The third of the seven primary mirrors for the Giant Magellan Telescopewas cast here Saturday (Aug. 24) at the University of Arizona’s Steward Observatory Mirror Lab. … Read more on Space.com

Casting of the third primary mirror of GMT will start this Saturday, Aug 24, in the Steward Observatory Mirror Lab, Univ. of Arizona. FOXNEWS reports the even and introduces the GMT online:

http://www.foxnews.com/science/2013/08/23/giant-telescope-mirror-for-future-observatory-to-be-cast-saturday/

Dr. Wendy Freedman, Chairman GMT, and Dr. Pat McCarthy, Director GMT, discuss the Giant Magellan Telescope’s mirrors and the science that they will enable.

Media

The Practical Optics Workshop (POW) is a set of focused activities outside of the regular curriculum that provide graduate students opportunities to learn valuable practical skills.  The goal of POW is to fill the gap between the classes and the actual research work.  It covers skills that are broadly need for graduate students’ research and their future employment. The main organizer of this workshop is Dr. Ping Zhou from LOFT. Faculties through out the College of Optical Sciences will participate teaching. Test runs for some of the sub-workshops are already under going. The official kicked off will be in the coming semester. A more detailed introduction can be found here:

http://www.loft.optics.arizona.edu/documents/presentations/POW_Introduction-student.pptx

In what could prove to be a major breakthrough in quantum memory storage and information processing, German researchers have frozen the fastest thing in the universe: light. And they did so for a record-breaking one minute. (from io9.com)

A novel telescopic contact lens has been developed by engineers led by Joe Ford at UC San Diego. The lens can add a 2.8x optical zoom to normal vision when its mode is switched with a polarized glasses. The design uses 4 aspherical reflective surfaces and a diffractive optical element to achieve the performance and keep the lens wearable (1.17 mm thick) at the same time. The work was originally published on Optical Express. As an optical testing group, we are thinking: “how to test it”?

http://www.comagenius.net/2013/07/switchable-telescopic-contact-lens.html#.UeWQIo3VCao

http://scitechdaily.com/engineers-develop-a-telescopic-contact-lens/

This video explains how astronomers search for exoplanets (planets outside the Solar System). The techniques applied are all based on optics, which gives a background knowledge explaining why works done by our group are important.

http://www.phdcomics.com/tv/#039

An article in the local magazine, Desert Leaf, talks about the Steward Observatory Mirror Lab (SOML) and the giant mirrors under fabrication there. Follow the link below, and the article is on P 32-35.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/73190213/Desert_Leaf_SOML.pdf

Speaker: Dr. Joohyung Lee
Korea Research Institute of Standard and Science (KRISS)

3:00 PM – Thu – June 20th – 2013
Conference Room 821

Femtosecond lasers offer unique characteristics in both the temporal and spectral terms, not observed in other continuous-wave or pulse lasers, permitting breakthroughs in precision dimensional metrology particularly. The temporal and spectral characteristics of femtosecond lasers were exploited in absolute distance measurement by means of pulse cross-correlation based interferometer and dual-comb interferometer which enable nanometer precision not only in laboratory environment but also in open-field. In this talk, absolute distance measurement technique will be described after brief introduction of femtosecond lasers and second half of the talk will be devoted to feasibility test of absolute optical testing exploiting distance measurement overcoming relative testing nature of conventional laser interferometer.

For more information, please contact Dae Wook Kim – dkim@optics.arizona.edu

Tamer Elazhary received the 2013 Micheal Kidger Memorial scholarship for optical design.  Congratulations!

More about the scholarship.