Tag: Congratulations

Congratulations Dr. Wu — MagAO’s newest Ph.D.!

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.

MagAO’s Newest Sagan Fellow

MagAO’s Own.

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 First PhD and Newest Member

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.

Days without a motherboard failure: 53