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I think Justin Hom at Arizona had a CHARA program last year to do this vetting. I'll check with him on if we need more data. I agree that CHARA is pretty ideal here!

I didn't do the calculation but it seems like zet Oph is small enough. Really hard to find enough good reference stars, so even if we slightly resolve the angular diameter, it might be good enough.

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I think zet Pup and zet Oph are O stars, and they are currently on our list. We need really bright stars that are really far away (to minimize angular diameter) so we have a lot of B stars too if some of those are interesting.

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The inner working angle is ~0.15 arcsec, pretty comparable to GPI, if that helps. We're also going to observe some Bright massive stars and we're hoping they don't have companions since we need them for dark hole digging!

Jason Wang @thejason.wang · 29/07/2025

I'm apparently experiencing an adrenaline rush from a grad student in my group giving a talk at a conference I'm not even at?

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Jason Wang @thejason.wang · 29/07/2025

I thought the talk was great! Really inspiring!

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Jason Wang @thejason.wang · 29/07/2025

Not at #HWO25 but had to watch the Youtube stream to see the coolest version of the HR 8799 orbit movie from @bmacastro.bsky.social

A screenshot of the movie of the 4 planets orbiting HR 8799, but this time they have tails due to some video bug.

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Jason Wang @thejason.wang · 11/07/2025

Every time I blink, Roman gets even closer to launch!

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Jason Wang @thejason.wang · 11/07/2025

The 51 Peg b postdoctoral fellowship is out and Northwestern is one of the possible host institutions. Come join us! More information about the range of planetary astronomy research and other opportunities (like PI of Keck proposals) here: ciera.northwestern.edu/opportunitie....

ciera.northwestern.edu

51 Pegasi b Fellowship at Northwestern

Northwestern University is excited to be a host institution for the Heising-Simons Foundation’s 51 Pegasi b Fellowship. Fellows can collaborate on planetary astronomy research and can benefit from aff...

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Jason Wang @thejason.wang · 27/06/2025

We have an information session next Tuesday, July 1, 1 pm Eastern / 10 am Pacific. This particular town hall is aimed at early-career researchers, although non-early career researchers are also welcome to attend. Details are here: www.romancoronagraph.space/white-papers... (2/2)

romancoronagraph.space

Roman CPP - White Papers 2025

The Community Participation Program (CPP) team solicits short white papers from the worldwide science community describing both technology and science observing ideas for the Nancy Grace Roman Space ...

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Jason Wang @thejason.wang · 27/06/2025

Help us decide how to allocate ~2200 hours of Roman Space Telescope time! The Roman Coronagraph team is soliciting white papers to get community input on how to use our observing time (reminder, there is no GO call for the Coronagraph). If you need more details about the Roman Coronagraph.. (1/2)

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Jason Wang @thejason.wang · 12/06/2025

We're looking to hire a director of operations for CIERA! Consider applying if you're interested in a position in astronomy where you enable others to do research.

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Jason Wang @thejason.wang · 07/06/2025

Loading up webbpsf to get the inside scoop

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Reposted by Jason Wang

Laura Lopez @ohdearz.bsky.social · 31/05/2025

Here's NASA astrophysics, if I read the president's proposed budget correctly. 🔭

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Reposted by Jason Wang

Dr. Jessie Christiansen @aussiastronomer.bsky.social · 30/05/2025

*speechless horror* (Guys the NASA Exoplanet Archive is in this box. My job is in this box.)

Screenshot of the president's budget showing that the Exoplanet Exploration budget would reduce from $54.4M to $3.3M.

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Jason Wang @thejason.wang · 30/05/2025

Just coming down from the adrenaline rush of participating in the public comment period of my town's board meeting.

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Reposted by Jason Wang

AstroMonnier @astromonnier.bsky.social · 12/03/2025

Postdoc job Ad! Want to apply the latest technologies in laser combs and high-speed detector arrays for pushing heterodyne interferometry? Come to Ann Arbor to work with Prof Cundiff and me! Please repost this to help spread the word. Best to apply by Mar 31: apply.interfolio.com/162289

apply.interfolio.com

Apply - Interfolio {{$ctrl.$state.data.pageTitle}} - Apply - Interfolio

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Jason Wang @thejason.wang · 21/02/2025

AAS has a helpful page for contacting your congresspeople on the status of astronomy funding in the US: aas.org/advocacy/get...

aas.org

Action Alert 2025 | American Astronomical Society

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Reposted by Jason Wang

Jonathan Fortney @jjfplanet.bsky.social · 19/02/2025

The 7th annual Other Worlds Laboratory (OWL) Exoplanet Summer Program is now accepting applications for our 3-week workshop in late July 2025. We seek to foster collaborations in exoplanet science with this workshop on the UC Santa Cruz campus. Applications are due March 15: owl.ucsc.edu/summer/

owl.ucsc.edu

Summer 2025

The Other Worlds Laboratory (OWL) at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) will soon be accepting applications for the seventh annual Exoplanet Summer Program (ESP), from July 14 – …

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Jason Wang @thejason.wang · 18/02/2025

Very excited to share that I was selected as a Sloan Research Fellow! Really thankful to all my mentors, colleagues, collaborators, and my amazing research group. Wouldn't have been possible with all of them!

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CIERA @nuciera.bsky.social · 14/02/2025

A cosmic love story? In a new study, CIERA graduate student Fulya Kıroğlu discovers that binary black holes formed in crowded star clusters align their spins - in a seemingly choreographed dance - before merging. Learn more: bit.ly/cieravalentine 📹: Jamie Lombardi / Allegheny College

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Reposted by Jason Wang

Ava Polzin @avapolzin.bsky.social · 05/02/2025

Our second Picture an Astronomer public lecture -- in person (Chicago) and online Friday! Hear @astrokatie.com talk about the end of the Universe! More information + registration at pictureanastronomer.github.io/lectures/ 🔭🧪👩‍🔬

Flyer for Katie Mack's Picture an Astronomer public lecture -- February 7 in Chicago and online.

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Jason Wang @thejason.wang · 28/01/2025

Final week to apply for the Code/Astro workshop! Come learn about open-source software development in Python.

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Reposted by Jason Wang

Ava Polzin @avapolzin.bsky.social · 20/01/2025

Our Picture an Astronomer series starts in just over a week! Free to attend (in person in Chicago and online) and an incredible opportunity to engage directly with the scientists behind cutting edge astrophysics research. More info (including registration) at pictureanastronomer.github.io 🔭🧪👩‍🔬

Flyer for the Picture an Astronomer public events — all on the University of Chicago campus (unless stated otherwise) and online.

Jan. 30 — kick-off celebration featuring lectures from Chicago astronomers, bingo (with prizes), and a free book for in-person attendees
Feb. 3 — public lecture by Dara Norman, president of the American Astronomical Society
Feb. 7 — public lecture by Katie Mack, author of “The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking”
Feb. 19 — public lecture by Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell at the Adler Planetarium
Feb. 25 — public lecture by Anna Frebel, author of “Searching for the Oldest Stars: Ancient Relics from the Early Universe”

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Jason Wang @thejason.wang · 14/01/2025

The Roman Coronagraph team is soliciting input on what to do with 2200 hours on the highest contrast coronagraph ever flown! There is no open-time program, so fill out this survey on the technology demonstration and science that you think would be most interesting! docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

docs.google.com

Roman Coronagraph Community Interest Survey

Context: The Coronagraph Instrument onboard the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (scheduled to launch no later than May 2027) will enable an in-space technology demonstration of a high-contrast coron...

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Jason Wang @thejason.wang · 08/01/2025

True. I'd just say our mindset with PSF subtraction is to be as agnostic as possible, so we can find things that are unexpected, so we try to first develop algorithms that don't require a priori knowledge. We can always add in that prior knowledge later.

Jason Wang @thejason.wang · 08/01/2025

It's just a bit impractical for detection to do this, when you don't know a priori what kind of signal you'll get (like how some disks get completely removed by ADI, you may not even know you should be looking for one). But certainly joint fitting is a possibility in the future

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Jason Wang @thejason.wang · 08/01/2025

We're working on adding knobs to match the on sky data. Indeed the stellar spectrum may become a free parameter. The distortion solution, we haven't looked into yet since we are optimizing over a very small area

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Certainly could. We also are investigating limiting the number of degrees of freedom between a reference star and a science target (optimizing most of the DOFs on a reference star without astrophysical sources) and having much fewer to fit for on the science target with real sources.

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We haven't tested it but it should be just as applicable (we're just generating the PSF of the star and subtracting it off), with the caveat that we will have to work harder to prevent over fitting since disk features can look like stellar psf features

Yes, always better to do starlight suppression optically than in post-processing. But hard to do it perfectly at the time of obs and we certainly are interested to try this technique in the future on Roman or an HWO-esque design to fix any remaining imperfections.

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Isn't few nm/few microns = 1/1000th of a wave? Still, indeed we're excited about its potential given the great stability! It's why we decided to start with JWST first.

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The optimization is not a problem (takes minutes to run). I think more complex optical models are harder just because we need to think about all possible degrees of freedom we want to adjust.

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Exoplanet Detection via Differentiable Rendering

This work was led by Brandon Feng (computational imaging postdoc) and Rodrigo Ferrer-Chavez (astro PhD student at Northwestern). Check out the paper on arixv! arxiv.org/abs/2501.019... Next up: demonstrating this technique on real JWST data (stay tuned!)

arxiv.org

Direct imaging of exoplanets is crucial for advancing our understanding of planetary systems beyond our solar system, but it faces significant challenges due to the high contrast between host stars an...

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We jump on the differentiable modeling bandwagon in order to fit millions of degrees of freedom in our optical model. This allows us to measure drifts in optical alignment that happen when JWST slews between targets. Because of this, we can do better than unsupervised data-driven methods like KLIP.

A plot showing contrast curves for KLIP, our new algorithm, and the fundamental noise limit of our data.

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