Category: research log

  • back to basics

    back to basics

    i consider my physics education incomplete, i suppose any honest physicist would…

  • what does an exoplanet look like?

    what does an exoplanet look like?

    Large telescopes have allowed us to take unresolved pictures of exoplanets around a few dozen nearby stars, in many different colors of light. What do they look like?

  • we used the billion dollar observatory wrong, on purpose

    we used the billion dollar observatory wrong, on purpose

    this march, i published my fifth first-author research paper in The Astronomical Journal (not my first fifth-author paper, which i think is yet to come). i was required by my collaborators to use a title prefix to indicate this paper is part of a series published by our team, so in a small act of…

  • into the biosphere

    into the biosphere

    Well, really, it’s the Biosphere 2.

  • nircam coronagraphs

    nircam coronagraphs

    I was invited out to arizona this past weekend to attend the ultimate (read, last planned) NIRCam Team Meeting. NIRCam is the Near Infrared Camera, an instrument aboard JWST that is responsible for many of the awe inspiring images you’ve seen from the observatory. There, I got to see a physical copy of the sapphire…

  • 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.

  • 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…

  • i published another science paper

    i published another science paper

    This past month I published another peer reviewed article as first-author, this time in The Astrophysical Journal. In this paper, we used the VLTI/GRAVITY instrument down in Chile to study the orbit and atmosphere of a failed star.

  • jwst cycle 2, and n+1 time’s charm for vlti

    jwst cycle 2, and n+1 time’s charm for vlti

    in which i discuss proposing for space telescope observing time, and resubmitting a failed telescope proposal.