Date	Speaker	Topic
16.09.2016	Michael Biermann (ARI)	GAIA as seen by a First Look Scientist As a daily routine, the Gaia First Look Scientists evaluate the quality of the scientific data and check the status of the Gaia instruments. In this talk a few examples out of the pool of findings by the Gaia First Look Scientists will be presented and discussed. This should -on the one hand side- highlight the capability of this highly accurate astrometry mission, but -on the other hand side- also demonstrate the problems of the related data analysis work. Presentation: German Slides: English Questions: German, English
23.09.2016	Anna Boehle (UCLA)	Upgrade of the detector in the integral field spectrograph OSIRIS OSIRIS is a near-infrared (1 - 2.5 microns) integral field spectrograph (IFS) on the Keck I 10-meter telescope in Hawaii. This adaptive-optics-fed instrument uses an array of small lenses to sample a rectangular section of the focal plane, producing up to 3,000 spectra simultaneously with a spectral resolution of ~3,800 and diffraction-limited spatial resolution. The unique capabilities of this IFS have allowed it to contribute to a variety of science programs since its commissioning in 2005, such as characterizing the atmospheres of extrasolar planets and tracing the motions of gas and stars at the centers of the Milky Way and other galaxies. In January 2016, the detector in OSIRIS was upgraded from the original Rockwell Hawaii-2 to a Teledyne Hawaii-2RG with lower read noise, lower dark current, and higher quantum efficiency. In addition to the upgraded detector, the detector head was also mounted on a linear stage, allowing the position of the detector to be accurately adjusted along the optical path when the instrument is at cryogenic temperatures (~80 K). This linear stage greatly reduced the number of cool downs required to put the detector image plane at the spectrograph camera focus and adjust any residual tip/tilt of the detector image plane. In this talk, Anna Boehle will give a brief overview of integral field spectroscopy and its advantages and challenges and also present the details and the results of the upgrade of the OSIRIS detector. Presentation: English Slides: English Questions: German, English
30.09.2016	Martin Kuerster	A special planet on our cosmic doorstep: Proxima Centauri b The recent discovery of a potentially Earth-like planet around our nearest stellar neighbour Proxima Centauri has made a splash. In this talk Martin Kürster will tell us how this discovery was made, why it is special, and how the study of this planet is supposed to continue. The talk will be widely understandable as the speaker would like to reach all interested colleagues at the institute. After all, each of us contribute our share to making these amazing scientific results possible. Presentation: German Slides: English Questions: German, English
07.10.2016	Silvia Scheithauer	CIAO - Wavefront sensors for GRAVITY GRAVITY is a near-infrared instrument for the Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) at the ESO Paranal observatory in Chile. GRAVITY combines the light of all four 8,2m telescopes to mimic a virtual 130m telescope. The thereby possible, drastically increased sensitivity and resolution, however, can only be reached, if the image blur due to atmospheric turbulence above every single telescope is corrected by the real-time deformable mirrors of an adaptive optics system. Hence, GRAVITY has to provide not only the „Beam Combiner Instrument“ (BCI) in the VLTI-lab, but also four infrared wavefront sensors to analyze the atmospheric turbulence. These wavefront sensors are located in the four Coudé-rooms of the telescopes, therefore called „Coudé Infrared Adaptive Optics“ (CIAO). The CIAO wavefront sensors were built under the responsibility of MPIA in close cooperation with ESO and the MPE-led GRAVITY consortium. While the BCI has been installed already in October 2015 on Paranal, the assembly of the four CIAO systems lasted from February to September 2016. Currently, the scientific commissioning of the complete GRAVITY instrument is ongoing. One important scientific goal is the observation of objects in the direct vicinity of the black hole in the center of our Milky Way. In addition, GRAVITY will allow to study young stellar objects and shaped-up stars with an unprecedented sensitivity. In spring 2017, when the galactic center is again observable from Paranal, observations of the star „S2“ will start. The close fly-by of this star relative to the black hole will allow to test Einstein's general theory of relativity with an extreme accuracy. Presentation: German Slides: English Questions: German, English
14.10.2016	Claudia Reinlein (Fraunhofer IOF, Jena)	Active and Adaptive Optics at the Fraunhofer IOF Active and Adaptive Optics is more and more used in ground-based telescopes and also in discussion for space telescopes. For both types of systems there are completely different technological requirements. While space telescopes mainly aim for active optics, ground-based systems apply both active and adaptive optics. This talk describes the technological features and the state of the art of "deformable mirrors / AO systems". And here the focus will be set onto research and development projects of the Fraunhofer IOF (Jena). In the framework of an ESA project, a test breadboard is developed, in order to demonstrate the capability to compensate for static aberrations in using active mirrors in space telescopes. In the future, telescopes with a diameter of 4-16m will be used for the search for extraterrestrial life. In this context, IOF develops and investigates an active mirror with "set-and-forget" characteristics to compensate for aberrations conditional of manufacture and assembly. For the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT) a technology development for extreme AO (X-AO) is conducted. In this context, the talk will inform about a technological pre-investigation (design) of a deformable mirror with 11000 actuators. For laser communication between a ground-station and a geostationary satellite, the pre-compensation of aberrations is a technique to increase the signal intensity at the receiver and to attenuate disturbing speckles. The talk will also present the real-time AO of the Fraunhofer IOF and its compensatory efficiency as a function of the correction angle. Presentation: German Slides: English Questions: German, English
21.10.2016 HdA-Auditorium!!	Eike Guenther + Michael Pluto (TLS, Tautenburg)	Instrumentation projects of the Thüringer Landessternwarte Tautenburg The Thüringer Landessternwarte (TLS) operates a 2m Alfred-Jensch telescope and a LOFAR radio telescope in Tautenburg and is involved in a number of instrumentation projects for various telescopes. In this talk the instrumentation of the telescopes in Tautenburg and other projects are reviewed. Although the Alfred-Jensch telescope was built more than 50 years ago, it is continuously upgraded with new instrumentation. Currently in use are a high-resolution Echelle spectrograph, which is used for exoplanet-research, and a low-resolution faint-object spectrograph. Additionally, there is also a CCD camera in the prime-focus, which is used for imaging. Building on the experience with these instruments the TLS also participated in a number of international instrumentation projects. The first one was GROND, a multi-channel camera for the ESO/MPG 2.2m telescope at La Silla. Others were the HERMES spectrograph for the Mercator telescope in La Palma and the two calibration units for CARMENES. Still ongoing is the upgrade of CRIRES to CRIRES+, which is a high-resolution NIR spectrograph for the VLT. Being studied is GTI, a multi-channel camera that is specifically designed for the follow-up observations of exoplanet candidates of TESS and PLATO. The TLS also hosts a LOFAR station. LOFAR is the Low-Frequency Array, an instrument for performing radio astronomy in the wavelength range from 1.2 to about 10 m. It is being built by ASTRON, the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy and its international partners, and operated by ASTRON's radio observatory of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research. About 40 stations are located in the Netherlands, additional ones are in Great Britain, France, Sweden, and Germany. Presentation: German Slides: English Part1 Part2 Questions: German, English
28.10.2016	Santiago Barboza	The MICADO derotator and its test stand at MPIA The Multi-AO Imaging Camera for Deep Observations (MICADO), a first light instrument for the 39m European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT), is being designed and optimized to work with the Multi-Conjugate Adaptive Optics (MCAO) module MAORY using laser guide stars. The MICADO-MAORY configuration will provide diffraction limited imaging over a large 53arcsec field of view. The current concept of the MICADO instrument consists of a structural cryostat (2.1m diameter and 2m height) with the wavefront sensor (WFS) on top (cryostat + WFS ≈ 4.000kg). The cryostat is mounted via its central flange directly to a large 2.5m-diameter image derotator. The whole assembly is suspended above the E-ELT Nasmyth platform by a hexapod-type support structure, which is located underneath the MAORY bench. MPIA is responsible for the design and development of the MICADO derotator, a key mechanism that must precisely rotate the cryostat assembly around its optical axis with a differential angular positioning accuracy lower than 10 arcsec, in order to compensate the field rotation due to the alt-azimuth mount of the E-ELT. This device consists of a high precision bearing, gear wheels, motors, encoders and very stiff mechanical interfaces. The MICADO derotator is being developed using a custom-made high-precision four-point contact ball bearing. With the intention of probing the current concept of the derotator in an early phase of the project, a prototype has been built using a standard 1.2m-diameter bearing. The test campaign is about to start during the next days and we will figure out if the proposed concept is able to reach the challenging angular positioning accuracy and other key performance figures required by the MICADO instrument. Presentation: English Slides: English Questions: German, English
04.11.2016 HdA-Auditorium!!	Stefan Hippler	Adaptive optics for VLT and E-ELT This talk summarizes in a very general approach the principles of adaptive optics (AO) and its value in the astronomical application. In part one, Stefan Hippler will specifically and phenomenologically describe how images are formed up during an observation through optical turbulence. A brief historical summary highlighting the achieved experimental milestones will conclude this introduction. In part two of the talk, the AO systems of the famous ESO observatories on Paranal (VLT) and Armazones (E-ELT) will be brought into focus. With NACO and CIAO, two examples of already running instruments will be described in detail. This also allows a foresight to the currently designed advanced systems for ESO's new flagship mission in the mid twenty-twenties. Presentation: German Slides: English Part1 Part2 Questions: German, English
11.11.2016	Vianak Naranjo	Characterization of Infrared Detectors - What is that? Infrared instrumentation at MPIA is one of the major technical activities in house. It brings together the work of very different engineering areas, but for this talk the focus will be on the infrared detector and its characterization. What is this all about and why is it so important? An infrared detector cannot operate alone: as a complex unit of an infrared system the detector serves as a connection between the readout electronics and the software. The characterization process is the way of understanding how the detector works and how it behaves, and it is the key to guarantee the best performance of an instrument during operation. If you have ever wondered what do the people working with infrared detectors do, please join us and find out! Everybody is welcome! Presentation: German Slides: English Questions: German, English
18.11.2016 HdA-Auditorium!!	Sascha Douffet	Safety officers - Main actors and their tasks The last talk about occupational safety gave an overview, covering history, structure, regulatory framework and tasks. Since the topic is very complex, important questions are still to be answered about the main actors and their tasks. The following topics will be discussed in the second part: Who are the main actors? What means "responsibility" with respect to occupational safety? What are the main tasks? What may happen, if responsibilities are not assumed and tasks are not fulfilled? Every employee should know, which functions and activities are implemented at MPIA. Not only every colleague should know who is responsible for occupational safety, also the responsible persons should know about their tasks, such that those become a practical reality in the day-to-day work. And hence, the risk for accidents is automatically reduced. Presentation: German Slides: German Questions: German, English
25.11.2016	Michael Boehm (ISYS, Stuttgart)	OVMS-plus: Disturbance compensation at the LBT Interferometry at modern large ground-based telescopes often utilizes an array of telescopes. However, this is only possible if the length of the light path is equal for all telescopes, i.e. the optical path difference (OPD) has to be zero. Because the optical elements of the telescopes tend to vibrate due to wind excitation, for example, the OPD is usually oscillating with peak-to-peak amplitudes of several µm and frequencies up to 60Hz. Without proper active compensation, this would render most measurement attempts in the near-infrared (NIR), rather useless, since . Thus, large telescopes such as the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) are equipped with a dedicated OPD and vibration monitoring system (OVMS) to be able to measure these disturbances and compensate for them in a fast feed-forward manner. At the beginning of the talk Michael Boehm will briefly revisit the OVMS at the LBT and describe how the accelerometer readings can be used for disturbance compensation. The second part of the talk will present the new enhanced and centralized software architecture, called OVMS-plus, and illustrate several challenges faced during the implementation phase. Finally, measurement results from LBTI proving the effectiveness of the approach and the ability to compensate for a large fraction of the telescope induced vibrations will be presented. Presentation: German Slides: English Questions: German, English
02.12.2016
09.12.2016 HdA-Auditorium!!	Thomas Henning	Astronomy in Heidelberg - From the Koenigstuhl into the World In this talk, Thomas Henning will give his personal view of the development of instruments at MPIA using specific examples. Some important discoveries in the field of planet formation and exoplanets, which were achieved with these instruments, will be highlighted in the talk. Presentation: German Slides: German Questions: German, English
16.12.2016
23.12.2016	--	Christmas break