“Out Of The Mountain Of Despair, A Stone Of Hope”

Reflections

Spring semester finally ended and things are slowing down just for a little bit. I have about a month before going to present a poster at SPIE and then a talk at Cool Stars 22. There are still many things to be done for my LBT/NOMIC work, but I'm mostly excited to go to my first in person SPIE conference. I started working on infrared detectors right before the pandemic hit and then the last year of graduate school along with some health issues knocked out potential travel.

This past week I finally had the time to do a deep dive back into JWST pipeline end-to-end. Many of the time-series observations done with JWST/NIRSpec have been for spectroscopy of transiting exoplanets. My group got the first time-series observations of a brown dwarf with JWST at medium resolution. There was no space-based observatory prior to JWST that could take time-series spectra in the infrared at a resolution greater than a few hundred. With this extra resolution power hopefully the brown dwarf community can start distinguishing photometric changes from specific molecular gases and cloud species.

Top: Cathedral of St. Augustine

Bottom: Piece from Juan Obando and Yoshua Okón: DEMO

I PASSED WITH ONLY ONE ERROR

I take my driving test tomorrow!!!!!!!!!!!!

Images of the Milky Way's galactic center in the mid-infrared.

Left: Image from Becklin and Neugebaur 1975

Right: Image from Dinh+ 2024

Despite not knowing alot about galaxies, I was absolutely blown away by all of the defined structure in the image on the right. During department tea time this week some colleagues were talking about their favorite papers that are older than themselves. I went back to my personal favorite, Infrared Observations of the Galactic Center (Becklin+ 1968) and checked out similar papers from the time. I came across a very old image of the inner parsec region shown on the right.

Lake Kennedy (fishing spot) in Tucson, Arizona. When I went to check it out there was a fishing competition going on so everyone was quiet and focused. It was lovely seeing turtles, ducks, birds and dragonflies.

testing touchdesign

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.