AO Summer School 2025
AO Summer School 2025
Editor’s Note: Marcus’ post below describes this year’s CfAO Summer School at UCSC. for more banana slug content see our sibling CAAO MagAO-X lab’s blog posts.
Day 1 (Travel to UCSC)
I woke up early on Sunday morning as excitement about the coming week kept me from my slumber. Katie, Josh, Parker, and I stopped for some breakfast at the Tucson airport and waited for boarding to start. As we waited, I quickly realized that I was a second class citizen in the eyes of delta airlines. Josh, the most experienced traveler with numerous trips to Chile, enjoyed a upgrade to first class while I suffered in the last row with a chair that would not recline.
Josh enjoying first class
After a quick flight we landed in LAX to catch another connecting flight to the tech hub of America and the “Heart of Silicon Valley”, the San Jose airport. In the San Jose airport we enjoyed multiple ad campaigns about AI and how it will improve my work (Will AI push to main?). From here we needed to catch a quick 45 minute uber from the airport to the UCSC campus. However, once we started driving we ran into immense traffic due to a car accident (Why does San Jose only have one road and so many people?). Our uber driver, who spoke no English, bobbed and weaved through traffic trying to get us to campus in a timely manner. But alas to no avail we had to tough out the traffic. A 45 minute uber slowly and with much agony turned into a 2+ hour trip. He pulled out google translate and told us that he was sorry for the inconvenience but hinted that he had an idea to pass the time. He whipped out his iPad with lighting speed and placed it on the dash. With a slight chuckle and twinkle in his eye he played “Happy Gilmore 2” in English with Spanish subtitles and English narration (which is arguably the only way to watch this movie). Time flew by and eventually we made it the UCSC campus where we then checked into out dorm rooms.
After checking into our rooms, we met some friends from the Gemini Observatory and the University of Victoria. We decided to travel down to Santa Cruz and explore the city.
We stopped at a elixir tea shop in downtown Santa Cruz
Day 2 (Day 1 of Summer School)
Day 2 started off early with breakfast at the college 9 and 10 dining halls (The food was exactly as you would expect and gave me flash backs to my freshman year). The summer school then began promptly at 9am where we enjoyed great talks from Becky Jenson-Clem (Introduction to AO for astronomy), Becky and Phil Hinz (AO the game), Renate Kupke (Introduction to Ray Optics), Nicole Putnam (Introduction to AO for vision science). In these talks we learned valuable information that would prove vital for the hands on labs that would take place in the coming days. In addition to these talks, students presented their work in a poster session.
Day 2 ended with a reception at the CfAO Atrium where we got our eye balls measured…
Day 3
Day 3 started off in a similar fashion to day 2, however, I was more excited to get down and dirty with the concepts of wavefront sensing and reconstruction. We learned the theory behind the Shack-Hartman WFS and the Pyramid WFS in addition to some others. We next transition from presentations to hands on labs, where we go to build and play with our own AO kit.
Day 4
Day 4 continues with presentation and labs. For the presentation portion we learned about atmospheric turbulence (Saavidra Perera), deformable mirrors (Phil Hinz), and Laser Guide Stars (Jessica Lu). My favorite presentation was the one from Phil where we learned about the interaction matrix, which mathematically connects the WFS to the actuators on the deformable mirror (I’m a sucker for anything remotely related to controls). In the lab portion of Day 4 we got to build / align our own WFS. We placed a Shack-Hartman WFS in our “telescope” and were able to see the grid of dots through our camera. We then used the same Shack-Hartman WFS but moved it to a focal plane to create a makeshift pyramid WFS. Surprisingly it worked very well.
Katie geeking on how well its working
We also got a tour of the SEAL and UCO shops.
Becky told me not to go under the solid granite vibration table if there was a earth quake…
Day 5
Day 5 marched on with presentations from Nour Skaf (Control Theory), Bruce Macintosh (Error Budgets), and Emiel Por (AO Simulations). I enjoyed the control theory talk but quickly realized that the systems I am used to encountering in controls are inherently different than those used to describe AO control systems. The HCIpy tutorial given by Emiel was also intellectually stimulating.
Sleepy time immediately after Emiel’s talk.
Day 6 (Final Day)
Day 6 made headway, you guessed it, in the same way as the previous days. I was interested in the Astro photonics talk by Kevin Bundy. In this talk I learned about photonic logic gates which apparently can cause phase kicks (goodbye traditional DM, AHAH I JOKE). Finally, we enjoyed an amazing talk about AO in space which was presented by Rus Belikov. He presented a high level overview of how AO system in conjunction with coronagraphs work. He then dived a little deeper in to EFC and other speckle nulling methods. Overall, I enjoyed this talk since I now feel like I have enough basic knowledge to understand what other people in my lab have been talking about for the past two years….
Finally, we ended our AO summer school journey with awards … that were based on our eye ball measurements from earlier in the week. We have a few winners. First being Chia-Lin, who won smallest pupil!
Just 3.4 mm, for reference mine was 6.7 mm
And some from our very own sister lab, MagAO-x! Josh won the worst optic award by measuring a strehl of just 1%. His award was title the Hubble Space Telescope Award (before the manned mission to fix the optic). Parker won the Adaptive Optic award for the pupil with the largest diameter change between measurements. Unfortunately Katie and I did not win any awards, which initially made us sad but we quickly remembered that not winning an award means that our eyes are not broken.
Later that night
After a long week of fun learning and hands on experiments, a group of us decided to explore the city of Santa Cruz before we bid goodbye. We headed down to the boardwalk to watch Josh, Parker, and Andre jump into the pacific ocean. (Will not post those pictures…)
Later, we hung out at the arcade and enjoyed some fun games.
Some fun attractions right on the beach front!
Josh and Parker up to their neck in dance dance revolution.
Finally, we hit the karaoke bar where, to my surprise, I enjoyed watching Josh and Katie lose their voices. (Again, not pictured … but come to my office and I’ll show you. )
All in All
From the lessons learned, to the friendships formed, to the rock-hard dorm room mattress, AO Summer School was an unforgettable experience—one that a mere blog can’t fully capture. And with that, I bid farewell to AO Summer School, and to you, dear reader.
– Marcus Klupar
Quote of the Blog: “It is not where you start, but where you stand” - me
Song of the Blog: This Town’s Been Too Good To Us (Santa Cruz)
Bonus Photos
banana … banANNNNA… BAAAANNNNAAAANNNNAA SLUG!
Turkey on campus.
Fun pin that resonated with me.
