I recognize that Astrobin is dedicated to amateur imaging and astronomy but I thought that some of you might be interested in what happens at a meeting of professional astronomers. As I write this, I’m sitting in the Copenhagen airport waiting for my long flight back home from the meeting. SPIE (the Society of Photographic Instrumentation Engineers) holds this meeting every two years in various locations around the world. I’ve attended the meeting before, but only as an exhibitor so, this was my first time as a registered attendee. It’s pretty expensive to attend and it’s aimed at professionals so only a handful of amateurs make it to this meeting, which is why I thought that it might be interesting to some of you to learn about what goes on.
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[Above] Entrance to the Bella Convention Center in Copenhagen
First, the meeting was extremely well attended. I couldn’t find official numbers but there were at least three thousand attendees. The meeting ran for six full days and there were many hundreds of presentations and posters—along with a vendor exhibit that was open for nearly three days. A large number of the attendees are Ph.D. level researchers working in academia but many were also from various observatories such as ESO, Keck and governmental agencies like NASA. This is a meeting where most of the heads of the world’s largest and most significant observatories are in attendance. It is definitely a gathering of who’s who in Astronomy and space science research.
Each day starts with a “Plenary Session”, which is an hour-long talk by an expert about various subjects and these were all absolutely outstanding. One of the talks by a NASA astrobiologist covered the subject of what should we be looking for as we search for life in the universe. Another talk, again from NASA, covered the plan for Flagship programs of the future with a lot of discussion about planning for the “Habitable Worlds” mission and the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope scheduled to launch next month. A talk by a Chinese scientist detailed the status and future plans for astronomy and observatories in China where they are focusing on becoming a major player in astronomical and space research.
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[Above] The Plenary Sessions were always packed.
The technical sessions cover every aspect of astronomy and instrumentation ranging from ultra-long radio wavelengths into X-ray research. One of the phrases that I heard numerous times is the push for full-sky, “high cadence” imaging to look for fast occurring transient events. The new Argus program funded by Eric and Wendy Schmidt is aimed at this area of research. It will be an ultra-wide field, multiple aperture array of telescopes that will use 1,200 of the 200mm, F/3 SCT telescopes recently announced by Planewave. Those telescopes were developed specifically for the Argus program. You can learn more about this program here: https://argus.unc.edu
I heard a number of talks about the Mothra system located in Chile and was able to have a number of discussions with a few of the engineers working on the project. I won’t go into the details but there are still a lot of challenges to overcome before that system is completely dialed in. They hope to commission the completed system sometime around December of this year (2026).
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[Above] A slide from the Mothra talk
There were even a few folks with Astrobin accounts in attendance.@Gabriel Santos (professor at the Univ de Sao Paulo) gave a great talk about how to optimize cost effectiveness of telescope arrays using commercial components.@Gaston Baudat (Innovations Foresight) presented a very well received poster paper on his wavefront sensor work. I was delighted to get to hang out with Vincent, Gaston, and Gabriel for much of the week. Vincent is a professor and one of the two owners of Obstech in Chile.
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[Above] From left to right, Gabrielle, John, and Vincent.
The program director for the ELT gave an informative talk about the status of that telescope and it sounds like they are holding to their schedule. Mirrors are being made and the structure is being completed. I am particularly proud that they are using PhaseCams at Safran Reosc in France to measure the optics. It is a super impressive project that appears to be extremely well managed. Other large telescope projects are moving along but many are on a much bumpier path toward completion. GMT is still struggling for money and the TMT (Thirty Meter Telescope) has been thrown into funding limbo. TMT was planned for installation on Maui; however, they lost their NSF funding needed to reach preliminary design review. Spain has jumped in with a $400M loan and now there is talk of putting it in the Canary Islands. I hope that they can pull it off but it sound very shaky at this point.
The technical papers ranged in subject matter from very esoteric research projects to very simple, completely understandable projects. One poster paper described a project to simply add an off-axis auto-guider to a meter-class telescope. The authors presented analysis with graphs and tables to show before and after imaging performance and I had to chuckle. This paper basically described what virtually everyone here does to run a deep sky imaging system! Other papers were clearly aimed at other researchers working on very specialized topics and weren’t so easy to understand without a lot more background. I personally enjoyed learning more about stellar interferometry, AO systems, and programs to image exo-planets.
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[Above] Gaston Baudat discussing his poster paper with an attendee.
The vendor area is always a great place to hear about new things. ASA is about to deliver their first 2.5-m scope. ZWO had a nice motorized tip-tilt unit for small sensors. Vincent Suc (Obstech) and I tried to convince them that they need a similar product for larger sensors. Sam Wen, the CEO and founder of ZWO, was there and he seems like a great guy!
The folks at Imagine Optic (a French company) were showing a new compact AO module called “Caio Vis” designed for small telescopes. It is optimized for F/9 – F12 systems but it can be adapted to faster systems with some additional optics. It has a 14x14 Shack Harman wavefront sensor and a 40x40 active mirror and it can run at rates up to 1 kHz. The entire system only weighs 3kg and it looked very well made! The guy who designed it (Guillaume Dovillaire) had a lot of videos and images that he took using his personal C9.25 in his driveway. The useable field is pretty small and the price is pretty high (~$80k) so this is only for very high-end amateur equipment or professional applications. The planetary pictures that I saw were definitely impressive. The one thing that I want to emphasize is that this is a “real AO” system using a Shack-Hartman wavefront sensor and a medium authority active mirror. The old amateur AO systems such as those from SBIG that merely corrected for tilt had nothing to do with true active-optical systems.
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[Above] The CIAO Vis AO product looks very nicely made and simple to mount on any telescope.
Baader Planetarium had their new, research-grade spectroscopy system for “large aperture” telescopes >0.5m) on display. Ironically, they had it connected to a CDK17. It is a very nicely designed, fiber-fed Echelle spectrometer with high spectral resolution. Again, this is a system designed for professional applications but they told me that an amateur with a CDK1000 took delivery of the first unit. Unfortunately, if you have to ask for the price, you can’t afford it.
QHY was showing off a new, extremely large (98.3 mm x 98.3 mm) Chinese made 150 Mpx, CMOS sensor with 8-micron pixels and a 14-bit ADC. The spectral response curve looks very good with a QE of nearly 90% in the visible. They don’t yet have a camera for it and the price will be north of $100,000 so it’s not a “general-interest” item, but it is nevertheless very interesting. It was certainly the largest sensor that I’ve ever seen! Unfortunately, I didn’t have the presence of mind to take a picture of it.
The folks at ATIK were showing off their new IMX455 based cameras. They appear to be built like a tank—quite large and heavy and they use only optical fiber for data transfer. Unfortunately, these cameras are pretty expensive (roughly double the price of other competitors like QHY, ZWO, or Moravian) and they currently have no software. There are no drivers or anything else! I really like the idea of optical fiber connections but I don’t believe that these cameras are aimed at the amateur market. For most of us in the amateur world, the advantages of an optical fiber connection over USB are probably not worth the additional cost.
FLI was there showing their new Aurora CMOS cameras. FLI cameras are bullet proof and I really loved the ones that I’ve owned but FLI is very late to the CMOS market with a product that carries a premium price. Furthermore, they’ve had production problems that have slowed initial deliveries. From what I learned at the show, it’s going to be a while before they solve those problems. I wish them well and I hope they succeed but they have a steep climb to get back to where they used to be and in my opinion, much of the market has moved on.
These are just a few of the highlights that I gleaned from the meeting. There is simply no way to report on all of the things that I took away from this event. It was an amazing week and it was totally worth it to attend this meeting. I loved Copenhagen and I want to go back again someday—just to be a tourist. The next SPIE Telescope meeting will be held in Montreal in 2028 and I hope to be there again.
- John
