Today was the last day of the conference! We saw many great talks (mostly about PDS 70 and HR 8799…) and many of us have left excited to get back to work and Reduce! That! Data!
Today was a half day and that meant we were finally able to roam free and see the beauty of the Netherlands. Logan, Joseph and I headed over to Den Haag to check out another city.
We saw beautiful architecture…
… gorgeous flowers…
And some authentic Dutch boba tea～～～！ ( ❛ ᴗ ❛ 🌸)
It wouldn’t be a trip to the Netherlands without seeing a Dutch art masterpiece so we went to the Mauritshuis museum of fine art…
…where we saw the famous painting “Girl with a Pearl Earring” by Johannes Vermeer.
Seeing the painting in real life fell a little flat. We much prefer our own take on the Vermeer master work, so we fixed it. “Jared with a Pearl Earring” belongs in a museum don’t you think?
Switching out the paintings caused such a commotion that a protest rapidly formed outside the museum.
Or, was it just a coincidental and totally unrelated protest? Who is to say, really…
Jared and Logan are heading back tomorrow and we wish them safe travels! Joseph and I are on to the next adventure in Belgium.
Today I presented Kevin Wagner’s talk about searching for planets in 10 µm light. I think I did an okay job talking about things I know nothing about, but then, I do have plenty of practice.
All questions about Kevin’s part of the talk will be answered with viscacha noises.
Incredibly, people did ask me questions. In this rare instance, “beats me, ask someone else!” was a valid answer. (Actually, I’ve been running audience messages back and forth to Kevin on the Steward grad student Slack. Just not on stage.)
The only MagAO-X/XWCL member officially on the schedule for today was our fearless leader Dr. Jared Males.
GMagAO-* is strictly an improvement over MagAO-X as the * means it can wildcard match all Giant Magellan AO instruments.
I can’t speak for Jared, but I’m happy to be free of any further obligations beyond listening and enjoying the rest of the conference.
Themed Gallery 1: Pictures of PDS 70 b from SPHERE
It’s their fave.
Themed Gallery 2: Food in hand
Li’l marzipan sandwichIf pound-cake were a cookieBalanced dinner of frites
Where are days 1 & 2 you ask? Um we didn’t blog those. *Sheepish grin*
Your favorite MagAO-X team is living it up in Leiden, Netherlands this week at the Spirit of Lyot conference – a conference devoted to bringing exoplanet direct imaging science and instrument builders together to unite the tech with the science. I’ve had a great time so far! This is my first astronomy in-person conference post-pandemic, and it’s great that every talk and poster is directly related to science I am excited about. I’ve met so many people both known and unknown to me previously, and am feeling re-invigorated and re-inspired about the work I’m doing.
Today was the first MagAO-X-focused talk by Leiden’s own Dr. Sebastiaan Haffert. He talked about his integral field spectrograph addition to MagAO-X, VIS-X. Here are some action shots:
Sebastiaan telling the audience about how VIS-X will blow this PDS-70 thing wide open. Peep the sweet sweater swag
MagAO-X team member Olivier Guyon and MagAO-X team friend Kate Follette also graced us with exciting science talks today. Additionally, I have a poster at the conference, which you can see here, and Joseph Long also has a poster!
Tomorrow will be action packed with talks by audience favorite Dr. Jared Males, and surprise special guest Joseph Long with an exclusive set delivering Kevin Wagner’s talk who is home with a surprise special covid.
Stay tuned!
PS – Please forgive any typos as they gave us all 8 beer tokens each and only two days to spend them, and I am feeling the effects at the moment… Cheers!
In honor of all the friends new and old, the song of the day is I Have Friends from the hit TV show Crazy Ex Girlfriend:
This past week, the MagAO-X team attended the SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation conference in Austin, TX. Here’s a recap of all of our presentations at the conference.
Let’s start off with the talks. Jared kicked off our presentation collection with a talk on the MagAO-X update:
Starting it off with the MagAO-X PI
Laird gave an update on MagAO:
We love MagAO!
Kelsey gave a fantastic talk on the vAPP for MagAO-X and Linear Dark Field Control:
Kelsey’s awesome presentation with excellent use of pictures
Lauren gave an awesome talk on her PyWFS PYRITE sims:
Lauren’s talk stepped through PyWFS really well, great job!
Justin presented PIAACMC designs for SCExAO/GMT/MagAO-X:
Despite being the last talk of the conference, it still had great attendance!
The rest of us had poster presentations:
Joseph presented on his CLIO data analysis
Maggie presented on her work with the MagAO-X kinematic mounts
Alex R (v1.0) presented his simulations work on Fraizen’s paper
Rachel Morgan (MIT) presented her work using the data Ewan collected with MagAO on 2017B
Alex H (v2.0) presented his work with the MagAO-X K-mirror mount
Laird presented the MagAO-X optomechanical design
Kyle presented his work characterizing the MagAO-X DMs
Jhen presented her work using POPPY to characterize the MagAO-X and LGS testbeds
Jared made a poster for GMagAO-X
Here’s some shenanigans from the conference and in Austin:
Jared’s talk crashed several timesonce during his presentation. It turns out, LibreOffice and the SPIE talk upload system disagree with each other, particularly with how to handle Lauren’s 700 KB flaming logo. When transitioning to the next talk, MagAO-X refused to leave the screen.
Free advertisement for MagAO-X!
According to Laird, later in the week, Lauren’s MagAO-X logo came back to shutdown another talk. The computer tried to “recover” Jared’s talk and so the solution was to kill it outright. MagAO-X came back with a vengeance it seems.
Despite the heat and humidity, Austin was a great conference location.
I observed some Texas locals
Sunset dinner by the Colorado River
I did the millennial thing and ate avocado toast for brunch one day
And so concludes SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation 2018. It was a fantastic time seeing everyone, meeting new people, attending talks, and presenting research. To close off, here’s a quote from the MagAO-X PI:
Jared: “All deficiencies in your presentations have been noted and will be addressed in due course.”
MagAO is at the SPIE Astronomical Telescopes and Instrumentation conference in Edinburgh, Scotland this week. Instrumentation-astronomers from around the world are gathered here to talk science and engineering. The talks feature everything from detector technology, high-speed computing, and telescope operations to gravitational waves and extrasolar planets. Edinburgh
My talk about MagAO was the first one of the conference: My talk about the MagAO status update
Jared had two posters: Jared’s Orbital-Differential Imaging (ODI) poster
This one is about MagAO-2k and MagAO-X: Jared’s MagAO-2k and MagAO-X poster
And Enrico had one: Enrico’s SOUL poster
Laird gave an invited talk about visible-light AO: Laird’s invited talk about visible-light AO
And Armando about the new AO system for the VLT: Armando talking about ERIS AO
We took the opportunity of all being in the same place to plan our MagAO upgrade to 2 kilohertz, called MagAO-2k. The MagAO team meets to plan our next engineering run for the MagAO-2k upgrade
Some more pictures from around the conference: Claire Max and her current and former students
Proof that Jared and Olivier are in the same room together
UA grad student Asher Baltzell gave a talk in the Cyberinfrastructure section about his work creating a cloud-computing software package to detect exoplanets in MagAO data. This work was featured in this video by Cyverse:
Finally, check out the SPIE post about the conference here. Look for me, Asher, and MagAO in there!
