Pictures of the frame

A picture is worth a thousand words... in a deliberate effort not to overwhelm you with too much information, I will therefore just let you enjoy the pictures of the finally assembled frame! But before that, let me thank Doi-san for his great design and work on the frame: very nice job, Yoshi!

Pineapples, pineapples!

On my way back from NY last Sunday, I played with my Python SCExAO simulator to get a feeling for how a phase map on the deformable mirror (DM) gets remapped by the PIAA. The grayscale picture shows the focal plane image resulting from a double cross sinusoid on top of a flat DM. Without the PIAA, you expect to see your usual PSF surrounded by a regular grid of speckles whose separation depends on the number of sine waves you can generate across the DM and whose brightness depend on the amplitude of the sine wave. If the guys from SEEDS read this post, this may remind them of what the grid mask they want to put in HiCIAO will do...

With the PIAA, things of course get really different and your regular grid gets turned into a nice display... of pineapples! I just showed this morning the corresponding picture to a friend who was staying at our house. The laptop was on the kitchen table, and half joking, he pointed out that the picture looks just like the Hawaiian quilt pattern that's printed on the the kitchen tablecloth asking me whether I had done it on purpose... what do you think?