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!
MagAO have just spent the week at AO4ELT 4 = Adaptive Optics for Extremely Large Telescopes, 4th edition. The conference was held at the UCLA conference center at Lake Arrowhead, a very nice resort where the CfAO Fall Retreat is usually held.
Here is the conference room full of AO scientists and engineers.
On Wednesday evening I went on a tour of Big Bear Solar Observatory organized by the conference. It was fun and interesting! The telescope is on a pier out in the lake, with a long narrow road going out to it: The telescope is built on a pier out in the lake for stable seeing during the day (laminar flow across the lake). We were there at night — the “off” time — and saw some beautiful moonlight over the lake. Also, life preservers were near the stairs to the basement, because the lower level can flood when the lake is high.
Visiting a solar telescope at night is like visiting a night-time-astronomy telescope during the day: You get a nice tour because the staff are able to give you their attention, and you get to go into the telescope dome and optics Coude room because they aren’t busy tracking the star(s) and collecting the photons.
We first saw the double-decker optics bench: The optical bench at Big Bear in the Coude room takes in the sunlight, corrects it with AO, and sends it to a variety of imagers, spectrographs, and magnetic field measuring devices.
Claire Max admiring the optics bench at Big Bear
Then we saw the GUIs in the control room — looks fun! The GUIs at Big Bear Solar Observatory include a single-conjugate “classical” AO system and a multi-conjugate MCAO system.
And some images of the final product: Here are some of the close-up images of the Sun taken by Big Bear Solar Observatory. The Earth could fit inside one of these sunspots.
And finally, up to the top floor to see the telescope: The full telescope. Can you find the secondary mirror?
The secondary mirror is above the primary mirror, but off to the side. This is what is called an off-axis Gregorian, and I had never seen one before. The primary mirror is a segment of a parabola and was tested and polished to its final optical shape at the Steward Observatory Mirror Lab, and aluminized at Kitt Peak. The secondary mirror being off to the side means there are no “spiders” (or support struts that look like spider legs) in the beam to cause diffraction or scattered light that make it hard to image the high-contrast regions on the Sun. We also could use such a telescope design for imaging the faintest, coolest exoplanets. An off-axis Gregorian telescope has no spiders in the beam, to reduce scattered light, making the high-contrast imaging on the Sun possible.
But I did see a spider! Not causing diffraction or scattered light in the telescope beam though.
Here is a full picture of the 1.6-m telescope at Big Bear Solar Observatory.
Thanks to the staff at Big Bear for the wonderful tour!
Now back to the conference. AO4ELT is a meeting where AO scientists and engineers come together to discuss cutting-edge problems and solutions in adaptive optics. This included science cases, wavefront control, deformable mirrors, detectors, lasers, etc. Jared gave 2 talks this week, one about his plan for an “extreme AO” (ExAO) version of MagAO called MagAO-X, and one about Olivier Guyon’s ExAO system at Subaru, SCExAO: Jared gave 2 talks this week, one as himself for MagAO-X (top) and one as Olivier Guyon for SCExAO (bottom).
I had a poster about the science I am doing with MagAO and GPI to image Jupiter-like exoplanets and to measure their fundamental properties like temperature and luminosity: Vanessa came by to look at my poster and we are very excited about direct imaging of Jupiter-like exoplanets for the next generation!
Runa had a poster about the E-ELT M4 wavefront corrector, which we quite enjoyed, as it was dense with cultural and AO references: Runa had a poster about testing the wavefront of the E-ELT M4 adaptive mirror.
Laird talked about visible-light AO, for today’s and the next generation. His talk was 40 slides in 20 minutes and covered a lot of ground, and I was so taken that I forgot to get a picture of him giving the actual talk, so this will have to do: I didn’t manage to get a photo of Laird during his talk but this is a pretty good stand-in.
Laird and Brian talk GMT phasing in front of the First Light CRED poster (who supplied the refreshments).
We enjoyed many formal and informal discussions at the meeting with our friends and colleagues about our new challenges in AO: Simone, Jared, and Enrico talk Pyramid Aliasing just before the Italians leave to go home.
And finally, some wild life! This is the AO4ELT mascot enjoying the refreshments.
MagAO has been well represented here at the Spirit of Lyot conference, despite being a much smaller team than the other big AO planet finding instruments. Here are a few more pictures from our presentations over the past few days.
Me presenting early results form our GAPplanet Survey (exciting results to be announced soon!)
Katie, in a convincing Laird Close disguise, presents her work on characterization of the Beta Pic exoplanet.
