• expect the expected | my latest first author paper on af lep b

    expect the expected | my latest first author paper on af lep b

    in my latest paper (published on the pre-print site arXiv today, and by the Astronomical Journal in a few weeks), i took a closer look at a nearby, young, gas giant exoplanet.

  • astronomy communication in the age of slop

    astronomy communication in the age of slop

    i’ve been wading through the increasingly sloppy internet for most of my adult life. one of the places that i always seem to encounter low effort content is in astronomy “communication”

  • aurora visible in baltimore, oct. 10th ’24

    big cme from oct. 8th has finally reached us on earth, and while i didn’t expect to see much from all the way down in maryland, we walked out into the park to have a check. we were able to see red (h-alpha emission) and green ([oiii] emission). phone cameras can’t beat those with tripods…

  • lego fondor haulcraft build

    lego fondor haulcraft build

    last month, while i was recovering from my wisdom teeth removal, i wanted something relatively low impact to do; so i built a custom designed star wars lego

  • “Fluke Near Nehalem,” by Katherine (James) Harmon, and commentary

    “Fluke Near Nehalem,” by Katherine (James) Harmon, and commentary

    My grandmother was a writer, poet, and editor. After her passing, my mother found and posted to social media one of her poems originally published in the Oregon East literary journal titled Fluke Near Nehalem. The poem inspired me to submit my own piece of environment inspired poetry to a creative writing journal, which was…

  • a poem in reckoning

    a poem in reckoning

    my poem fear of pipes and shallow water was recently published in issue 8 of Reckoning, a nonprofit, annual journal of creative writing on environmental justice. you can find the poem online, or you can support the journal by buying a physical copy of issue 8. either way, thank you for reading. part of the…

  • snow days in balmor

    well, my apartment roof is leaking (again). it snowed seriously last in baltimore about two years ago, and i have some fond memories of taking some long treks through wyman park, treading new paths through the drifts in my ruptured doc martens. i was listening to the wheel of time audiobooks back then and could…

  • the moon is out tonight

    the moon is out tonight

    here’s an image of it that I took for someone special at 6pm, 2023/12/20.

  • my third paper: is it a planet? (no)

    my third paper: is it a planet? (no)

    My third academic paper (that is, the third peer-reviewed research article I’ve written as the lead author) was accepted for publication today in The Astronomical Journal, and is publicly available on arXiv. Similar to my second paper, this result describes our observations of a failed star (a.k.a. a “substellar object”, or “brown dwarf”) that is…

  • november visit to germany

    november visit to germany

    i’ve spent the past two weeks on a work trip to germany, first to heidelberg for two back to back workshops, and then to munich (garching, really) to collaborate at the european southern observatory (eso), who run the paranal observatory in chile i visited last year. now, i’m back in baltimore and enjoying the company…