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Tweep of the Week: Patrick Gaulme

/ Jennifer Johnson / Leave a comment
Still Life of Patrick Gaulme with Telescope. Credit: Arl Cope

Still Life of Patrick Gaulme with Telescope. Credit: Arl Cope

Our @sdssurveys Tweep of the Week for the week of March 27th is Patrick Gaulme, stellar and planetary astronomer and part of the observing team for SDSS. Patrick will be at Apache Point Observatory for part of this week, taking observations for @MaNGASurvey, @APOGEEsurvey, and @eBOSSurvey. Fingers crossed for clear skies, low humidity, and calm winds. Now we also turn the blog over to Patrick to introduce himself:

 

Hello, my name is Patrick Gaulme, I have been an SDSS astronomer for about two years. I am also a researcher in the field of seismology of stars and giant planets. I am science PI of a NASA-ADAP grant to study eclipsing binaries detected by the NASA Kepler space telescope, and PI of several observation projects with K2, the resuscitated version of Kepler.

I am involved in developing techniques and methods to measure planetary atmospheric dynamics with Doppler imaging in the visible domain. For this I am science PI of the NASA-EPSCoR granted JIVE in NM instrument project, which is a Doppler imager aiming at detecting oscillations of Jupiter and Saturn and measure winds of thick atmospheres in our solar system.

Tweep of the Week: Audrey Oravetz

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This week our @sdssurveys Twitter account will be run by SDSS observer, Audrey Oravetz. Audrey is part of the staff of observers and fiber optic technicians (the people who plug optical fibers into the plates) working for SDSS at our survey telescope in Apache Point, New Mexico (our telescope is neither automated, nor robotic, despite the common misconception!).

Audrey Oravetz

SDSS Observer, Audrey Oravetz (she’s definitely not a robot).

Here’s Audrey introducing herself in her own words:

Hello. My name is Audrey Oravetz and I have worked as an observer for the 2.5m SDSS telescope for the past nine years. It was always a dream of mine to work at a high-ranking observatory. I enjoy working alongside my colleagues to output a high quantity of quality data for the SDSS projects.

I graduated from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2007 with a B.A. in Astrophysics and graduated from NMSU with a M.S. degree last summer. My thesis (under the supervision of Dr. Rene Walterbos (NMSU)) was centered around the study of ionizing H-alpha photons within two star formation nebulae, NGC346 and NGC602, within the SMC.

A Docufeest in New York.

/ Karen Masters / 3 Comments

This week many of the Key People in SDSS-IV have been meeting in New York to get a good start on the Documentation that is needed to accompany the upcoming Thirteenth Data Release (DR13) of the surveys (scheduled for July 2016).

Docufeest (scientists working on laptops)

SDSS-IV scientists hard at work at Docufeest.

Here a storify from Twitter of all the documentation fun we have been having at Docufeest. You will have to wait to see the updated website until the summer.

Tweep of the Week: Sarah Jane Schmidt

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In charge of the SDSS Twitter account for this week is Dr. Sarah Jane Schmidt, the Columbus Prize Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Astronomy at The Ohio State University

Dr. Sarah Jane Schmidt

Dr. Sarah Jane Schmidt

Dr. Schmidt studies the lowest mass and most numerous types of stars in our Galaxy – the M and L dwarfs. These types of cool stars have strong magnetic fields on their surfaces which results in special kinds of extra light from the stars, including dramatic flare events, which Dr. Schmidt works to observe and understand.

Within the SDSS collaboration, Dr. Schmidt has worked or is working on observing cool stars using spectroscopy from several different surveys:

1. A study of ultracool dwarfs with data from a BOSS (Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey) ancillary project

2. A TDSS (Time Domain Spectroscopic Survey) project looking at long timescale magnetic field variations on late-M and early-L dwarfs

3. Studying the colors of late-K and early-M dwarfs with measurements of temperature and metallicity from spectroscopic observations taken for the APOGEE survey.

This can all be summarised as spectroscopy of the lowest mass stars there are, and Sarah is most interested in using these to constrain the stars ages and how this relates to their magnetic activity.

We hope you’ll join the conversation with Sarah and other SDSS scientists on twitter this week so we can all learn more about the magnetic fields of the smallest stars in the Universe.

SDSS Tweep of the Week: Brett Andrews

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This week SDSS scientist Dr. Brett Andrews is taking over our @SDSSurveys twitter account.

BrettAndrews

Brett Andrews is a postdoc in the Physics and Astronomy department at the University of Pittsburgh. He is working on the MaNGA (Mapping Nearby Galaxies at APO) Data Analysis Pipeline and visualisation tools.

Brett’s research focuses on understanding galaxy evolution, particularly the impact of metal production by stars, cosmological gas inflow, and galactic winds. He is interested in using the gas-phase abundances as a way to trace the relatively recent chemical enrichment history of a galaxy as well as the stellar abundances as a tool to provide a fossil record of the abundance of a galaxy over its entire history.

This week is the MaNGA Team meeting, being held at the University of Kentucky, Lexington Kentucky, so it’s a good week for Brett to take over the Twitter account.

So stay tuned for lots of extragalactic science this week from @SDSSurveys

 

SDSS Tweep of the Week – Karen Masters

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This week is the 2014 SDSS Collaboration Meeting which is happening in Park City, Utah. The @SDSSurveys twitter account will be “taken over” this week by Dr. Karen Masters from the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation at the University of Portsmouth.

Karen is the first ever “SDSS Tweep of the Week” – a new idea to give the SDSS Twitter account over to collaboration members for week long stints. We don’t expect to fill every week this way, but look out on the blog for introductions to future “Tweeps” from the more than 200 scientists involved in SDSS from all over the world.

As our SDSS Director of Education and Public Engagement, Karen is the ideal guinea pig for this plan. Karen is also a science team member of the @MangaSurvey part of SDSS so expect to hear a lot from MaNGA parallel sessions during this week.

Dr. Karen Masters

Dr. Karen Masters – SDSS Director of EPO and a member of the MaNGA Science Team

If you’re a SDSS Collaboration Member reading this and interested to sign up for a week please visit the Twitter Schedule on the Wiki (password protected site).