Matthew Whiting's Homepage

About Me

An astronomer by training, I currently work at the Australia Telescope National Facility, part of the CSIRO. I am part of the computing group for the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP), where my job is to develop science analysis software for the ASKAP processing pipeline.

The huge volumes of data that ASKAP will produce mean that all observations will be processed automatically in pipelines. The science analysis software will take the fully reduced images and spectral cubes and produce catalogues of the sources that are present therein. This work builds on my previous work on the Duchamp three-dimensional source finder.

News: Duchamp version 1.6.1 is now available for download.

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Research Activities

My Astronomical Research

I get some time to do my own astronomical research. My background is more in the optical and infrared part of the spectrum, but I am getting some radio experience here at ATNF. Some topics I'm interested in include:

Optical & infrared emission processes of quasars and active galaxies.
The relationship between optical and radio emission in quasars.
Absorption lines seen in quasar and radio galaxy spectra, particularly at radio wavelengths.
Variable and transient objects, particularly in the radio.

You can see my list of publications here, or follow the link on the left.

Object Finding in Astronomical Data

The main project other than ASKAP work that I have been working on here at ATNF is the development of object finding software. Compared to the two-dimensional case, there is a lack of good tools for searching for objects in three-dimensional data, particularly spectral-line data cubes. My software, known as Duchamp, is my contribution to this field. Please have a look at the dedicated Duchamp web page.

Simulations of ASKAP observations

In developing the processing pipelines for ASKAP, we have produced a range of simulated ASKAP observations designed to reproduce the type of data products expected for different surveys. The link on the left takes you to a page where you can download some of these datasets. Most of these simulations were created in high-performance computing environments such as the iVEC supercomputer epic and the NCI National Facility supercomputer vayu.

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