What I do

I received my PhD in August of 1994 in astronomy at the University of Virginia Astronomy Department. My research was part of a large project studying Hubble Space Telescope images of supernova SN1987A, a star that blew up in 1987. This was the brightest supernova in 400 years, and was visible to the naked eye (if you happened to be in the southern hemisphere, that is).

I was initially hired afterward to work on COBE, the COsmic Background Explorer, and then moved on to work with STIS, the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph. I worked on that for five years.

Now, I do web-based public outreach for GLAST, a gamma ray satellite planned for launch in 2005. I am at the physics and astronomy department at Sonoma State University near San Francisco, California, and I love it.

When the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) first observed the supernova in August 1990, we were all surprised to see it encircled by an elliptical ring of gas. It was known before that there was an oval shaped nebula surrounding the star, but everyone thought it would be a shell, and not a torus (donut shape). When I analyzed the images carefully, I was able to detect some of the gas further away from the supernova that was known to exist from earlier, ground-based images. But we were all surprised once again when the newly fixed HST was trained on the star, and the outer nebulosity was shown to be very discrete rings! Pictures of all this can be found here, and many more can be found in the pages listed below.

There are many good places on the Web to find supernova information and pictures. Here are a few: