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!
Two VORTEX papers published
Two papers directly related to the VORTEX project have just been published in A&A:
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!
VORTEX annual meeting at U. Liège
Today is starting our annual VORTEX face-to-face meeting. This year’s venue is the picturesque Colonster Castle, owned by the University of Liège and nicely located at the edge of the Sart Tilman woods. The meeting will last 3 days.
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.
SPIE Optics+Photonics
Several VORTEX team members are presenting talks and posters this week at the “Techniques and Instrumentation for Detection of Exoplanets VII” SPIE conference.
Lyot conference starting today
A large part of the VORTEX team is now in Montreal to attend the In the Spirit of Lyot conference. Elsa and Carlos each have a talk this Monday, and the VORTEX team will also display a series of posters.
AGPM first light on Keck/NIRC2
Our latest baby had its first light at Keck/NIRC2 on June 8th. We had time to carry out a lot of engineering tests, including closed-loop pointing control with QACITS (huge success!). Some science data sets have also been taken for performance demonstration.