Postdoc at Max Planck Institute for Astronomy

LINC-NIRVANA (LN) is a near-IR imager for the Large Binocular Telescope offering both multi-conjugate AO and interferometric beam combination for high spatial resolution. I worked with Professor Tom Herbst, his Ph.D. student Kalyan Radhakrishnan, and a team of 10 engineers. As I reviewed the design, alignment, and testing documentation, I asked questions of the team and clarified the assembly and alignment procedures. I worked with optical engineers to trace and document the field flips and rotation as it propagated through the LN system to each of the three detectors and many translation stages. I reviewed the commissioning plans, and assisted during two pre-commissioning runs and two commissioning runs.

LN was installed in late September 2016 and acquired its first “technical photons” a month later. Since then, we continue to bring the various control loops online, finalize interactions between telescope alignment and instrument calibration, incorporate the rotations and coordinate flips into the control software, and commission the instrument with early science targets. When we began commissioning, we needed fields that contained multiple, bright, well-spaced USNO-B1 guide stars at various separations, with a bright target in the center for auto-guiding. For these initial runs, we searched for evenly-spaced asterisms of stars brighter than 12th Rmag. The Ground-layer Wavefront Sensor (GWS) requires stars with radii between 60" - 180", and the High-layer Wavefront Sensor (HWS) requires stars with radii up to 60". Three examples of well-populated star fields are shown above, with a 180" solid-line circle for the GWS and a 60" dashed-line circle for the HWS.

If you would like to see my 2017 Adaptive Optics for Extremely Large Telescopes 5 (AO4ELT5) poster on my LINC-NIRVANC work, please see here.

Additionally, I worked on the Galactic Bulge Spectrograph for the MPG/ESO 2.2m Telescope. It is a slitless spectrograph with resolution R∼3000 covering a 12 nm window around Ca II λ854nm. I worked to model and extract the overlapping spectra in slitless views of the dense stellar bulge. Our program was unique in that we planned to feed in known Gaia positions, magnitudes, and temperatures, and then extract the velocity and equivalent width of the absorption line.