- Education
- I earned Bachelors (1973)
and Masters (1974) [thesis] degrees in
Planetary Science from
M.I.T.,
- Work
- After I got my SM degree, I took some enforced time off from astronomy
due to a lack of jobs and developed financial software in Boston at
Financial
Publishing Company in 1975 and 1976, while still doing some work
at MIT in my spare time (helping write
my first published paper).
- In 1976, I left to develop astronomical software full-time, in lieu
of graduate school, at
Cornell University in
Ithaca, New York from 1976
until 1979, soon
helping discover the Uranian rings and publishing
my second paper in Nature. More research and publication followed
through the 1979 move of my research group to M.I.T., where I worked until 1984.
- In 1984, I came to the
Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory to work on the
Spacelab 2
Infrared Telescope (and helped write
this paper about its results). Along the way, I developed the graphics
terminal emulator for xterm.
I am in the list of contributors at the end of the xterm man page on any
X-Window supporting system.
-
Since that project was completed in 1990, I have worked at the
SAO Telescope Data Center,
developing and using software for
astrometry and the
reduction,
analysis, and
archiving
of optical and near-infrared spectra and images. Besides a few more pipelines
for spectrographs, I have written the widely-used
RVSAO redshift computation package
and
WCSTools image world coordinate system, FITS file, and source catalog package.
-
This talk
summarizes the work I've done in positional astronomy over four decades.
-
This page
explains why there is a different name on my papers before 2011.
- Professional interests
- Managing and making available archives of astronomical data
- Astronomical data formats,
Sky coordinates,
catalogs, and
images:
WCSTools
(scat) and
SAOimage
-
Astronomical Image Databases
- Celestial cartography
(SKYMAP)
and mapping in general
- Stellar and galactic radial velocities
(RVSAO)
-
Occultations of stars by solar system objects
- Scanning astronomical photographic plates
- Outer solar system objects (
Pluto/Charon,
satellites, Kuiper belt, etc.)
- Working on a bunch of papers on
astronomy and astronomical software.
- Member of the
International Astronomical Union
- Member of the
American Astronomical Society
AAS Division for Planetary Sciences
AAS Division on Dynamical Astronomy,
Webmaster(1997-) and committee member(1997-1999)
AAS Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy (2015-)
AAS Committee for Sexual-Orientation and Gender-Identity Minorities in Astronomy) (2015-)
- On the Advisory Committee of the
Astrophysics Source Code Library (ASCL)
- On the Scientific Organizing Committee for
Inclusive Astronomy 2015
- Like all astronomers, I worry constantly about the
weather.
- Developer of software in C, Perl, Fortran,
but no longer in my favorite, PL/I
- Publications
- Other interests
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Sunset out of my former office window
[Bigger picture]
Here are some talks I've given:
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