La Sagra Sky Survey
I have been involved into the La Sagra asteroids team since the beginning of the La Sagra Observatory (OLS) in Andalusia, Spain in 2006. The main activity at OLS is the discovery and tracking of Small Solar System Bodies. The first asteroid at OLS was discovered in August 2006 by manually "blinking" of sky images. In the following years I contributed to the continuous improvements of the search methods and data reduction pipelines. In particular, I developed an asteroids Night2night linking software, asteroid prediction script, a observation planning software named "SkyPlot", and a lot of other scripts. Besides asteroid night-to-night linking and position prediction of new unconfirmed asteroids, I regularly did follow up observations and astrometry of potential Near Earth Objects (NEOs).
The La Sagra Sky Survey (LSSS) has become the most prolific European NEO survey of all times and is now able to detect several hundred previously unknown asteroids per month and track tens of thousands of known ones.
After over 300 observing nights (most of them remotely) and more than 3100 asteroid discoveries, including one Mars Trojan (2007 NS2), 12 NEOs and one comet, I left the team in September 2009.
For more information visit the La Sagra Observatory website.
Dust extinction and supernovae
In 2008 I spent my first summer working at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, MD with my supervisor Dr. Susana Deustua. There I got introduced to a study to examine the effect of host galaxy dust extinction on the observed properties of Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia). Although SNe Ia are standard candles, the correlation fails for some SNe Ia which can appear dimmer and redder either because of host galaxy dust extinction or perhaps due to intrinsic properties. Using the Spitzer Infrared Nearby Galaxies Survey (SINGS) sample (Kennicutt et al. 2003), Draine's standard dust model, and SNe Ia template spectra (Hsiao et al. 2007), we have developed statistics on host galaxy dust extinction of type Ia supernovae in the galaxies by randomly placing a Type Ia SNe spectrum template, and compared the results with observations.
Also, to investigate dust properties in high redshift galaxies, we compare the simulated spectra to the PHASE extracted data set of 139 spectra of 124 Type Ia supernovae obtained at the VLT during the first three years of the CFHT Supernova Legacy Survey (Balland et al).
A paper is in preparation!
Trans-Neptunian objects
In 2007 I started to collaborate with dr. Jose Luis Ortiz who is working on small solar system bodies at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía (IAA-CSIC) in Granada, Spain. I'm involved in several different ongoing projects related to Trans-Neptunian Objects. Some of them are:
- TNO Survey: I'm periodically processing data collected at the I08 Alianza S4 Observatory on Cerro Burek in Argentina and the I16 IAA-AI Atacama Observatory in San Pedro de Atacama, Chile. For that I wrote my own software in Python that detects moving objects, identifies them and makes croppies of the unknown ones. As a by-product, we discovered around 25 main belt asteroids from September-November 2011.
- Relative astrometry: I have significantly contributed to the astrometric data reduction of a mid-term astrometric and photometric study of trans-Neptunian object (90482) Orcus. The right ascension residuals of an orbital fit to the astrometric data revealed a periodicity of 9.7 ± 0.3 days, which is what one would expect to be induced by the known Orcus companion (Vanth). Read more...
Other projects
- GRBs host galaxies photometry
- Trail detection in FITS images
- Variable star search and photometry (I was team leader at Visnjan School of Astronomy 2009, read more here)
- Minor planets photometry
- Meteor trajectory and orbit determination
- Visnjan Observatory Robotic Telescope (VORT)
- etc
