In mid-September Phil and I made a short trip to the MMT for one night of observing on Hectospec. Sadly the guider didn’t work and we didn’t get any data (with sub-arcsecond seeing!!), but Hectospec operates in queue mode so we weren’t totally out of luck. In fact, the night after we left one of our fields was observed. I… Read more →
Working with the Geneva Evolutionary Group
In early July I travelled to Geneva, Switzerland to work with the Geneva Evolutionary Group on understanding the luminosity function of Red Supergiants (RSGs) in M31. We had previously obtained telescope time on UKIRT on Mauna Kea in Hawaii to observe thousands of RSGs. After photometrically separating the ones in M31 out from the foreground stars we were able to… Read more →
Observing trip to Apache Point Observatory
In late June I went down to New Mexico to do a training run on the 3.5m at Apache Point Observatory. For three nights I took spectra of red supergiants with the hopes of finding binary companions. While my science wasn’t incredibly successful, we made up for it by putting an eyepiece on the telescope to look at the Ring… Read more →
Runaway Yellow Supergiant in the Small Magellanic Cloud
My collaborators and I have a paper in press on a runaway Yellow Supergiant star in the Small Magellanic Cloud (see here). We found a 200 solar radii star hurdling its way through space at 300,000 miles / hour! Because this is pretty cool, we issued a press release describing our discovery. I did an interview with the University of… Read more →
Priority Visitors on Gemini North
In mid-October Phil Massey and I went to Hawaii to observe on 8-m Gemini North as priority visitors. This meant we acted like queue observers in exchange for getting the chance to observe our own Wolf-Rayets under pristine Mauna Kea conditions. Sadly, these conditions never occurred but I still got to see volcanos, sea turtles, and really big telescopes on… Read more →
Master’s Thesis Defense and Paper
Today I successfully defended my Master’s Thesis on the strange Wolf-Rayet stars I found in the Large Magellanic Cloud. Additionally, the paper based on this thesis was accepted for publication in the ApJ! You can find it here: WN3/O3. Read more →
University of Washington Acceptance!
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 →
Back at Las Campanas
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 →
New Zealand Massive Stars Conference
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 →
Colloquium at Colorado University: Boulder and the University of Washington
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 →