A little bit of a project update for those interested.
Oz in summer
Half of the team is Australia-based, and summer was in December-February. So many or most of the Australians took vacations over Christmas and part of January. We are lucky that these past months there are very little case of COVID in Oz, so people could essentially move around the country freely, and in particular take advant...
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MAVIS has a large footprint at the Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation conference. We lined up 12 papers on various aspects of the system, based on the phase A study. Here is the complete list and the links to the paper’s PDFs:
MAVIS: System modelling and performance prediction (Agapito et al)
MAVIS IFU with AO for VLT: image slicer concept and design (Content et al)
Predictive Le...
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[This is the web version of the paper published at SPIE 2020; Another crucial resource is the Science Case, available at the arXiv]. This paper has many authors (essentially the entire MAVIS phase A crew).
Abstract
A consortium of several Australian and European institutes – together with the European Southern Observatory (ESO) – has initiated the design of MAVIS, a Multi-Conjugate Adaptive Op...
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Very long time we have not updated this blog. There are lots of news, all positive, that we are excited to share with you.
MAVIS Phase A review
The MAVIS phase A review took place over two half days on may 26-27, 2020 - at the height of the COVID first wave. It was all virtual of course. The documentation was delivered 6 weeks prior to the review, and in the usual ESO review style, we had an ...
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The MAVIS team is putting an end to the phase A documentation review. It’s been a while we know that there is significant interest in the community for additional instruments. The selected instrumentation covers the largest possible fraction of the science case, but not all. There is space for additional instrumentation, or for specialised instrumentation to cover specific needs.
We have had i...
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So many things happened since the last post, and yet like so may websites, this on fell into neglect because its maintainers were busy doing other things!
The Kioloa busy week took place from March 6 to 10, 2020. 10 months after the first busy week, and the last post on this blog! In the meantime, we’ve seen many progress in the design, a successful mid-term review with ESO, a coalescence of t...
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The busy week was proposed (by Stefan Stroebele) at the Kick-off meeting as an effective way to boost activity and communication. It was decided to have two busy weeks during the phase A, the first one in Europe early in the phase A (05/2019) to kick start the project and the second one in Australia close to the end of the phase A (02/2020) to work on the final phase A document writing. The Asi...
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We now have an online sign-up for a general MAVIS email list, run via MailChimp. We will use this list for periodic updates on MAVIS of general interest. The list consists of all White Paper authors, as well as others who have expresed an interest in MAVIS. Please feel free to sign up!
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All,
We’re happy to report that the MAVIS project was kicked off at ESO (Garching) on Jan 31 & Feb 1, 2019. The meeting was very successful, with about 20 consortium members and 7 ESO representatives.
We also had a pre-kickoff meeting on Jan 29 & 30, with about 15 consortium members. Things are starting to really shape up, and we’re getting organised.
We’re on for a 15 months journey...
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Following the successful MAVIS Phase A bid, we are very happy to release the wonderful collection of MAVIS White Papers to the public. Please follow this link to access the individual papers.
A HUGE thanks goes to the many scientists from around the globe who contributed to this effort. We received 57 complete papers, involving 150 scientists from 47 institutes across 16 countries. The full co...
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The ANU and INAF posted Press Releases on MAVIS on December 7.
Here is the ANU one, and here the INAF one. The Aussie one is very Aussie-centric, not unexpectedly. This is quite important for us in Oz and we’re proud of it.
These were picked up by a few media, like the Daily Mail, the West Australian, Space Daily. ABC did an interview and was supposed to air it on Friday, but I never received...
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Today, we just received notice from ESO that our bid was successful. MAVIS goes into phase A.
Now the real work starts. We need also to sign the agreement with ESO (which should hopefully not take too long, as we have already ironed out the legal stuff last months). Robin Arsenault, our contact at ESO, told me they are going to send us comments on our proposal, to be addressed at the Kick off ...
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Because the ESO proposal is now due September 14 (delayed with respect to the originally anticipated mid-July), the due date for the white papers has been postponed to July 15 (from June 15).
Instructions for white paper submission can be found here. A list of currently submitted ideas for white papers can be found here.
Please consider sending in your white paper; it is important.
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We have brand new mailing lists. In addition to the general mavis.team@mavis-ao.org, we also have mavis team addresses for each institutes. In alphabetical order:
mavis.team.aao@mavis-ao.org
mavis.team.anu@mavis-ao.org
mavis.team.arcetri@mavis-ao.org
mavis.team.lam@mavis-ao.org
mavis.team.mq@mavis-ao.org
mavis.team.padova@mavis-ao.org
mavis.team@mavis-ao.org forwards to all the a...
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The call for proposal for a VAOI (Visible Adaptive Optics Imager) is out; I received it today (one day after the workshop). Important dates are as follow:
Acknowledgement to ESO due 25 May
Questions to ESO deadline: 5 September
Proposal due 14 September
Validity Period through 31 December (which I understand as being the latest date for an answer from ESO).
This is a competitive pro...
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Thanks and congratulations to all for a very successful and productive workshop.
Below are a few pictures. Feel free to send me photos if you have any that you want to share.
Click on an image for the original size version.
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The MAVIS workshop is almost upon us!
The workshop in numbers, with two days to go:
52 participants turning up at the workshop, including a 15 participants from overseas.
Remote connections possible, with 6 people who will be presenting/attending remotely.
3 days of workshop, with a program that is a mix of science and instrumentation talks.
38 talks
Many discussion sessions
One ...
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Current list of MAVIS White Papers and topics
Last updated 2018/04/30.
To allow collaboration and coordination, this page provides a list of proposed topics for MAVIS White Papers received so far, along with the lead author, and list of co-authors. To avoid ‘spambot’ issues, we don’t provide email addresses here. However, if you want to get in touch with other authors, details can be obtained...
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JUNE 14, NEWS: The date for the white paper has been extended to July 15, 2018.
(Copy of a letter sent to the ASA exploder on 11 April 2018). See also the current list of white papers in this post.
Dear Colleagues,
We are writing to solicit White Papers describing exciting science cases that make use of the unique capabilities of “MAVIS” (MCAO Assisted Visible Imager & Spectrograph) - a ...
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