Our Fall 2001 campaign was (long ago, sorry) in progress; here is the
log of all observations.
Our Fall 1999
campaign, sorted by supernova being followed or
log of all observations, and
light curve estimates. More information and
links can be found on the
CFA supernova page. This has
Go to:
[ IFA ]
[ IFA Faculty ]
This web-page has had
Teaching
Astr 301:
Observational Projects
Astr 734:
Order of Magnitude Astrophysics
Current Research Projects
ATLAS: The
Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System
This is a new
project that is complementary to (a polite way to say better than)
Pan-STARRS for finding killer asteroids. ATLAS is a pair of
half-meter telescopes that can only see things 10x brighter than
Pan-STARRS can, so it's only able to work to a third or a half of the
distance of Pan-STARRS. What's different is that ATLAS patrols the
entire, visible sky twice a night, whereas Pan-STARRS is much slower.
Pan-STARRS is narrow and deep; ATLAS is wide and shallow. The
motivation for ATLAS is to provide warning of an asteroid on its
final, impact trajectory: maybe a week's warning for
a 2 Mton explosion and three week's warning for a 100 Mton explosion.
Recently ATLAS found a 10 Mton asteroid ( K17Q60) that missed the us by 10 Earth
radii (if we find 99 more, watch out!), and another (A103wzq) still on
the MPC confirmation page whose MOID (minimum orbital intersection distance) could be less than an Earth radius (it might hit us). We're having fun.
Pan-STARRS: The
Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System
Between 2002
and 2010 I was pretty much consumed with work on the Pan-STARRS project.
This is an AFRL funded effort to build a telescope and imager to carry
out wide-field (3 deg), deep imagery of the whole sky. What's
different about Pan-STARRS is that we are doing this every night and
covering the whole sky many times. Therefore Pan-STARRS is far better
than anything ever before for finding moving objects, variable
objects, and transients. I'm interested in finding supernovae, of
course, but we're all in this to help reduce the risk of the Earth
being whacked by an unseen asteroid. The IFA is joined by a
Pan-STARRS Science Consortium who
are carrying out the science mission of the first Pan-STARRS telescope.
High Redshift Supernovae:
Studies of Cosmology from Observations of Type 1a Supernovae
Type 1a supernovae (expoding white dwarf stars) are
reliable standard candles, and have changed very little
since the universe was young. Such beacons, seen across the age of the
universe, can tell us whether the universe has decelerating significantly
since the Big Bang, and whether it might recollapse some day.
This work, starting with the High-z program, branching into the Higher-z
and ESSENCE projects, led us to announce in 1996 that the universe
is undergoing an accelerating expansion because of "Dark Energy", a
cosmological constant. Although we really felt like we were going out
on a limb, the evidence was clear and it's been reconfirmed many times
over since then.
SBF Survey:
A Survey of Galaxy Distances Using Surface Brightness Fluctuations
This is a project to determine the distances
to the nearest 300 elliptical and S0 galaxies by measuring their
surface brightness fluctuations. We've got good photometry, the
fluctuation data are on tape and almost completely reduced,
Paper I,
Paper II,
Paper III, and
Paper IV
are out. Paper II derives a model
for the large scale flows in the local universe which you can
download as sbf2flow.f. Paper IV
has data tables of SBF magnitudes, colors, and distances which you can
download as
table.good and
table.poor.
OTCCD:
Image Motion Compensation Using an Orthogonal Transfer CCD
With Barry Burke and Dick Savoye at Lincoln Labs, I've invented a new
type of CCD (US patent 5,760,431) which can shift charge in all four
directions. So as an optical image dances around on a detector, you can
move the accumulating electrons to follow it and avoid blurring. We built
and used a prototype device (details published in
astro-ph/9705165),
and we also made a large chip (2k x 4k)
which I installed on the UH 88" telescope. This OPTIC camera has
been used for some of the very best light curves of extra-solar planet
occultations from the ground.
visitors since 1 Sep 97.
