Breakouts

The Planning Tool manages a user’s targets around their night of observing. Targets are created and edited by this tool, and can also be imported by uploading a starlist file. Features include a Simbad target resolver that fills in missing target information using the target’s name. Additionally, the Planning Tool informs users of their target’s feasibility with interactive charts that visualize target(s), taking into account telescope limits, air mass, lunar angle, lunar brightness, etc. This demonstration will touch on these features, as we create and visualize our targets for a given night of observing.

The Keck 2035 Strategic Plan endorsed high-contrast technology development as a means of supporting a broad OIR science portfolio and providing cutting-edge science opportunities to the Keck community by hosting technology demonstrations for ELTs and space missions. In this breakout session, community input will be solicited for the design of Keiki: a dedicated high-contrast technology development platform for Keck. We will discuss Keiki’s goals, constraints, and progress to date on a notional optical design and plans for a flexible real time control solution. Additional discussions will include (1) the balance of long-term, stable Keiki capabilities and the ability to host visiting subsystems, (2) the process for transferring successful Keiki technology demonstrations to the main AO bench, and (3) the impact of Keiki support on the Keck AO staff.

Greg: Progress and challenges in the development of the Keck Planet Finder Data Reduction Pipeline
The Keck Planet Finder (KPF) is a fiber-fed, high stability Echelle spectrometer covering a wavelength range 𝜆 = 440-850 nm with resolving power R > 80,000. The combination of high optical throughput, exquisite thermal and mechanical stability, and the 10m aperture of the Keck I Telescope make KPF capable of acquiring Doppler masses for planets in the Earth-to-Neptune mass regime for stars as dim as V = 15. KPF achieved first light on November 9, 2022 and is approaching is approaching a single-measurement instrument-limited precision of 10 cm/s and on-sky photon-limited precision of 30 cm/s, important milestones on the road to discovering true Earth twins. However, several software challenges must be overcome before reaching these milestones, particularly for dim targets and/or over weeks-to-years timescales. In this talk, I will highlight recent developments by the KPF-DRP software team toward overcoming these challenges, as well as recent benchmark science results which demonstrate the extraordinary potential of KPF science.

Dan: A Proposed Cloudy Sky Program for Keck: Chromospheric Activity in Bright Solar Analog Field Stars
This presentation proposes a long-term Keck program to monitor solar analog stars during sub-optimal nights, aiming to understand solar variability and its role in climate change. By studying “grand minima”—periods of diminished solar activity like the Maunder Minimum—the project seeks to determine their frequency in Sun-like stars and the stellar dynamo processes involved. Using a new, vetted list of 211 bright solar analogs from Hipparcos and Gaia, the program would collect Ca II HK activity data with HIRES to identify candidate grand minimum stars. Community participation would enable year-round data gathering, with contributors recognized as coauthors on resulting publications.

Jack: KPF Community Cadence: A Observing Mode for Keck
The KPF-CC program is a bridge between the classically scheduled nature of the observatory with the pRV exoplanet community’s desire for a queue observing mode. We have developed a software, AstroQ, to solve for the mathematically optimal schedule for observations of all requests from PIs who opt into the queue. Additionally, we have built infrastructure within Keck Observatory to allow PIs to interact with the queue software to set their requests and track their program’s progress. In this session, we will provide an overview of the auto-scheduler algorithm and the tools available to PIs so that we can all maximize the pRV science at Keck Observatory.