Recent Talks

In a time when we deal with extremely large images (be it from computer
simulations or from extremely powerful telescopes), visualizing them can
become a challenge. If we use a regular monitor, we have two options:

1) fit the image to our monitor resolution, which involves interpolation
and thus losing information and the ability to see small image details.

2) zooming in on small parts of the image to view them at full
resolution, which involves losing context and the global view of the
full image.

To alleviate these problems, display walls of hundreds of Megapixels can
be built, which allow us to visualize in full resolution small details
of the images while retaining in view a larger image context. For
example, one of the world's highest resolution tiled-displays is
Stallion (https://www.tacc.utexas.edu/vislab/stallion, at the TACC in
Texas, USA), with an impressive resolution of 597 Megapixels (an earlier
version of the system can be seen being used at
https://tinyurl.com/mt7atad9).

At the IAC we have built a more modest display wall (133 Megapixels),
which you probably have already seen in action in one of our recent
press releases (https://tinyurl.com/4bwtxvec). In this talk I will
introduce this new visualization facility (which any IAC researcher can
use) and discuss on some design issues, possible current and future
uses, limitations, etc.

Las estrellas en el cielo no están quietas. ¿Cómo podemos fotografiar el espacio sin que salgan movidas? Trípodes, monturas, sistemas de guiado y soluciones para conseguir estrellas como alfileres.

Unirse a la reunión Zoom

https://rediris.zoom.us/j/86168960971
ID de reunión: 861 6896 0971

Youtube

https://youtube.com/live/br3we052mv4?feature=share

Kepler photometry was so precise that new ways could be developed to harvest the great wealth of quasi-continuous data that has never been accessible from the ground. We initiated a project that we dubbed The Kepler Pixel Project in order to explore approaches and to discover new pulsating stars and other time-variable objects. During the project we examined individual pixels of the original Kepler mission to find interesting objects around the main Kepler targets. Specifically we launched a subproject to find background, faint RR Lyrae stars that are missing from the original Kepler sample. Altogether we found 26 new RR Lyrae stars, increasing the Kepler original RR Lyrae sample by 50%. In this talk I'll present the latest results of this project. In addition to RR Lyrae stars I will also show results on ~1000 new eclipsing binaries found in the framework of the same project.

Vera C. Rubin Observatory's Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) is one of the most important ground-based astronomy projects of the coming decade. In the second half of this talk I will present my research group's work on classification of variable stars with machine learning methods which is part of the Hungarian in-kind LSST contribution. The novelty of our method is that we use images of light curves, such as a human classifier would do. The method gives surprisingly good results based on the shape of light curves only, but can be further improved if additional astrophysical parameters (distance, amplitude, colors, etc.) are taken into account.

Only recently, thanks to the Gaia, have we been able to directly measure how our own Galaxy was formed since its infancy, by cannibalizing smaller galaxies formed at the core of dark matter subhalos. These accretion events can be seen as kinematic groups and may have brought their own group of globular clusters, some of which are only seen today as their remnant cold stellar streams. Here I will discuss how the main accretion events unveiled by Gaia can be linked to previously known halo substructures, mainly large stellar clouds identified more than a decade ago in large photometric surveys. Additionally I will discuss the Jhelum stellar stream in the light of its interaction with the Sagittarius stream, which can give us insight on the details of this ongoing accretion event. Finally, I will briefly discuss how the new Gaia XP DR3 spectra is aiding in  the identification of metal-poor unmixed halo substructures in the solar neighbourhood, highlighting the case of ED-2, a [Fe/H] = -2.5 cold stellar stream in which the Sun is embedded in. 

In this talk, I'll describe the full upgrade of OSIRIS at GTC telescope, once installed in the Cassegrain focal station including a new monolithic blue-sensitive detector. Changes in the standard operation of the instrument will be detailed, as well as a brief summary of the short-term instrumentation plan for GTC in 2023.

Unirse a la reunión Zoom
https://rediris.zoom.us/j/86985740449
ID de reunión: 869 8574 0449

Enlace de Youtube:

https://youtube.com/live/WxBPiiUkwJ4?feature=share

La finalidad del proyecto TTNN es realizar la mejora del sistema de control de los telescopios IAC-80 y Carlos Sánchez con el objetivo que el nuevo entorno de software y hardware que se diseñe sea robusto
versátil, permitan controlar los telescopios de forma remota y facilitar, a posteriori, su operación automática. Para el cumplimiento de estos requerimientos en la parte software se está diseñando e implementando un sistema de control de alto nivel basado en ROS y una aplicación de escritorio escrita en pyQt5.

YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbxU7VZzR8k&t=4s

Youtube933518

MAAT is a mirror-slicer integral field unit that will be installed in OSIRIS in 2024, breathing new life into the GTC's work horse instrument. As well as the opportunity to perform spatially-resolved spectroscopy over a field of 10"x7", MAAT will also offer increased signal-to-noise and resolution for point sources with respect to the standard long slit mode.  As part of the preparations for the arrival of MAAT, we have implemented support for the reduction of OSIRIS data into the open-source, python-based spectroscopic reduction package PypeIt. Indeed, with the arrival of the new blue-sensitive CCD, PypeIt is now the only publicly available pipeline that continues to work for OSIRIS. With very little human intervention, PypeIt produces fully calibrated and coadded spectra that are near the Poisson limit for point sources. In this talk, I will present a brief overview of the philosophy behind PypeIt and demonstrate the ease with which OSIRIS data (and soon MAAT data) can be reduced.

I present a detailed analysis of the scaling relations of ETGs and suggest a way to predict the evolution of the distributions of galaxies in these planes. This new approach is able to account of several features observed in the FP projections and of the tilt of the Fundamental Plane.

El próximo proyecto en estudiar es fondo cósmico de microondas (CMB) es LiteBIRD, un satélite de la JAXA que pretende estudiar la polarización de los modos-B. En él se encuentran integrados tres telescopios que recorren un rango frecuencial desde los 34 hasta los 448 GHz, donde se encuentran los Transition-Edge Sensor Detectors (TES), que operan a una temperatura de 100mK y que requieren de una estabilidad térmica estricta. En el Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias se están estudiando mecanismos de control de la temperatura para convertir los requisitos térmicos en una realidad.

Youtube:

https://youtube.com/live/9Cq9Oy-aicY?feature=share