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

Fruits of my ongoing native plant project.

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.

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.

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.