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About MeAddress
Gavin RamsayArmagh Observatory
College Hill
Armagh
N Ireland
BT61 9DG
gar@arm.ac.uk
+44 028 3751 2951
Surveys
Much of my work over the last decade has involved photometric surveys such as RATS, RATS-Kepler and OmegaWhite which identified stars which vary in their intensity of short periods. These surveys are called `synoptic' photometric surveys which implies a general summary of the photometric properties of objects. What we did in these surveys was take a series of short exposures (30 sec) of the same field for 2 hrs or so. We then search for objects which vary in the brightness. Easier said than done!
For our work on the Kepler field we used the INT to identify potential
targets to observe using
the Kepler
satellite. We observed quite a few delta Sct stars using Kepler and
the image below gives a nice view of these stars observed using
Kepler. We show only 1 day of data and the period increases as you
move down the plot.
Armagh is also a member of the GOTO consortium which will be building a facility whose aim is to identify the optical counterpart of gravitational wave events which are expected to be detected using Ligo and Virgo.