OSC will be participating in the Science City portion of the Tucson Festival of Books, presenting four fascinating open lectures and numerous optics demonstrations on March 11. Professors Euan McLeod, Dae Wook Kim, Robert A. Norwood and Jennifer K. Barton will be presenting in Meinel 307, beginning at 10 a.m.

Congratulation, Maham Aftab, for being the first NASA Datanaut from LOFT group.

“While attending virtual events and coding tutorials at Datanauts, I have been developing a polynomial set and a corresponding data analysis method that allows optical wavefronts or surfaces to be reconstructed from their measured gradient data. This will be especially useful for freeform and high spatial resolution surfaces, such as telescope mirrors; as this method allows for thousands of polynomial terms to be generated and used, even with limited computing resources.” – Maham Aftab

You can find an interesting story about “Great Strides in Optical Fabrication” in the Photonics Spectra (Oct 2016) magazine article. (pdf version) You will find LOFT group’s contribution for this exciting world-wide co-efforts. We love to be a part of it.

Dr. Frater, Eric successfully defended his PhD dissertation, “Optical Alignment with CGH Phase References.”, on July 27th, 2016.  We send our big congratulation to this excellent LOFT group PhD, and please check out his “cool” dissertation for more detail on his work.

Congratulation,Hyesun Angela Cha (LOFT undergraduate student). Angela was listed as one of the  ​“Dean’s List With Distinction” (2015 Fall) and “Dean’s list” (2016 Spring) students in the College of Optical Sciences at the University of Arizona in 2016.

Recently, there have been two exciting AMA (Ask Me Anything) sessions in Reddit Science section.

1. “Optics: A Revolution in Communications” by Alan Willner (President of The OSA, Optical Society) on 7/8

2. “Building the World’s Largest Telescope” by Patrick McCarthy (Interim President for the Giant Magellan Telescope) on 7/22

In order to continue the exciting “Optical” momentum in the public Reddit community, LOFT group is going to host another session at 6 – 8 pm EST (3-5 pm in Tucson) on 8/10 as below.

Science AMA Series: I’m Dr. Kim, and we are the Large Optics Fabrication and Testing (LOFT) Group at the College of Optical Sciences. We want to share our knowledge about the tools required to make and then test the world’s largest mirrors! AMA! We are excited to be here to share our expertise in the field of fabrication and testing of mirrors and other optical surfaces. Joining me (Dae Wook) in answering questions are my students Logan Graves and Isaac Trumper, who specialize in developing these types of measurement tools. We specialize in making very large telescopes of world renowned quality. We can do this only through understanding exactly how to make, and then test, the mirrored surfaces. You may have heard of one of our current projects, the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT), but we like to call it a giant camera! This telescope is designed to investigate events just after the Big Bang, such as how galaxies formed. It will do an amazing job at collecting light in order to view very faint objects in the sky. We also work on other exciting projects such as a giant microscope (DKIST), and a giant action-cam (LSST). Please take a look at our group’s website to get an idea of the other types of projects we work on: http://www.loft.optics.arizona.edu/projects/. To enable these amazing telescopes, we develop fabrication and testing methods such as using silly putty to polish, or a TV and camera to display fun patterns to measure nanometer sized surface defects. We even use really hot wires to generate infrared radiation, which enables a whole different type of surface testing. Want to learn how you can make your own mirrors? Interested in amateur astronomy? Want to understand how optics and light works more? Well then come on and ask us anything!

If you want to join the AMA session, please, visit the Reddit Science (https://www.reddit.com/r/science/) at 6 pm EST (on 8/10) or ahead of time to submit your AMA questions.

We welcome two new babies, Julia Joy Palmer (left: Daughter of Michael & Joy) and Jace Yul Kim (right: Son of Dae Wook & Heeyoung), joining the “honorable-and-priceless” LOFT group family membership! LOFT group wishes their happy and good life!

LOFT group feels lucky to be at this moment of human history, the detection of gravitational wave by LIGO! A new ear to the beauty of Universe.

Postcard image created by LOFT group

The LOFT group just released SAGUARO version 1.6.5 Some highlights for this release include an updated kernel with the ability to run the software on *NIX Operating Systems. This version has been tested on Mac OS X El Capitan, Debian Jessie, and Windows 10. Please check out the change log for more information.

Also, the SAGUARO counter has reached 4018 downloads! Many thanks to the SAGUARO users for submitting bug reports to improve the quality of the software.

Dae Wook gave a Tech Talk “Innovations in giant optics powered by kid’s toy” at the Hack Arizona (Hackathone) at midnight in the UA library. “It was truly a unique and nice experience.”