It is extremely illegal to smuggle Andean mammals of the high desert into downtown Montréal, but I have always wanted to try poutine, and MagAO-X already got me as far as Tucson anyway.
At the border, I tried to explain I was going to the SPIE conference but I’m not sure Google Translate was working.
Today, Laird and Lauren both gave their talks, which I’m sure were lovely, but I honestly had trouble staying awake after the long flight from Tucson. Here’s a picture of me trying to pay attention to a conversation between Olivier, Jared, and Laird.
It was worth the price of the ticket just to see all three in person, again. See you in November, señores!
Song of the Day
The Canadian Fish and Wildlife Service is hot on my tail, so I must return to Chile… but I don’t regret a thing.
Hello Blog! I’m Eden and I’ll be joining the MagAO-X team this fall as an OpSci grad student. This SPIE I’m presenting my wavefront profiling work on imaka, a GLAO demonstrator, but I’ll be joining the high contrast crew in no time.
Happy to report that I survived my Wednesday poster session.
This conference is much more exciting, informative, and thrilling than any of the online approximations the last two years. So far, as a first time SPIE-ian, I think I could summarize the experience so far as a mix of:
Cutting edge talks illuminating the future of our field and fully inspiring me to start over my research from scratch.
Celebrity Spotting:
Jared spotting Olivier Guyon in the AO session.
Stalking the exhibition hall for the elusive free coffee and rumors of the best freebies:
The Dutch booth had 400 units of a LEGO JWST model. They ran out in a day and a half.
Extreme pride at the progress of the field, the creativity of research, and my own ability to understand some of it.
Crashing at 3pm and making use of the food and resources in the community lounge networking space.
Leftover beads from diversity sessions means an opportunity.
Rallying for the 6-8pm poster session, and being surprised when the admin needs to increasingly aggressively flip the lights to force us attendees to leave.
Over the last two days, many MagAO-X talks have graced the stage of the the AO talk session. The group is looking very good up there.
Laird presents his talk on holographic dispersed fringe sensor.Sebastian presents on behalf of Meghan O’Brien.
We’ve also had a fully stocked schedule of posters, some of which *cough Sebastian* had an ever present line.
Joseph explaining computer optimization to the next generation.Maggie presenting on GMagAO-X’s DM optical design.Noah Swimmer from UCSB presented an MKID camera for use behind MagAO-X Sebastian’s poster before the rush.
A very special session on Wednesday paid tribute to a titan amongst AO, David L. Fried of the Fried parameter and the Fried geometry who passed away in May. One of his close collaborators gave a history of his career which ended up being a historical overview of the field itself. As a younger scientist, it was humbling to see how much one man had contributed to the science I work with daily as well as how many around had gotten to work with him directly.
Of note, the memoriam presenter was just as excited as the rest of us to receive the speaker gift for the AO session:
“We r-not limited by seeing” with a back of the Fried Geometry
Hope everyone can stay strong through the last two days of this intellectual marathon!
Double french Songs for your double day blog:
Dream catching, aka its a dream to be at SPIE.
The title is English but the lyrics are mostly French.
While the whole group is living up up north, those of us left behind in the sweltering heat and humidity of Tucson in July got a treat today:
Everyone safe and sound in the loading dock staging room. The big white box in the back is MagAO-X, the foreground is the electronics box, and the grey box is our control computer.
That’s right, that’s MagAO-X back home all safe and sound and looking none the worse for wear from her journey home from Chile! Delivery was kind enough to happen when literally everyone from the group is in Montreal or otherwise elsewhere, except moi and undergrad researcher Roz Roberts.
Your’s truly and Roz, dripping sweat
Folks it was a rough one. After about 30 mins of watching the crane and maneuvering the dollies in the 6 million degree heat and 5000% humidity (I measured), I was pretty wiped. And all we did was move it off the loading dock into the staging room. Unpacking comes next week, so stay tuned for the next update!
It’s only day 2 of the SPIE Astronomical Telescopes & Instrumentation Conference and already lots of interesting talks, lunch & learns, and posters are underway.
Dr. Richard Dekany gave an interesting talk on SIGHT, the Palomar 5m telescope LGS AO system, and highlighted the support of our very own Sebastiaan Haffert and Meghan O’Brien on the Optical Differentiation wavefront sensor.
The Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) Lunch & Learn brought up interesting points about international differences in approaches to EDI. There are more similar events and networking events throughout the week in room 514!
We supported fellow optical sciences grad student, Kevin Derby, from the UArizona Space Astrophysics Lab during his fantastic talk on pinwheel segmented primary apertures.
Kevin Derby presenting his talk
Since this lab just loves when things are “in-phase”, several of us attended a talk on the phasing of the James Webb Space Telescope by Scott Acton. He had some thoughtful words on his next steps as a scientist, “And that’s how you align the telescope. Now I need another job.”
Scott Acton presenting his talk
On theme with space telescopes, we are finishing the night with UASAL graduate student, Jaren Ashcraft, presenting his poster on the Space Coronagraph Optical Bench – SCoOB.
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.”
