Infraredastronomy - The Research Garden

Last week I attended the joint meeting of the National Society of Black Physicists and National Society of Hispanic Physicists in Houston, Texas. I enjoyed seeing friendly colleagues and meeting new researchers. It was an honor to give an invited talk in the astronomy session and I'm happy I could convey the importance of brown dwarfs to folks outside of my subfield.

The first photo is everyone from the University of Arizona (minus Carlos Vargas) who attended. Graduate students Jasmin Washington (Steward Observatory, center) and Kiana McFadden (Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, left) presented their work as well. I had fun walking around an exploring downtown Houston in the evenings. I absolutely adored the POST, which had an open plan plant store with a stage for jazz.

“Out of the mountain of despair, a stone of hope”

LBT/NOMIC spectroscopy

NOMIC is one of the infrared cameras within the Large Binocular Telescope Interferometer. It is primarily used to take images at 8-13 microns. When NOMIC was built, a low resolution grism was installed within one of the filter wheels. Last Fall I was finally able to test it on sky to see how it performed. Lambda Persei is a relatively bright star with a spectral type of A0, similar to Vega. The NOMIC spectrum of Lambda Persei is shown in blue with black error bars. A spectrum of Vega from Rieke+ 2008 is shown in red. They match pretty well besides the region between 9.5 and 10 microns. This is likely due to the telluric calibrator star being observed at a very different air mass than the target. Getting a good telluric calibrator beyond 8 microns is very challenging for ground-based observations. A significant chunk of stars are too dim to get high signal-to-noise in a short period of time relative to the time required for science observations.

testing touchdesign

Reflections

I recently adopted a cat and have named him Lorenzo. At the shelter he was kind of a mean ass cat. Now that he lives as a solo cat I'm seeing a really soft side of him and it warms my heart. I also recently submitted an instrument concept for the Gemini Strategic Planning community input. Not entirely sure where that will go, but I'm proud that I put myself out there with my team.

I really enjoyed doing this interview for the Brown Dwarf Podcast. It was such a pleasure talking with Phoenix.

The People Behind JWST

I was featured in an article about the people who support and use JWST. I was so excited to share more of my personal experience working with the data. Link to article here.

Another video that highlights some of my work and hopes for JWST are here in this TikTok posted by the SETI Institute. The interview was done by Franck Marchis.

my life, my life, my life, my life. in the sunshine.

Reflections

I'm mentoring an undergrad for the first time and I'm realizing more how much effort it takes to start someone on research from scratch. Its so different from how classes work there is really no script to it. We are working on studying Hubble observations of Jupiter from 2015 to now. At the moment most variability measurements of gas giant exoplanets or brown dwarfs are only over one or two rotation periods. We need to move from "weather" into long-term climate observations, which is possible with a small observatory in space. Using Jupiter and current brown dwarf data, we can estimate what sensitivity is needed.

I've been gaming a lot less lately. I reached Platinum 4 in League of Legends, which is much higher than my original goal this season. There is no point in practicing because the whole map will change in January. I also have some JWST Observations that got executed today and LBTI observations to plan for in December and January.