Past Science Highlights
Recent Science Highlight : Wednesday, Oct 10, 2007
We've been getting lots of PR regarding our search for asteroids in the SDSS data, including here, here, and here. The best one is at MSNBC and the fanciest one is a video.
Recent Science Highlight : Thursday, Aug 17, 2006
I have been trolling the SDSS Supernova Search looking for minor planets (soon to be called "small solar system bodies"). We have found some of the more distant objects yet, including 2005 RL43, 2005 RM43, 2005 RN43, and 2005 SA278. Hopefully when the IAU votes on the definition of a "planet", or "pluton", some of our guys will pass muster. Which means I get to find a planet in our solar system! Now that is cool...
Recent Science Highlight : Thursday, April 11, 2006
Have resurrected my Perl scripts to
automate the Daophot photometry package. An ensemble of
SDSS images are being run through
this pipeline. As a particularly cool example of how well this
package can work, here is an SDSS i-band
image of globular cluster M2. On the left is
the raw science image, on the right is the image reconstructed from
all the stars photometered. Nice!
Recent Science Highlight : Thursday, March 23, 2006
As part of the SuperMACHO Collaboration, we are searching for variability in the Large Magellanic Cloud. We had noticed some diffuse features in our difference images that were moving with time. A quick search found that these features seemed to be moving out from common centers corresponding with known supernova remnants that are several hundred years old. We've used Gemini to take spectra of these featues, recovering the actual light from ancient supernova explosions, and are planning on searching for these light echoes around known Galactic supernovae. Read the official press release. Or puruse our collaboration's web page. And check out a cool animation of the echoes around supernova 1987A!
