Alan Kastengren

Wasp nest inside a gas cylinder cap.

Apparently the wasps have been busy during the dark period at the APS.

Golden Alexander flower

Fruits of my ongoing native plant project.

Wire sculpture in Terminal B of LaGuardia Airport.

So this week hasn't been comfortable, but that's what makes a good conference. Not one that makes you feel comfortable, but one that teaches you and drives you to do the next thing. Thank you to the organizers of both meetings.

But the meetings over the past few days have given me soooo much to think about. It's easy to sit at the beam line and dream up of what we could do with the synchrotron. In the end, though, we serve the user community. It has to be useful to them.

I don't know the players in these areas of science. I don't understand what they need, or where APS fits in. All of them have well-defined, sophisticated workflows and impressive visualizations. Goodness knows I don't know the first thing about paleontology, or anatomy, or geology.

Instead, I came to the ToScA North America and NoCTURN meetings. The community is friendly and collegial. The venue is fantastic. The science talks are interesting (really, samples from an asteroid!). But it isn't comfortable.

I understand the methods in all the science talks and can see how I might do them at APS. I have a very good idea of all the wares the vendors have to offer. I am very firmly the x-ray expert in the group. It is very safe and very comfortable.

It has been an interesting experience this week. There is a conference I usually go to this time of year. It is a small, collegial conference. It has a lot of people I've hosted at the beamline. The faces are familiar and the organizers always make for a good experience.

Statue of Liberty at night.

Fascinating talks at the ToScA conference today at the American Museum of Natural History: bird brains and evolution, flowers, and dinosaurs. Strangely, there is a whole world of tomography applications outside of the synchrotron; who could have guessed?

It has been a great 2025-1 run. We had 11 first lights, 14 beamlines completed commissioning, and I even got a couple user experiments in!

An illustrator's happy accident-"Spilled Ink Kittens" by Japanese artist and illustrator, Avagadoo.

This one is an even better example of Laue diffraction from our aluminum scattering target.

One of the more fun things about white beam shielding validations is how overexposed the burn paper gets. This paper started out yellow. In this one you can see the Laue diffraction spots from our aluminum target.

Yesterday I finished shielding checks at 7-BM. Today I see the first tulip shoots coming up. It's been a good week.

After helping so many beamlines and seeing so many first lights after the APS-U dark time over the past 10 months, today I finally got to have mine. Hello again, 7-BM.

Undulator beam from two canted undulators at closed gap hitting the photon stop. You can see a visible glow from where the beams strike.

A decent camera viewing a diagnostic screen can save *so* much time in getting a beamline lined up. This little guy has paid for itself many times over in the past nine months.

This is the second best tool for beamline commissioning (after doughnut holes). A digital camera with a decent camera lens is invaluable. One can go to a long exposure time to see a weak beam or a very short one to see the structure in the monochromatic beam from an ID line.

The most important tool of the commissioning team.

Returning APS user. This one is more interested in grubs than in x-rays, however.