Lego big guns for SPIE. (See: lego JWST at SPIE 2022). This year they’ve gone even bigger with scale Lego models of the ELT! But, instead of the first 200 interested parties, these were exclusively given out to participants with stunning social media posts. Or very good persuasion skills.

Turns out we had an in with a sympathetic ear. And I got to make up for my lack of Lego two years ago:

A win for the office!

In a fairytale ending, the ELT has made it home to Tucson and is in good company with our GMT model.

Left: GMT, foam model. Right ELT, lego model

& the MagAO-X Friends

Of course, we are lucky to also get to see our office neighbors and collaborators present at the conference too! We did not capture them all, but this is a conference that scientifically feels like home (maybe too literally).

Sebastiaan’s collaboration with the Santa Cruz testbed.
Warren Foster, Alum, talking about mirror fabrication for LFAST
Lauren Shatz, Alum, talking about LASSIE at Space Force
Katie Morzinski talking about MAPS commissioning

The End.

Cheers to a good conference and good work by our team!

UA team photo: Josh, Joseph, Katie, Eden, Jared, Jay, Jialin, Laird, and special guest Olivier!
Fireworks over the Yokohama Bay.

Song of the week:

Love Letter to Japan by the bird and bee

It’s giant! It’s magellan! And it’s a telescope! Coming to a Chile near you in [mumble mumble mumble]

The MagAO-X team is also fully engaged in preparing for the next big thing in telescopes, the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT). GMT is one of the ELTs (extremely large telescopes) being planned for the next generation of ground based science, along with the Thirty Meter Telescope and the ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope (yes, ELT is an ELT). GMT is currently being built near our MagAO-X home at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile. Our group is knee deep in planning for GMagAO-X, the extreme adaptive optics coronographic instrument for exoplanet science on the GMT.

So we made a big showing at the GMT Community Science Meeting this week in DC. These meetings are run every year with a rotating science focus, this year was our time to shine with the Exoplanets meeting. The idea is to get future GMT users together to talk about the exoplanet science they want to do with this powerful exciting new platform. Jared gave an invited talk about GMagAO-X, while Laird, Jay, Maggie, Eden, Sebastiaan, and I presented posters about our current and future science. MagAO-X collaborator, super star, and blog alum Alycia Weinberger was there as well. There was an opening reception Tuesday night, two full days of talks and posters, fancy pantsy meals provided (and open bar!!), ending with a half day wrap up on Friday. All in a super fancy hotel in the middle of DC. I had a great time, this was maybe the first time I’ve been to a conference where every talk was something I was interested in (my optics colleagues may have felt differently).

Pics for your viewing pleasure.

Posters! One of these things is not like the others…

Poster Pops! Little 1-min advertisements for your poster.

Our fearless leader gave a talk all about GMagAO-X

I’m writing this from home the day after the conference utterly exhausted! Tons of fun, tons of travel, and the open bar didn’t help things.

I’ll end with the super fancy conference group photo!

You didn’t know that that’s what DC looks like? You need to travel more.


The song of the day is Science Is Real by They Might Be Giants

Code/Astro Days 2.5-4: More Code, Some Astro, and the Super Secret Seasoning to Tonkotsu Ramen

I’ll try to make up for my clickbait title by starting right off with the secret ramen seasoning that I’m uniquely suited to identify.

The last supper

It’s apparently very rare, but chefs from select regions of Japan will season tonkotsu (pork) flavored ramen with peanut dust or peanut butter to impart a special nuttiness to the savory soup. As many of you might guess, this didn’t turn out well for one of the resident peanut deniers in the group. But hopefully those who read this blog will help spread some awareness since, in general, Japanese food restaurants have been a very safe haven for peanut allergy sufferers…! And no, the restaurant made no mention of this additional ingredient anywhere on their menu :-/.

After a quick brush with my kryptonite, we were back the next afternoon exploring the surrounding Chicago area to seek out the healing properties of a slice of deep dish. Although the weather was less than ideal for most of Wednesday with a slight chance for multiple tornados.

Selfie with all the Tucson kids! ft. Vikram (Steward) and Edgar (physics) and Gemma (Spain)

As for the workshop, we (Jialin, Gemma of España, and I) shared a brief eureka moment when we successfully created and pip-installed our very own open-source Python package on our computers! To get everyone else up to speed, we utilized this workshop to get a head start on a collaborative, bright, most-likely-to-be-single star catalog for AO calibration purposes! All that’s really left to do is streamline the catalog querying and crossmatching functionality and then actually make the SQL database prior to our next observing run.

Big thanks to Logan for helping us refine this idea and make it happen in such a short timespan!

I always worry my posts end up evolving to be too too wordy so please enjoy a photo dump of the social activities that took place for the rest of the workshop and afterwards before flying back home to Tucson :-).

This is Ben from UC San Diego. We ran into Ben serendipitously and after some small talk he confessed to being a fellow Jared fan after seeing Jared’s talk at AO4ELT. Astro is such a small world.

Song of the Day

We had a Lyft driver who was literally the city of Chicago anthropomorphized. dApparently in his youth one of his favorite pastimes was staying at the bars in Downtown Chicago until closing. Well so, around last call, when they played this song at the end of the night it was his cue to antagonize the bouncers and convince them, as best as he could, that he makes his own rules, he owns this bar, they’d have to use force to get him to leave, etc. On more than one occasion he got the bouncers grinning and giving him the stink-eye while cracking their knuckles at ten minutes to closing. However, as soon as the clock showed 30 seconds to official closing time he was already 100 ft away from the building and power walking his way home. In between belly laughs he exclaimed “I was young, dumb, and I’m *still* only 5’5″ on a good day so what did you expect? I knew my limits!”

It was way funnier with the thick Chicago accent and euphemisms than is probably coming off typed out here.

Code/Astro Day 1-2.5: Code, Code & Deep Dish Pizza

Both the non-Ph.D.ed KLIPers convened at O’Hare and ready to create a catalog of non-binary stars for the next MagAO-X run, we enjoyed the mild (relative to Tucson) sunshine on the Northwestern Campus. We spotted a nice garden with some cool spiders and Northwestern viscacha enjoying its nutritious meal.

Ready to explore the campus while it’s sunny!

We visited the old astronomy building on Northwestern Campus, which is also the site for the Dearborn Observatory completed in 1888. The 18.5″ refractor inside the dome as well as the entire building was closed to visitors during our visit on Sunday.

According to Wikipedia, this telescope was used to discover Sirius B!

In addition to the OG KLIPers or KLIPistas of MagAO-X, Gemma Gonzalez-Tora from ESO joined the team. We have made a decent amount of progress on making a code to find single stars within a given coordinate. Stay tuned for Jay’s post later this week to see our final product!

Cheers to our amazing team and congrats to Gemma on obtaining her Ph.D.!

We also spotted the third MagAO-X team member on Zoom! Hello Eden!

Oh yes, the title can very deceiving, but the rest of the post contains only Jialin’s review of the Chicago/Evanston food. Chicago deep dish is of course a must try for first timers. Jay and I stopped by the famous Labriola on our half-day off for a 12 inch Danny’s Special Deep Dish Pizza, which contained Russo Sausage, mushrooms, green pepper, and onion in addition to lots of mozzarella cheese and tomato sauce. (And half the pie is about to head back to Tucson!)

Look at that cheese pull! Thanks Jay for insisting on trying this place!

The Chicago Style hot dog is on par with the Sonora Dog, with fresh tomato and a good thick slice of dill pickle!

Portillo’s Chicago Style Hot Dog: Beware of the hidden picked peppers, they can really burn!

If you can’t wait until SPIE 2024 in Japan to try the famous Omurice or Japanese omelette rice, you can find a pretty good substitute in downtown Chicago. (Don’t bother getting the ramen, you can find better ones in Tucson, shhhhhh….)

We ordered the curry sauce instead of the more traditional option.

And I won’t be myself if I don’t recommend a good boba or bubble tea place.

Yes, this is indeed the third boba I’ve had since arriving and there will be more…

Song of the Day(s):

I wanted to catch a musical in Chicago Broadway during my time here, but unfortunately, July is the month of nothingness. Thus, I feel inclined to share one of the most famous numbers from the musical Chicago!