Now that telescope proposals are submitted we return to our regularly scheduled programming. Our first order of business is to belatedly congratulate Dr. Derek Kopon, the Magellan AO Project’s first PhD. Derek is off to Heidelberg to help with the LINC-NIRVANA interferometer, but he’ll still be working on MagAO.
We also welcome our newest team member, Ya-Lin Wu. Ya-Lin is a first year graduate student at Steward and is helping us develop data pipelines to manage the huge amount of 1s and 0s we produce on a nightly basis.
We head back to LCO to prepare for first light in exactly one month. Time to start paying attention again.
We are very excited to announce that MagAO’s very own Kate Follette has been awarded a NASA Sagan Fellowship. Her proposal, “Finding and Characterizing Forming Protoplanets with Next-Generation Adaptive Optics Systems”, was one of just 6 selected this year. You’ll probably have guessed that “Next-Generation” AO systems includes our very own MagAO.
Kate’s Sagan project involves imaging baby planets with MagAO+VisAO’s H-alpha capability, and following up with the amazing Gemini Planet Imager (GPI). You can read all about Kate’s project in this pdf.Here’s Kate on her way up to the telescopes at LCO. Way to go Kate!Dr Follette hard at work driving VisAO.
Congratulations Kate, and welcome to the Sagan Fellows family!
MagAO’s own Ya-Lin Wu defended his Ph.D. dissertation and is now Dr. Wu! Congrats Ya-Lin!
Dr. Wu and his happy advisor.
Ya-Lin has used MagAO to study planet formation in many ways, most recently combining VisAO data with ALMA data to study circum-planetary disks. Check out all of his papers on our Publications page.
Ya-Lin is now on his way to the University of Texas at Austin as a 51 Peg b fellow. Way to go.
This is a late post, but on November 16, 2018, Kelsey Miller successfully defended her Ph.D. dissertation! Congratulations, Dr. Miller!
Kelsey and her Ph.D. Committee – Olivier, Jared, and Michael
Kelsey’s research is on Linear Dark Field Control (LDFC), a focal plane wavefront sensing technique where she monitors the bright field speckles and uses their linear nature to maintain stability in the dark hole. She has been developing LDFC using the MagAO-X pupil and vAPP coronagraph design. You can learn more about Kelsey’s work in LDFC (JATIS, arXiv) and how LDFC will work with MagAO-X (SPIE, arXiv).
Kelsey is off to cooler climates at Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands, who have been our collaborators with the vAPP coronagraph. She will be a postdoctoral researcher with Frans Snik, continuing her work on LDFC to get it working on sky. We will miss you tremendously!
The school year has wrapped up and we’re about to head into summer. Usually we’re excited we survived the year at all, but this time we are celebrating the XWCL undergraduates graduating and completing their bachelor’s degrees! Chris, Maggie, and Madison have worked with us for the past couple years assisting on MagAO-X.
Chris joined us in 2016 as a computer science undergrad. He started working with Katie doing data reduction. Jared then poached him away to work a lot in the lab doing mostly hardware coding and is the original Basler camera whisperer. He is going to stick around with us for a few weeks to wrangle some more hardware control programming before journeying off to a real job with Fast Enterprises.
Congratulations, Chris!
Maggie joined us in 2017 as an optical sciences and engineering undergrad. She’s worked primarily with Laird on MagAO-X optomechanical design and alignment. She came along with us to SPIE last year and is part inventor with Laird on the optomechanical mount patent. She will be suffering sticking around with us this fall at UA for a PhD in optical sciences, where she will also be an NSF GRFP recipient. She is off to a summer internship in Baltimore at STScI working on HiCAT.
Maggie with Laird at the Optical Sciences commencement
Madison joined us in 2018 as an optical sciences and engineering undergrad. She worked with us part time last summer to help Lauren with the MagAO-X pyramid wfs alignment and joined us for the past school year doing quantum efficiency testing for a light source. She will be partially suffering sticking around this fall at UA for a MS in optical sciences. She is off to a summer internship in Boston at MIT Lincoln Laboratory.
Madison with Jhen and Lauren at the Optical Sciences commencement
The MagAO-X PI has expressed an interest in the return of having a song with the blog posts. With the help of Joseph, we have a graduation-themed song for EACH of the undergrads:
For Chris, we have “Shut Up and Let Me Go” by the Ting Tings:
For Maggie, we have “Move On Up” by Curtis Mayfield:
For Madison, we have “Take Yourself With You” by Rose Linor Dougall:
Also, as tradition with the blog, here are quotes. The MagAO-X PI has some parting words for the graduating undergrads:
Jared: You’re here until you die* *Source: “Look Down (Prisoners)” from Les Miserables
Congratulations again to the undergrads, XWCL is super proud of all the hard work you’ve done! Here’s to a fun and productive summer for everyone!
escope proposals are submitted we return to our regularly scheduled programming. Our first order of business is to belatedly congratulate Dr. Derek Kopon, the Magellan AO Project’s first PhD. Derek is off to Heidelberg to help with the LINC-NIRVANA interferometer, but he’ll still be working on MagAO.
We also welcome our newest team member, Ya-Lin Wu. Ya-Lin is a first year graduate student at Steward and is helping us develop data pipelines to manage the huge amount of 1s and 0s we produce on a nightly basis.
