as-tro-pho-tog-ra-phy ăs″trō-fə-tŏg′rə-fē noun
photography involving astronomical objects and events
I love telescopes, and when I’m not using them to conduct my research I sometimes try to take pretty pictures. I’m by no means an adept, especially when it comes to image processing. It’s mostly for my own edification.
JWST
I mean, this is the big one right? My research focuses on direct images of exoplanets with the world’s largest telescopes. I’m my happiest when I can turn that data into art. For now, all I can show is my false color image of HIP 65426 b from JWST/NIRCam, but hopefully there will be much more to come 😉
Maryland Space Grant Observatory
I was the Observatory Fellow at JHU for the 2022-2023 academic year, and I’ve written a few posts before taking up that post about my first few nights at the telescope (here, and here). In general, you can find more astrophotography I’ve helped supervise on the MDSGC website. For many of these, I ended up observing the images, but handing them over to my intern Matthew Prem or JHU student Gavin Wang to process and make beautiful.
iTelescope Remote Observatories
I’ve given a webinar at iTelescope, and they paid me partially in telescope time! Here’s some of those results.
Amherst College Observatory
In my time at Amherst I got acquainted with the ACO Beta telescope, and have been able to use it to do some modest astrophotography. ACO isn’t the most high-tec observatory out there, but we’ve been able to get some neat shots even if our stars aren’t perfectly circular, and our flat fields aren’t perfectly, well, flat.
WIYN 0.9m
In January of 2020 I traveled to Kitt Peak National Observatory to use the WIYN 0.9m telescope for a research project. For that project I observed a young star forming region in Taurus, and was able to stack my data to create these cool shots of the L1551 cloud, and a handful of Herbig-Haro objects in the field.
