GPI at 2016 SPIE Astronomical Telescopes and Instrumentation

GPI is here at the SPIE Astronomical Telescopes and Instrumentation conference in Edinburgh, Scotland to talk exoplanets and engineering with our colleagues around the world. We have had talks and posters by GPIES team members on topics from AO and instruments to computing and pipelines. This week has also been a great opportunity to meet face-to-face and discuss some of the finer points of GPI technical challenges and plans going forward. Here are some pictures from the week:

Edinburgh, Scotland

Bruce gave a great talk on the GPI instrument and GPIES campaign in the instruments session:

Bruce’s talk about the GPI instrument

Vanessa gave a great talk about GPI’s AO performance in the AO session:

Vanessa’s talk about GPI AO

In her talk, I was especially struck by how well the GPI team has continued to monitor and improve the performance of the instrument, throughout the GPIES campaign.

Franck’s poster was about the GPIES project from a systems level:

Franck’s poster about the GPIES project

Marshall’s poster was about the GPIES pipeline and calibration, critical for extracting accurate exoplanet info from the raw data:

Marshall’s poster about the data pipeline and calibrations

Ben’s poster was about an improved algorithm for finding exoplanets particularly close to the star:

Ben’s poster about detecting exoplanets extremely close to their stars

Li-Wei had a poster about using the satellite spots to determine photometry in the polarized mode:

Li-Wei’s poster about calibrating the polarized photometry when using the coronagraph

Max had a poster about polarimetry mode: performance, data reduction, and contrasts:

Max’s poster about calibrating instrumental polarization and GPI’s performance in polarimetric mode

We also took the opportunity to gather 17 of the attending GPIES members for a delicious Indian dinner:

GPIES dinner on Thursday night at the conference

GPIES dinner from Franck’s perspective

I had to add this picture because Dmitry somehow managed to hide in all the dinner pictures

Unfortunately Patrick and Lyra were not able to attend the dinner due to an early bedtime for one or the other, and Stephen was only able to stop by to say hi.

After a conference like this, I always leave full of new ideas and a renewed energy for my work. Thanks GPI and SPIE for a great SPIE!