Tag: conference

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.

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:

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:

Then we saw the GUIs in the control room — looks fun!

And some images of the final product:

And finally, up to the top floor to see the telescope:

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.

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:

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:

Runa had a poster about the E-ELT M4 wavefront corrector, which we quite enjoyed, as it was dense with cultural and AO references:

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:

We enjoyed many formal and informal discussions at the meeting with our friends and colleagues about our new challenges in AO:

And finally, some wild life!

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.

Kim, impressing the crowd at her poster.

TJ talking about his MagAO debris disk results.

As a number of MagAO team members are currently at the “In the Spirit of Bernard Lyot 2015” Conference in Montréal, Québec, we’ll have a couple blog posts this week discussing this exciting direct imaging-focused conference. Spirit of Lyot is a large meeting held every 3-5 years focused on the imaging of extrasolar planets and circumstellar disks. Along with all of the hot-off-the-press science results in the field, the meeting is particularly focused on the innovative new instrumentation, and technologies in development or currently on-sky to pave the way to new discoveries.

A great overview with some very cool MagAO updates were shared yesterday by Laird, the second talk of the conference:

Laird highlighted the many unique capabilities of MagAO and the strengths of going to visible wavelengths. As VisAO has demonstrated soundly, visible light observations offer many scientific advantages: you can detect strong emission lines like H-alpha, you have a better chance of distinguishing object characteristics with wider color-magnitude diagrams, can obtain a nice estimate of the extinction due to dust, and of course achieve much improved spatial resolution! With the adaptive secondary, which is more robust to lost actuators, MagAO’s performance on-sky in terms of RMS wavefront error is ~135 nm and right at the error budget from the lab estimates, providing ideal resolution to do this science with exceptional sensitivity.

Laird also made sure to talk about the many exciting recent results and ones coming soon, both disks and planet detection/characterization, with a run down of projects by Ya-Lin (new paper just hit arXiv! on the low-mass companion 1RXS J1609B), Jared, Katie, and Kate — more coming soon on these last two projects as the talks are being given later today!

Later in the afternoon, Gilles Otten, who was at MagAO with Matt Kenworthy back in early May (see their blogs from that run here), presented brand-new instrumentation results from testing their new vortex apodizing phase plate (VAPP) coronagraphs. In case you missed it, there are a ton of details in yesterday’s blog recapping the press release. But here are a few photos, too:

Gilles gave a great talk with very exciting observations showing the two complementary PSFs from this coronagraphic system and the excellent contrast on Clio. A few of the first targets were a few famous stellar binaries (Alpha Cen, Beta Cen):

 

And the performance on-sky was very close to the predicted performance!

You can also follow along with all of the updates using the hashtag #LYOT2015 on Twitter and Facebook! Click here to see the real-time Twitter results.

 

Hello, MagAO fans. Are you attending the SPIE Astronomical Telescopes & Instrumentation conference in Montreal next week (starting tomorrow)? We would love to see you at one of our talks or posters to hear more about MagAO! Look for myself, Jared, or Laird — we’ll be at the conference all week.

Wednesday was a half day, but before we all took off to enjoy sunny Victoria we listened to some interesting talks — and showed off MagAO. Arizona/LPL alum Jonathan Fortney gave the introductory review talk on characterizing exoplanets.

Here’s Jonathan’s talk:

The famous Matt Kenworthy, now at Leiden but formerly a denizen of Steward Observatory, was the session chair.

This was the day when we unveiled our MagAO results to the wider exoplanet community. Katie gave a well-received talk on our system’s capabilities and our exciting results on beta Pictoris b.

You can watch the whole talk:

You can find all the talks on Christian Marois’s youtube channel here.

Later, a bunch of astronomers went to the home opener of the Victoria HarbourCats, a westcoast league team. They played the Kelowna Falcons. The Cats won (Bear Down!), and it was a great game on a nice night. We saw 2 homeruns, a diving catch in left field, and some close plays on the bases. We all rooted for the home team, stuffed ourselves with hotdogs, and enjoyed some good local brew.