Dr. Alex Maldonado successfully defended his dissertation, ‘Resolution Optical Surface Metrology with the “Slope measuring Portable Optical Test System” (SPOTS)’, on September 5th, 2014.  Congratulations, and please see his publications for more details about his work.

Dr. Laura Coyle successfully defended her dissertation, “Precision alignment and calibration of optical systems using computer generated holograms”, on August 8th, 2014.  Congratulations, and please see her other publications for more detail on her work.

Measurements of polarization of the cosmic microwave background. Credit: POLARBEAR

A recent publication in the Astrophysical Journal reported that curl was detected in some of the oldest measurable light in the universe.  This was the result of measurements taken from an observatory in Chile’s Atacama desert.  See source for more information.

The LOFT group just released SAGUARO version 1.6. Some highlights for this release include an updated kernel with the ability to save module log history and additional bug fixes in the modules: MapRotate, MapMaskTool, and AverageDatasets. Please check out the change log for more information.

Also, the SAGUARO counter has reached 2138 downloads! Many thanks to the SAGUARO users for submitting bug reports to improve the quality of the software.

Alejandro Maldonado and Laura Coyle, LOFT group PhD candidates, won the 2nd and 3rd place for the Best Student Paper Awards at OSA OF&T (Optical Fabrication & Testing) conference in Hawaii 2014.

Congratulation for the nice achievements!

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Congratulations to Jim for being named honorable mention in this year’s GPSC Achievement Awards!

GMT just passed its preliminary design review for commissioning and construction. This brings GMT one step closer to completion.

Link

Aspheric and freeform surfaces metrology with software configurable optical test system: a computerized reverse Hartmann test.

Diffractive optics calibrator: design and construction

Margaret discusses her experience as a NASA COOP in AST Optical Engineering COOP finds inspiration in Margaret Thatcher and her colleagues at Goddard.

Check out the November 2013 issue of Photonics Spectra for a cool overview of the GMT project. Here’s the link.