Farewell Pierre!

Today is Pierre Piron’s farewell party. He will not completely leave the project, though, as his new postdoc will be at U. Uppsala! Although his main project is outside the scope of VORTEX, Pierre will still be working partially with us.

First AGPM characterization on VODCA

After two years of development, and many delays due to ground work, asbestos removal, procurement of critical hardware, etc, we have finally performed the first coronagraphic rejection measurements for one of our L-band AGPMs on the Vortex Optical Demonstrator for Coronagraphic Applications (VODCA), now located it its dedicated ISO7 clean room at ULg. The first results look very promising!

NIRC2+AGPM observing run

The VORTEX team has arrived at Caltech for 1 engineering night and 3 science nights on NIRC2 with the AGPM. On the menu: QACITS fine-tuning, validation of speckle nulling, and some great science targets. After two weathered-out runs in August and September, it looks like we finally gonna get some good data this time!

METIS Phase B kick-off

The kick-off meeting of the Phase B study for the METIS mid-infrared imager and spectrograph of the E-ELT is starting today. The VORTEX team is very excited to be part of this great team, and is looking forward to deliver excellent phase masks to enable the study of low-mass planets within the habitable zone of nearby stars!

Welcome Maddalena!

We have the pleasure to welcome a new postdoc in the VORTEX team. Maddalena Reggiani just joined ULg after obtaining her PhD thesis at ETH Zürich. She will be working mostly on the scientific exploitation of the data acquired with the L-band AGPM on Keck/NIRC2 and VLT/NACO.