Telescopes, Instruments, and Techniques (...with students and colleagues)

Telescopes:

Developed concepts for off-axis high dynamic range telescopes (HDRT):

  • - Built the 0.5m Haleakala SOLARC coronagraph, currently the largest such telescope for solar studies: www.SOLARC;
  • - ...and contributed to the 1.6m New Solar Telescope at Big Bear Solar Obervatory, CA: www.NST;
  • - ...and the 4m ATST (DKIST) concept, under construction on Haleakala: www.DKIST.;
  • - ...and the PLANETS 1.8m telescope optimized for circumstellar matter observations and exoplanets, under construction on Haleakala: www.PLANETS.

Developed new concepts for large, multi-mirror, interferometric telescopes:

    - our proposed HDRT was adapted to the 25m Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) www.gmto.org;
  • - our design for the mass-law-breaking Colossus 75m telescope: www.the-colossus.com

Designed and built a network of Precision Solar Photometric Telescopes (PSPT) for measuring solar brightness variability.

Designed and built the Princeton-Mt.Wilson Solar Oblateness Telescope at Mt. Wilson.

Instrumentation:

Pioneered the development of IR array detectors (HgCdTe) for solar research.

Developed an open C130 aircraft experiment with IR spectroscopic imager, then detected the Si IX line needed for coronal magnetometry,

Developed and deployed a cryogenic solar eclipse spectrograh in North Chile.

Developed an infrared fiber spectro-polarimeter for solar eclipse experiments, deployed at the solar eclipse in Libya.

Developed a facility coude visible/IR echelle spectro-polarimeter for the 3.7m AEOS telescope on Haleakala for stellar research.

Developing the facility Cryogenic Near-Infrared Spectropolarimeter for the DKIST: atst.nso.edu/inst/CryoNIRSP

Developed disruptive new technologies for energy concentrators and imaging mirrors

Numerical Techniques:

Developed new algorithms for

  • - extracting spectral information from non-evenly sampled time-series;
  • - array gain calibration without flat-fields;
  • - reconstruction of the Stokes-Mueller matrix for infrared solar magnetometry;
  • - telescope Stokes-Mueller calibration using daytime sky observations
  • - two-dimensional Hilbert solution for array spectral calibration.

Leadership in Commercial Technology Innovation and Design:

  • 2015 Principle Founder MorphOptic, Inc.
  • 2015 Principle Founder PLANETS Telescope Foundation, Inc.
  • 2013 Principle-Founder Colossus, Co.
  • 2013 co-Founder Innovative Optics Ltd.
  • 2008 Initiated the Maui technology affiliate group (MTAG) for industry-academic partnership on Maui