#spieastro — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #spieastro, aggregated by home.social.
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Amaze amaze amaze 🤩
Carole Mundell, Director of Science at the @[email protected], delivers an inspiring presentation on the ESA portfolio, from the exoplanet fleet to upcoming missions to #Venus, #Jupiter, and #Mercury. 🔭
#SPIEastro @[email protected] -
“The larger our projects become, the more important people become.”
This year’s #SPIEastro Lunch & Learn speaker is Dr. Pascale Hibon, Telescope + AO System Scientist @[email protected]. She is discussing hidden barriers in #astronomy careers, such as bias, workload distribution, & hidden networks. -
“Every step of the way, we have to re-negotiate the social contract.”
Pontsho Maruping, Managing Director of the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory, explains how scientific output depends on stable site access, predictable operations, & trusted relationships with host communities.
#SPIEastro -
I'm now making my poster for the SPIE Astronomical Telescopes & Instrumentation conference in July, and have discovered that if I follow the official guidelines for minimum font sizes (https://spie.org/conferences-and-exhibitions/astronomical-telescopes-and-instrumentation/presenters/prepare-to-present/poster-presentation-guidelines) that the title, author names & affiliations, institutional logos, and acknowledgements take up about half of the entire A0 poster. Doesn't leave much room for actual content.
This is what I get for trying to follow the rules.
I'm not even going to get to go to the conference. The AAO is only sending a handful of people this time, mostly senior folk on a mission to do "business development" plus a few others with external sources of travel funding. My boss is going to have to stand next to my poster on my behalf.
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The program for the SPIE Astronomical Telescopes and Instrumentation conference in July has been released. My paper (on the MAVIS Science Instruments) got accepted but I didn't get a talk slot, which means I get to make a poster again.
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Oh, it's that time again. The call for papers for the next SPIE Astronomical Telescopes and Instrumentation conference is now open, deadline 3rd December. The conference will be in Copenhagen, next July.
The likelihood of me getting to go is fairly low, even if I do get a talk accepted, because I did get to go to the previous one, in Yokohama, last year. I can but try, however.
https://spie.org/conferences-and-exhibitions/astronomical-telescopes-and-instrumentation
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"Port Macquarie" ready to take us back to Sydney.
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Vimes boot theory, but for hats.
I wear my hats a lot, and take them everywhere I travel. I buy them from an online Panama hat shop in Ecuador that lets me customise the design, and then they weave them to order. I spend between $200 and $300, which sounds like a lot, except that this hat has already lasted me 5 years, and my previous one was 8 years old when I decided to retire it. If I bought cheap straw hats instead they wouldn't cost as much, but each one would last me nowhere near as long.
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SPIE is over, and now I've checked out of the hotel. Got some time to kill before my 10 pm flight home.
The next conference is in two year's time, in Copenhagen. I won't know if I'll get to go that one until much closer to the time.
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After dinner at a Japanese BBQ restaurant we ended up in a tiny craft beer and live music bar where I drank Belgian beer with my Australian colleagues originating from Australia, China, Sri Lanka and Catalonia. A bunch of Italians from INAF turned up too.
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On the subject of living in the future, most countries only have 24 hours in a day. Here they seem to have found a way to squeeze in at least 25.
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I just bought an ice cream, from a vending machine, and paid for it using my train pass.
Truly living in the future here.
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In the category of "biggest X in the world" this may not be the most exciting, but there will definitely be some people at this event getting at least a little excited about it.
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The people building instruments for the ESO ELT (Extremely Large Telescope) have started measuring them in units of giraffes and elephants. This was Eckhard Sturm telling us that MICADO will be 1 giraffe tall and weigh 4 elephants. The next speaker, Bernhard Brandl, noted that METIS will also be 1 giraffe tall but only weigh 3 elephants.
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Some optics for astronomy end up looking like abstract glass ornaments. This is a spare/prototype "field splitter" for the MUSE instrument, on display at the Bertin Technologies/Winlight booth in the vendor exhibition.
The stack of mirrors is designed to split up an image of the night sky into 24 slices, and send the light from each slice to a different part of the instrument for further dissection.
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I think Ohara are winning the "which vendor brought the biggest thing to the exhibition" competition this year. That's a TMT mirror segment blank, a hexagonal chunk of glass-ceramic 1.44 metres from corner to corner. The TMT (Thirty Meter Telescope) will have a primary mirror consisting of 492 segments this size.
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Ugh. Pretty sure the reason for this is that now that the vendor exhibition is open they've hidden all the coffee in there to make us go in. That's all very well (and has happened at previous conferences) but the exhibition is on the ground floor and the event is spread across all four floors of the venue. The presence of coffee on the ground floor isn't much help if you're on the fourth floor and just have a few minutes in which to grab a drink.
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This morning bleary-eyed conference delegates have been looking at empty tables on every floor of the building with confused and forlorn expressions on their faces.
These tables have, generally, had urns of hot coffee on them throughout the day. For some reason during the session break between plenaries and normal talks this morning they do not. Given that the plenaries start at 8:30 am a lot of people were in need of caffeination by the 10 - 10:30 am break. The one cafe in the building was quickly overwhelmed, so I resorted to the vending machines.
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Why bittersweet? Well, ten years ago Lee Spitler and I started developing a concept for a tiny Australian space telescope in a 6U CubeSat, intended to measure the extra-Galactic background light (EBL) at visible wavelengths. It would complement measurements at longer wavelengths from the likes of CIBER, and help to determine the origin of the observed EBL excess... Like VERTECS it used a small refracting telescope, a CMOS image sensor, and a focal plane mosaic filter to perform multiband imaging without moving parts.
We spent 6 or so years trying to get our "Australian Space Eye" mission funded, initially as a standalone 6U CubeSat and later on merged with the SkyHopper CubeSat, but we never succeeded.
So, the fact that another group decided to do something very similar to what we hoped to do and then got it funded by JAXA is validation that our general concept was sound. Which is nice. Also the science that we had planned to do will soon get done, so that's good. It could have been us doing all this though, and at least 5 years earlier too, and I am a little sad about that missed opportunity.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.06960
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This is a little bittersweet for me.
Amongst the many talks I went to today were two on the VERTECS project, a tiny space telescope in a 6U CubeSat intended to measure the extra-Galactic background light (EBL) at visible wavelengths. This will complement measurements at longer wavelengths from the likes of CIBER-2, and help determine the origin of the observed EBL excess.
The project has been funded through the JAXA-SMASH small satellite program, and they are well on their way towards a target launch date late next year or early 2026.
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Science Fair for grown ups.
The first of four poster sessions was this evening, between 5:30 and 7 pm. It was hot, crowded and noisy, but there were ample free drinks and nibbles.
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Somehow I ended up, while attending the SPIE Astronomical Telescopes and Instrumentation conference in Japan, in a Californian themed restaurant, drinking the same type of Hawaiian beer that I drank when attending an SPIE Astronomical Telescopes and Instrumentation conference for the very first time, back in 2002, in Waikoloa.
I blame our professor of instrumentation and head of mechanical engineering.
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Lunch is making up for breakfast. This is so good.
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Improvise, adapt, overcome
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Conference starting at 8:30 am on a Sunday morning? Not great. Conference starting at 8:30 am on a Sunday morning with no opportunity to have a decent breakfast first? Worse.
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Well that's a new one for me. The hotel has a restaurant, serving breakfast, but they are *sold out*, and not just for today, for the next 20 days.
Some of us had breakfast included in their bookings, some don't. The ones that do are currently enjoying breakfast, the rest of us will probably have to grab something at the 7-Eleven downstairs.
I've never stayed in a hotel that turned away their own guests from breakfast because of insufficient catering capacity before.
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Our hotel has its reception on the 20th floor, above the guest rooms.
The white buildings stretching from here to just before the sail shaped tower are the conference venue.
I guess I should start using some hashtags.