Kathryn Neugent

I’m happy to announce that I’ve been accepted into the University of Washington Astronomy PhD program for Fall 2017! After all of these years of working towards “officially” entering the field of astronomy, I’m very excited about this next step. Here’s to the future! Read more →

I recently returned from a trip to Las Campanas Observatory where my collaborators and I finished up a four year project searching for Wolf-Rayet stars in the Magellanic Clouds using the 1-meter Swope telescope. We have a few half nights on the Baade Magellan telescope in less than a month to hopefully confirm any candidate Wolf-Rayets we may have found… Read more →

In the end of November I journeyed to Auckland, New Zealand to present my work at a Massive Stars conference. In addition to the conference, I also did a little vacationing before hand. My friend and I visited Hobbiton, Rotorua, Taupo, and Hot Water beach. Hopefully the next Massive Star “beach meeting” is in an exciting location! Read more →

This October I was invited to present my work on Wolf-Rayet stars at CU: Boulder and the University of Washington lunch colloquiums. In addition to gaining experience for giving hour long colloquiums, I also enjoyed discussing my research and gaining new viewpoints and possible research directions. Read more →

In early June I traveled to Chicheley Hall in the English countryside to present my work on WN3/O3 Wolf-Rayets at the Bridging the gap: from massive stars to supernovae meeting. In addition to learning more about these stars from an evolutionary standpoint, I additionally got the chance to do some traveling! I extended my trip by a bit and visited Stonehenge… Read more →

My November 2015 trip to Chile marks the 10th time I’ve traveled down to Las Campanas Observatory to observe massive stars in the Magellanic Clouds. The current run involves 10 nights on the 40″ Swope using narrow band interference filters to search for Wolf-Rayet stars in the SMC and LMC. We then have two nights on the 6.5m Baade Magellan… Read more →

Even though I’m now a NAU grad student doing my masters thesis on asteroids, I’m continuing my massive star research with Phil Massey. One of the upsides of this collaboration is that I still get to tag along on observing runs. Tonight we’re observing Wolf-Rayet binaries at the MMT down near Tucson, AZ. The last 19 nights have been clouded /… Read more →

Pretty soon I’ll be packing my bags to head back to Europe for another astronomy conference. After Greece in 2013, and Switzerland in 2014, Phil and I are now headed off to Potsdam, Germany for a conference on Wolf-Rayet stars! Phil will be giving an invited talk on Wolf-Rayet surveys and I’ll be giving a talk on our newly discovered… Read more →

This August I’ll be moving back to Flagstaff, AZ to attend Northern Arizona University and work towards my Masters in Applied Physics with asteroid-extraordinaire David Trilling as my advisor. While I’ve enjoyed researching massive stars for the past 6 years, it will be fun to focus my research on asteroids again! And, I hear there’s a massive star meeting in New… Read more →