conference – Page 8 – Extreme Wavefront Control Lab

Catch MagAO at SPIE Astronomical Telescopes & Instrumentation in Montreal

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.

Don't miss it! — This is the title slide of my talk about the status and on-sky performance of MagAO. The talk is quite early, third of the entire conference. It’s Sunday morning at 9:45am in the first AO session, “Session 1: Status of Current AO Instrument Projects I”.

patent pending, Laird M. Close — Kate’s poster about “New frontiers in circumstellar science with MagAO’s visible light simultaneous differential imaging mode” (Paper 9148-144) will have a viewing Monday from 5:30 PM – 7:00 PM in “Astronomy with AO”.

Be there or be square — Laird’s talk about “Into the blue: AO science in the visible” is at 4:05pm on Wednesday in “Session 14: Astronomy with AO II”

He promises joke(s) — This is the title slide of Jared’s talk about direct imaging of exoplanets in the habitable zone with AO. It is on Thursday at 3:35pm in “Session 17: Extreme AO II”.

IAUS 299: Misbehaving Planets and Moderately Insane Ideas

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.

nature always wins arguments with scientists. — Jonathan says that planets “misbehave” when his models don’t match observations. I suspect that the planets actually know what they’re doing, but more work needs to be done.

Here’s Jonathan’s talk:

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

FIVE MINUTES!!!!!! — Matt kept everybody in line.

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.

Go MagAO go! — Katie gave yet another great talk on our MagAO commissioning results. Here she’s fielding questions at the end.

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.

We were sitting dead-red, and it was right in our wheelhouse, and we went yard. — It was a sellout crowd.

IAU Symposium 299 day 1

Our apologies if you’re having trouble keeping up, but MagAO is now in Victoria, B.C., for IAUS 299. The conference got off to a great start with a review talk by Beth Biller, a product of the Arizona+Laird system.

bear down — Beth kicked off the conference. Johanna comments.

TJ had the honor of closing out today’s session. He wowed the crowd with LBT and MagAO disk images.

but which one is your favorite, TJ? — TJ closed out the session.

The talks from this conference go up on youtube as soon as Christian gets them uploaded (gulp). Here’s TJ’s talk.

For me, personally, the highlight of the conference so far has been the harbour ferry ballet, a truly impressive feat of nautical coordination.

Straight out of shining time station — The harbour ferry ballet. Seriously — this is a thing.

This is a lovely place to visit.

wait . . . is it winter on this side of the equator? — The legislative offices at night.

MagAO AAS Poster by Kate Follette

MagAO fans: Did you miss AAS? Or did you see our poster at AAS and want to see it again? Kate had a lot of great conversations at the meeting (ADS link), and she has now posted her AAS 2013 poster as a PDF to our publications archive. Here it is:

Well, we can’t believe it, but various team members are going to start heading to Chile next week for Comm-2!! So we hope you enjoy this first taste of our results… and stay tuned for more soon!

MagAO Does Amsterdam

Several members of the MagAO team are in Amsterdam for the SPIE astronomy conference. In addition to presenting several posters and giving some talks, we are also conducting the Clio2 pre-ship review on Wednesday. A busy week.